Critchley Parker
Born in 1862 in Melbourne as Ernest Frank Parker and published as Frank Critchley, ‘C.P.’ and just plain Critchley Parker, this dynamo was a journalist, newspaper owner, book publisher and fanatically pro-conscription activist, in a career full of notable achievements.
Critchley Parker was also perhaps the most recognised angler of his time. He was a foundation member of the Victorian Fly Fishers’ Association and a life member of the North Western Fisheries Association. We find references to him in books by R.H. Wigram, M.E. (Bill) McCausland, Don Gilmour, Roy Dean and others. In his 1937 booklet, About the Giant Trout in Tasmania, E.M. Mayes writes: “Another old stager, Mr. Critchley Parker, is a constant adherent of the Great Lake. To see him fishing the dam as early as 5 a.m. and at it all day until dark and the grand fly he casts is a treat and a lesson to many younger men.”
Critchley Parker was also a designer of trout flies. His most famous, the Yellow Peril—a streamer fly with dyed crimson and yellow hen feathers originally tied in at the eye and now usually tied matuka-style with a tinsel and yellow wool body—can still be found in tackle stores today.
Fortunately for anglers with an interest in reading about times past, Parker was a fly-fisher who put pen to paper, sometimes as ‘C.P.’ and sometimes just as ‘Critchley Parker’. He wrote for the Field (including ‘Saturday afternoon in Sydney Harbour’, ‘The angler at Botany Bay’ and ‘Trouting trips in Victoria’) and for Australian newspapers and journals, amongst which were ‘Trout fishing in Tasmania: The Great Lake, Lake Leake and the rivers’ for The Industrial Australian and Mining Standard, ‘Where are the fish? Is shortage temporary?’ for the Argus and ‘Tasmania’s trout waters’, published in Angling and Gun Sport.
He compiled and published one of the treasures of Australian fishing, Record of Fish Killed at the Great Lake. In its original form there were just two copies, each a magnificent oblong folio production with 34 pages of letterpress and an additional 278 pages for a continuing history, bound in leather with marbled edges and endpapers. He later produced a further 50 copies, in a somewhat less grand format, to distribute to the principal clubs and anglers’ societies throughout the world. Now a very desirable angling collectible, the Record is a marvellous collation of Great Lake anglers’ triumphs, adventures and misfortunes.
Later, Parker wrote Tasmania – The jewel of the Commonwealth with its fine fishing chapter, ‘Trout fishing and all that.’ He is credited by some as having written the tourist pamphlets, Trout Fishing in Tasmania and Tasmania – The haunt of the giant trout but it is now accepted that they are not from his pen.
He also authored a substantial (and at the time, eagerly anticipated) volume provisionally titled Trout Fishing in the Southern Hemisphere. It was to be a “volume de luxe” according to one newspaper report, about angling in the streams and lakes of Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and New Zealand. Sadly it was never published.
Critchley Parker died at his home in South Yarra on October 19, 1944, ten days after his 82nd birthday.
