A Conversation With Meg Stewart

A Conversation with Meg Stewart – Daughter of Author, Douglas Stewart and Artist, Margaret Coen.
by Jim Findlay – January 2013

Andrew Herd, medical doctor, angling bibliophile and historian, associate editor of Waterlog magazine and author of History of Fly Fishing is one of the United Kingdom’s most knowledgeable authorities on books about fish and fishing. His opinion, expressed half a world away, is sufficiently distanced from Australia and Zealand as to be as impartial as anyone in expressing a view about the place of Douglas Stewart’s The Seven Rivers in the scheme of things. “This is a truly inexplicable book,” he writes. “The reason I can’t account for it is that it is a classic, and yet it is available in paperback. Clearly, something has gone wrong in the grand scheme of things, because classic books on fishing are by definition out of print. Anyway, when Rick Keam sent me a copy of it, he opened up a new world of Australian fishing writing before me. They do not get much better than this, and Stewart writes with the sort of lyricism that few authors aspire to.”

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Meg Stewart’s house has been in her family since her mother and father moved to St Ives in 1953. It’s not big in the modern sense but the visitor is left with an impression of light and space. We talk over coffee about her father and her mother, about fishing, and about her father’s great book. Meg is easy to talk to, very generous with her time and patient with this inexperienced interviewer. She runs with the threads in the conversation, laughing and serious in turn at the memories.

You used to go fishing with your father. Perhaps if we could begin there …

I was going over when I first started trout fishing with my father. This book of Jonathon Persse’s (Letters Lifted into Poetry) I’ve found wonderful because it’s allowed me to date and recheck when things happened in my life. I have so much admiration for Jonathon’s effort in putting the letters together. There’s one written shortly after I was born. Mum always said I weighed ten pounds. But in a letter to David Campbell Dad writes that I was nine pounds, ten ounces. He goes onto say: “which would go well on a rod.” It’s a funny way to describe your newborn. But you can see I was destined to be connected with trout from the moment I was born.

Dad decided the summer I turned eleven that I was old enough to go with him on the streams. In that first year at Kiandra I used a plastic bubble as a float with an egg-beater type spinning reel. I didn’t catch anything much – I think I may have caught one trout at the end – but I did do a lot of fishing! Dad was quite excited because I did manage to cast with the bubble but I always knew that it was slightly undignified. I really wanted to do the proper casting with a long rod like his. He was a very good caster and very good at playing fish. I was never able to play fish properly. I used to get over excited and strike too soon. Then whenever I did manage to hook one I didn’t quite get the hang of letting the fish run away then bringing it back.

The next year we stayed at Kosciuszko and I swapped to a proper fly reel and rod. Dad was always very patient about taking me with him. I guess we didn’t do quite as much rugged walking into gorges as he might have done with David but we went pretty much everywhere else together. I liked the adventure of it, especially fishing a smaller stream where you could walk right in the river itself, casting ahead of you. Sometimes he used to say I could just sit on a rock and let my fly go downstream in a rapid. That’s quite good if you’re inexperienced because the trout will virtually hook itself. So it was a bit easier for me.

It was only the last year that we fished together that I had my own net. When I fished with Dad all those years we had just the one net between us. So he would net my fish – those that I did manage to play successfully – or else I would have to somehow wind the line right up until I could lift them out of the water onto the bank. He would mostly net his own fish but occasionally I would do it, with him issuing instructions. I thought it was a sign that I was really grown up when at the very end of his life I was given my own net because it meant I could fish completely independently of him. There’s quite a knack to handling the net. You have to be able to roll it up around the frame and put it in the holster. Then you have to be able to get it out and open it out with one hand when the fish is on the line. He was an expert at that.

There were quite set rules to trout fishing. He wasn’t an authoritarian person but they were instilled in me from when we first started fishing together. I knew you couldn’t go stomping along the riverbank and frighten all the fish. We didn’t talk much at all when we were on the stream. Often he would leave me at one pool and go off to the next pool and we’d meet up at the rapids. Then we’d walk around to another section and start in there. There might have been a little talk like, “Do you think it is time for lunch?” usually on my part. It never really crossed my mind to ignore any of his trout fishing rules. It was similar to the way I knew you shouldn’t talk through a theatrical performance. There are some things you learn quite quickly in life.

As well as rules there were also rituals to do with our fishing gear. I really loved the sound of his reel. It had a rich creaking sound when it was wound or unwound, and his cane rod made the best noise swishing through the air when he was casting. You had to dry the lines over night. They had pegs on the verandah posts at The Creel to string the lines around at the end of a day’s fishing. Then you had a little round box of … it was like lip-gloss in a way … and you took a bit of cloth that was in the lid of the box and ran that along the line. There was also the dry fly oil that was used to make your fly float. If you ran out of that the trick was to rub your fly in the crease of your nose and get the oil from there.

What really fascinated me was when you cut the stomach of the trout open to find out what insects it had been eating and you could see bits of grasshopper and so on. Then you knew what fly to put on. I think the medical aspect of the operation appealed to me.

