TIME TRAVELLERS
Anna takes us back to a time when fish stocks were abundant and cricket score catches common, and while those days are over, there is some good news for those dreaming of the “good old days”.
Picture this: you’ve forked out for a weekend charter with your mates and the anchor’s been dropped near an offshore bommie just outside Sydney Harbour. You’re leaning over the edge of the boat, hauling up one huge fish after another until the deck is swimming in them. They’re jumping on the hook as quickly as you can plop it down into the water.
It’s the stuff of fishing dreams, right? Well, there was a time when catching a swag of large snapper was literally as easy as dropping a line.
Newspaper reports from the turn of the twentieth century give a sense of colossal recreational catches up and down the east coast of Australia that we can barely imagine today.
