Wooley: The fish that never returned
James Youl’s 19th century obsession to bring Atlantic salmon to Tasmania may have failed, but his optimism and the serene Salmon Ponds at Plenty live on, writes Charles Wooley.
It has been a cold and miserable Spring on the Central Plateau. The worst in years. The power went off for two days but the food in the freezer was fine in temperatures -2C at night and a balmy 3C by day.
Even in good weather up there we store the olive oil in the fridge so that it won’t freeze while we are away.
The trout, wherever they were, had surely departed for warmer places. Certainly, they weren’t in Bronte Lagoon. Dusty the dog and I patrolled the freezing fishless foreshore, saw nothing and retreated to the shack with a warm fire and a book I’d like to share with you.
I was reminded that the reward of fishing is not always fish. “Under the Influence of Salmon: How a man and a fish turned our world upside down” is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the cockeyed optimism that drives Tasmanians to undertake wondrous and extraordinary follies.
The author Steve Harris tells the remarkable story of James Youl, a colonial sheep farmer with the outlandish dream of transplanting Atlantic salmon 10,000 miles from England into the remote gin-clear waters of Tasmania.
Mad? Yes, as it turned out. It was a magnificent but doomed obsession. But back in the 1860s it captured the imagination of Tasmanians. And let’s face it. We have always been prone to various forms of enthusiasm bordering dangerously on ecstatic faith, devoid of any rational scepticism.
Don’t make me spell it out and I admit I’m no better. While I wouldn’t invest in a stadium (that’s only for the taxpayer) I would have been a sucker for James Youl’s quixotic scheme. Even though the poor bloke was doomed to catch not one salmon in our wonderful colonial waterways.
Painstakingly over many years, 867,000 salmon eggs were collected and shipped to Tasmania. Packed in ice and moss and under sail for months the exercise was a long and sorry chronicle of mishap and disappointment until in 1864 a famous clipper “The Norfolk” made an epic 85-day dash to Melbourne.
About 80 per cent of the eggs survived, and the precious cargo was re-embarked on a fast navel steam-sail sloop for the perilous trip across Bass Strait and down to Hobart.
That might have been the end of the story but in Tasmania it is only the beginning of the account of the trials and tribulations of Youl’s vainglorious vision to introduce the gentlemanly art of flyfishing into a colony that desperately wanted to see itself as another England.
The author, Harris, is a fourth-generation Tasmanian, and his book is rich in historical detail. We learn for instance that the hatchery prepared for the salmon eggs cost 720 pounds. With an additional 60 pounds for fencing.
And wonderfully the place is still there today, just as described. The sublimely peaceful Salmon Ponds hatchery – and now also a museum, on the Plenty River in the Derwent Valley – is a beautiful place despite or because of the inspired folly which produced it.
The Salmon Ponds hatchery remains a serene and magnificent tree-lined temple of the trout.
That’s right. Trout.
So, whatever happened to Mr Youl’s salmon?
Like all grand schemes the plan was simple. Deceptively simple.
Harris explains, “If hatching was successful, young fish would swim from the ponds into the Plenty and then the Derwent and hopefully make their way into the salty expanse of Storm Bay and the Tasman Sea.”
But, if those salmon ever made that trip, unlike their English progenitures they never returned to the waters in which they hatched. Oops.
Blame Charles Darwin perhaps, or the alien Southern Ocean currents, but in Tasmania Mr Youl’s salmon were not made for this world.
As with today’s $1.4bn a year salmon farming enterprises in Tasmania there is much room for debate. As Harris puts it, “The ‘leave nature alone’ versus ‘man can do better than nature’ are echoed today.”
A hundred and sixty years ago the colonial salmon lobby refused to concede defeat. Youl and his associates seemed tragic figures as they haunted the chilly water margins of the Upper Derwent searching in vain for intimations of returned salmon.
Ironically what they eventually did sight were in fact trout whose eggs had been shipped along with the salmon. Trout have done so well in Tasmania there is hardly a waterway without them.
Why they are sometimes so hard to catch is for another day.
You can easily imagine how those colonial salmon true-believers were so excited by the sight of a silver trout leaping in the rapids.
Even without catching it they needed no convincing.
It was a salmon.
The Hobart Mercury concurred: “The thing appears to be beyond all doubt.” The paper settled the argument saying it could now be, “safely concluded the salmon are getting back from the sea.”
The Launceston Examiner agreed, headlining the story: “SALMON, AND NO MISTAKE”.
The colony was in the grip of ‘salmon madness’.
A visiting English writer, Anthony Trollope noted the “intense interest in salmon” on an island he found to be “more English than the English.”
Salmon would complete the Anglophile pastoral idyll.
Among oaks, poplars and pines with English hedgerows, humped-back stone bridges and Georgian villages, only one thing was missing, Salmo salar, the magnificent Atlantic salmon.
It was a fine delusion, and Harris records the fishless frustration of one gentlemanly believer.
“Let one be shot with a rifle. This is a very unsportsmanlike method of catching a salmon I admit, but the success of the experiment must be put before the shadow of doubt, and it is impossible to hook a fish, let one be shot.”
Whatever it takes.
Build it and they will come.
Under the Influence of Salmon mightn’t set out to be an allegory for our times but you would have to be wearing blinkers not to spot the rhymes and familiarities.
Steve Harris doesn’t need to labour them because of course if human beings ever learnt from history then historians would run out of things to write about.
Charles Wooley
is a Tasmanian-based journalist
Under the Influence of Salmon: How a man and a fish turned our world upside down
by Steve Harris: Melbourne Books, RRP, $40
