Wildside - Australia - Melbourne Fishing Show

Hunting the ‘lucky’ country

© Zane Mirfin, Wildside Column, Hunting the 'lucky' Country, Nelson Mail, 22 November 2008

Melbourne 4x4 & Fishing Show: Aimee with AFN 's Bill Classon. October 2008	FISHING FOR BUSINESS: Zane Mirfin with Australian iFISH TV 's Paul Worsterling at the fishing expo.
Big Fish: Rex Hunt visits our stand & talks fishing with Zane.	Great Show: Aimee on our stand with show organiser Paul Morgan.

In these modern times of credit crunches, retrenchment and global recession, the New Zealand tourism industry has been dealt tough cards.  Guided fishing businesses are not immune and are scrambling with big corrections in the marketplace.

In the race to be the last guides standing, Aimee and I recently flew to Australia to attend the National 4x4 Show, Fishing Show and Outdoors Expo – Australia’s biggest indoor sportsmen’s event and an extravaganza of all Australian things outdoors, and particularly all things fishing.

Melbourne is the powerhouse of Australian trout fishing and getting there is easy – and, thanks to Air New Zealand, positive as well. The fishing expo has been running for 13 years and is entrenched as one of the highlights of the annual fishing calendar. It is heavily marketed in magazines, television, radio, online, press and so on, and most years attracts more than 40,000 pilgrims.

Our Strike Adventure stand was situated right by the fishing stage, where luminaries of Australian fishing kept showgoers spellbound with tales of how to catch the big one. Perhaps the most famous Australian angler was Rex Hunt, an ex- AFL legend and host of numerous TV fishing shows.

Hunt packed the seating and it was great talking fishing with him later. Other wellknown angling identities at our stand
included Paul Worsterling, presenter of IFISH TV fame on Channel 10 and Bill Classon of the Australian Fishing Network – a huge publisher of fishing magazines and books.

Dozens of other keen fishers were doing the rounds and keen to gaze at large images of fishing success and talk about NZ fishing opportunities.

The 42-inch plasma TV running the fishing DVD filmed and edited by Nelson fishing guru Tony Entwistle went down a
treat and stopped traffic as the Australians gasped at the stunningly clear water and big trout. Being the only New Zealand exhibitors gave Strike Adventure Fishing some novelty value too.

After four days under fluorescent lighting and air conditioning, with some days approaching 12 hours, Aimee and I
were knackered. Talking fishing all day is an exhausting exercise. I even managed to make a few purchases of my own when doing the rounds to introduce myself and our business to other exhibitors during quieter periods.

My favourite memory of the show was the last day when exhibitors slashed prices to clear stock. At one stand the public went crazy buying cheap two-for-one rods and reels in a rugby-scrum purchasing frenzy. Overall, though, long-time exhibitors noted that the fishing expo was in decline, sales were nosediving, and the final tally of people through the door in four days struggled to make 30,000. It was very obvious that financial woes had arrived in the lucky country.

One thing that impressed me about meeting large numbers of Aussie anglers was mesmerising them with the amount of fishable water we have so close at hand. Australia is 45 times larger than New Zealand in land mass but New Zealand
receives the same amount of rainfall annually as the whole Australian continent (500 cubic kilometres, or enough water to fill Lake Taupo eight times over). Australia has a terrible water problem and years of drought (with no end in sight) has exacted a heavy toll on freshwater angling.

Another issue that was big in local Melbourne news was the state of the Yarra River that flows through the centre of
town, past the Exhibition Centre. The lower Yarra is one of the most polluted in the world with stratospheric levels of
mercury and arsenic – even worse than Vietnam’s Saigon River.

Part of the problem is Victoria being in the 13th year of drought and the Yarra has 100 billion litres less water per annum
flowing down it than 10 years ago.  Apparently, good fishing catches can still be had, with one angler posing with an 8kg
mulloway caught in the centre of town, but because the newspaper photo was black and white it was difficult to see if the fish had a radioactive glow.

After the expo we headed south to the rural area of Gippsland for a spot of night shooting, Aussie-style. Daryl and his father Max, are successful dairy farmers and have some great properties to explore at night by four-wheel-drive. The wildlife by night is just incredible, with kangaroos, wallabies, wombats and European red foxes everywhere. Foxes were introduced into Australia near Melbourne in 1845 and were once red gold when fox pelts fetched high prices, before anti-fur sentiment collapsed the markets. Hunting foxes that night was an epic adventure, either running them down in 40-hectare paddocks and shooting with shotguns, or luring them up with distressed rabbit calls from a silent vehicle then shooting with Daryl’s .22-250 heavy barrelled varmint rifle with a 12-24X scope at ranges often exceeding 300 metres in the powerful spotlight. It was a fabulous night out and we finally got to bed about 3am, with ringing eardrums and covered in orange dust.

Our Melbourne adventure was a lot of fun and New Zealanders should expect to see more Australians visiting here to fish and hunt as airfares become cheaper and travel becomes easier. However, if you thought New Zealand’s ‘‘nanny state’’ was oppressive, you should check out Australia, which is a deceptively bureaucratic country. Australians are losing the right to own firearms, duck-hunting rights have been seriously impaired, fishing is highly regulated and complicated, trout have been poisoned in certain waterways to make way for native fish, and it is illegal to own a set
net for fishing coastal waters.

In New Zealand we need to avoid the Australian experience at any cost – and resist losing our outdoor freedoms that we often take for granted.

Return to Wildside Trout Fishing Columns