The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia

“But why,” one may ask, “all this elaborate detail, this burying of lines, and, most absurd of all, the covering up of the baited hook with a flowerpot?”

Simply this. As the tide flows in over the sand there come with it, first of all, myriads of small garfish, mullet, and lively red bream, who, if the bait were left exposed, would at once gather round and begin to nibble and tug at it. Then perhaps a swiftly swimming “Long Tom,” hungry and defiant, may dart upon it with his terrible teethed jaws, or the great goggle-eyed, floundering sting-ray, as he flaps along his way, might suck it into his toothless but bony and greedy mouth; and then hundreds and hundreds of small silvery bream would bite, tug, and drag out, and finally reveal the line attached, and then the scheme has come to naught, for once the cute and lordly black bream sees a line he is off, with a contemptuous eye and a lazy, proud sweep of tail.

When the tide was near the full flood we would take the ends of our fishing- and tripping-lines in our hands and seat ourselves upon the high sandstone boulders which fringed the sides of the bay, and from whence we could command a clear view of the water below. Then, slowly and carefully, we tripped the flower-pots covering the baits, and hauled them in over the smooth sandy bottom, and, with the baited lines gripped tight in the four fingers of our right hands, we watched and waited.

Generally, in such calm, transparent water, we could, to our added delight, see the big bream come swimming along, moving haughtily through the crowds of small fry—yellow-tail, ground mullet, and trumpeters. Presently, as one of them caught sight of a small shining silvery mullet (or a luscious-looking octopus tentacle) lying on the sand, the languid grace of his course would cease, the broad, many-masted dorsal fin become erect, and he would come to a dead stop, his bright, eager eye bent on the prize before him. Was it a delusion and a snare? No! How could it be? No treacherous line was there—only the beautiful shimmering scales of a delicious silvery-sided young mullet, lying dead, with a thin coating of current-drifted sand upon it. He darts forward, and in another instant the hook is struck deep into the tough grizzle of his white throat; the line is as taut as a steel wire, and he is straining every ounce of his fighting six or eight pounds’ weight to head seawards into deep water.

Slowly and steadily with him, else his many brothers will take alarm, and the rest of the carefully laid baits will be left to become the prey of small “flatheads,” or greedy, blue-legged spidery crabs. Once his head is turned, providing he is well hooked, he is safe, and although it may take you ten minutes ere you haul him into such shallow water that he cannot swim upright, and he falls over upon his broad, noble side, and slides out upon the sand, it is a ten minutes of joy unalloyed to the youthful fisherman who takes no heed of two other lines as taut as his own, and only prays softly to himself that his may be the biggest fish of the three.

Generally, we managed to get a fish upon every one of the ten or twelve lines we set in this manner, and as we always used short, stout-shanked hooks of the best make, we rarely lost one. On one occasion, however, a ten-foot sawfish seized one of our baits, and then another and another, and in five minutes the brute had entangled himself amongst the rest of the lines so thoroughly that our old convict boatman, who was watching us from his hut, yelled out, as he saw the creature’s serrated snout raised high out of the water as it lashed its long, sinuous tail to and fro, to “play him” till he “druv an iron into it.” He thought it was a whale of some sort, and, jumping into a dinghy, he pulled out towards it, just in time to see our stout lines part one after another, and the “sawfish” sail off none the worse for a few miserable hooks in his jaws and a hundred fathoms of stout fishing lines encircling his body.

This old Bill Duggan—he had “done” twenty-one years in that abode of horror, Port Arthur in Tasmania, for a variegated assortment of crimes—always took a deep interest in our black-bream fishing, and freely gave us a shilling for each one we gave him.

He told us that by taking them to Sydney he could sell them for two shillings each, and that he would send the money to a lone, widowed sister who lived in Bridgnorth, England. Our mother deeply sympathised with the aged William (our father said he was a lying old ruffian), and always let him take the boat and pull over to Sydney to sell the fish. He generally came back drunk after twenty-four hours’ absence, and said the sun had affected him. But Nemesis came at last.

One day some of the officers of H.M.S. Challenger, with some Sydney friends, came to spend a Saturday and Sunday with us. It rained hard on the Saturday night, and the stream which fell into the head of the bay became a roaring torrent, sending a broad line of yellow, muddy foam through the narrow opening of the causeway, which I have before mentioned, into the harbour.

Sadly disappointed that we could not give our guests the sport which we had promised them, we sat upon the causeway and gazed blankly upon the yellowed waters of the bay with bitterness in our hearts. Suddenly “Cass,” the Moruya River black boy, who was standing beside us, turned to us with a smile illumining his sooty face.

“What for you coola (angry)? Now the time to catch big pfeller brack bream. Water plenty pfeller muddy. Brack bream baal (is not) afraid of line now.”

I, being the youngest, was sent off, with furious brotherly threats and yells, to our guests, to tell them to come down at once with their fishing tackle. I tore up the path and reached the house. The first-lieutenant, commodore’s secretary, and two ladies at once rose to the occasion, seized their beautiful rods (at which my brothers and myself were undecided whether to laugh in contempt or to profoundly admire) and followed me down to the causeway.

Before we reached there Billy Duggan and my brothers had already landed half a dozen splendid fish, one of which, of over ten pounds, was held up to us for inspection as a curiosity, inasmuch as a deep semicircular piece had been bitten out of its back (just above the tail) by a shark or some other predatory fish. The wound had healed over perfectly, although its inner edge was within a quarter of an inch of the backbone.

With a brief glance at the fish already taken, the two officers and the ladies had their rods ready, and made a cast into the surging, yellow waters, with disastrous results, for in less than three minutes every one of them had hooked a fish—and lost it.