Of rivers, and fish and fishing

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33693, 16 November 1974, Page 10

Of rivers, and fish and fishing

A Fisherman’s Year By John Parsons. Collins. 217 pp.

In this book the author maintains in full the highest standards of his widely admired articles on angling under the name “Kotare” in “The Press.” His experiences over 30 years of varied fishing, and the lessons and delights he has drawn from them are so well told that the book may well take its place among the angling classics with which the author is so richly familiar. John Parsons, an Englishman who came to live in New Zealand 23 years ago, began to fish as a boy, and fished an assortment of waters, mostly near London. His English fishing, almost all of it for coarse fish, extended for an active 14 years. He has divided his book into one chapter for each month of the year, and divided each chapter again into a section on fishing experiences in England and one of fishing in New Zealand, in each month. He has fished actively and with unfailing satisfaction in both countries, and the material on New Zealand is possibly the best writing yet on fishing in this country. Fishing is as many things to fisherman as there are fishermen. The author lists a dozen pleasures, but the list is not exhaustive. He puts at the head of his own pleasures his interest in the landscape and the life that fills it—plants, birds and animals as well as fish. Every occasion he has fished, he says, “has been memorable, if not often enough for fish, then always for the sights and sounds that fill a day by the water," and that is the theme of his book.

The author’s seductive descriptions of the wealth of coarse fish—roach, rudd, carp, dace, pike and many others —in English rivers, will rouse respectful interest in a New Zealand reader, and perhaps even a little envy. His charming descriptions of the wealth of other life in ana about English streams will certainly set the New Zealander to contemplating his own country’s like gifts, and perhaps raise uncharitable doubts of their generosity. The book will most certainly compel from the New Zealand angler admiration for the Englishman who must command a refinement of skill and judgment, and a knowledge of tackle, baits, water and weather unheard of here, if he is to succeed at coarse fishing.

John Parsons’ training in the need for knowledge of detail in heavilyfished England will have helped his

fishing for trout in New Zealand; certainly the spirit that moves the English coarse fisherman to sit quiet for frozen hours by a winter stream has led Parsons to tackle unpromising New Zealand waters in unfriendly conditions and catch fish when most New Zealanders would not even have set out.

Most New Zealand fishermen suspect, thankfully, that fishing here does not demand for success the skill the British angler needs. Trout here are less harried and thus less sophisticated, but they are learning as angling pressure grows. G. B. Hobbs, a skilled New Zealand fisherman who became successful in Britain, compared New Zealand standards of competence a little unfavourably in his “Fisherman’s Country,” incidentally the best book so far on New Zealand fishing. It would be good to hear the present author on the same theme.

John Parsons is clearly a highly skilled angler with an ability to produce fish out of quite improbable places. One of these is the Hutt River from Petone upward, and there is topical local interest in his praise of the Wellington Acclimatisation Society which among other things has saved

the Hutt from the unlovely fate of so many trout waters threatened by large human populations and industry. The author’s chief pleasure is fishing, and his book was written for his own further pleasure in recalling highlights from an unusually active and varied angling career. It deals more with disaster than triumph, and thus shows the true face of angling. It is not a book of instruction, but it offers by implication much wise observation on angling techniques. John Parsons clearly enjoyed writing this book, which will give fishermen as much pleasure to read. His clean, graceful English is a splendid bonus.