You stayed at The Creel sometimes.

Yes. The Creel was organised around trout fishermen and it was quite snobby. In our first year, we not only didn’t have one of the better front verandah rooms (we were out the back in huts where newcomers had to go) but also we weren’t really accepted by The Creel regulars like the judges who had been staying there for years. The headmaster of Cranbrook was another who used to fish there at that stage. You really felt they looked down their noses at you, to be honest. In the second year we managed to get a verandah room. Well, Mum and Dad had a verandah room. I think that year I stayed in the room with them then I graduated to the bachelors’ quarters which were down on the left hand side of the building as you looked at it. When David Campbell came he would stay in the bachelors’ quarters as well.

And there was a possum. The men’s lavatories were at the end of the bachelors’ quarters and one year there was a huge male possum that also lived in the bachelors’ quarters in the toilet area.

We did make some friends the first year, a man called Dimitri Setelik and his wife Lenka. Dimitri who arrived in Australia from Czechoslovakia in the early 1950s was an art restorer at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He certainly didn’t fit that image of the English trout fishing person I was just talking about but he was just as dedicated a trout fisher. We really liked him and his wife. That was also the year that we became friends with the Englishman Reggie Harris whom Dad calls Percy Mathers in The Seven Rivers. I don’t know why Dad tactfully changed his name but described him exactly the way he was. We used to take Reggie and his wife Lucia fishing with us because they had come to The Creel without a car thinking they would be able to do all the fishing they wanted in the Thredbo pools front of The Creel.

The moment you awoke you could hear The Creel regulars up and about. They seemed to have been up since very early in the morning. I don’t think they fished the early morning rise much. That seemed to be a bit beyond everybody. But they’d be having cups of early morning tea dressed in their fishing khakis and thumping up and down the verandah in their boots as they wound up their lines. A fair bit of nightly drinking went on at The Creel, as well as some lunch time imbibing on the river and we suspected they would sometimes put shots in their early morning tea. I don’t really know whether that’s true or a sort of legend I’ve created in my own mind.

The Creel used to make us picnic lunches of sandwiches to take out so we would have these thick sandwiches – lubricated by a whiskey from a hip flask in some cases – under a tree back at the car about one or two when it was too hot and still for fishing. Mum’s aunt Kathleen Coen in Yass used to make us a Christmas cake every year so the Yass Christmas cake would always come with us and The Creel packed lunch would be followed by the Yass Christmas cake. After that we would lie round until the light was less glaring and we thought the trout might have started stirring again.

What was the fishing like? Were there big fish?

There is something in trout fishing about the pursuit of large trout. There’s always the fabled three or four pounder in the next pool around the corner, usually in a gorge, or right out the other side of the gorge, that involves a lot of difficult walking. I can remember my father and David talking in awed tones about wanting to go back for a trout they’d seen a season before when they were fishing and it was always some mythical monster.

I think I’ve probably seen a three pounder but not much bigger than that around the Kosciuszko area which is where I did all my fishing. People weren’t catching huge fish there then. The largest trout I came across was probably the one that was mounted above the notice board at The Creel. There was a board where you could enter catches over two pounds. My father managed to get his name on the notice board but I certainly didn’t. One of my most agonizing early trout experiences was to do with a biggish fish however. It happened when David Campbell first moved to his property, Palerang (near Bungendore). The property had a dam and a river that you could fish. Dad and David went off along the river, leaving me to fish the dam with a worm. That day of course I actually did catch a trout and landed it without him. My problem was I didn’t want to kill it (we always killed whatever trout of legal size we caught straight away, often gutting them there and then too). Dad and David were nowhere in sight. I raced across the paddocks looking for them. But I couldn’t find them. I had to come back and reluctantly kill the trout myself.

Did your father tie his own flies?

Dad and David never tied their own flies that I know of. I don’t know why not. They were very particular about the flies they used. They liked like the Tupps Indispensable and the Hardy’s Favourite, also a Red Coachman. It may partly have been because Dad had quite a full life at that time and was too busy to tie his own flies. I mean, particularly when he first started trout fishing in Australia at Oberon in the 1940s or maybe even the late 1930s, he was working at the Bulletin and was deeply involved with his own projects as well. I don’t think anyone worked very hard at the Bulletin but he wrote his verse play The Fire on the Snow in his second year in Sydney, then Ned Kelly after that in the early 1940s and a number of other verse plays, so it was an incredibly busy time for his writing.

How do you think his early life in New Zealand influenced him?

I think his love for the outdoors started in Eltham. He grew up in this small country town surrounded by quite wild landscapes that he delighted in exploring. That’s why The Seven Rivers was called The Seven Rivers because between Eltham and the coast there were seven rivers that tumbled from the mountains to the sea. As far as sport went, the men in town could either go trout fishing or play cricket. My father chose trout fishing.

I went back with his youngest sister Shirley sister a few years ago to look at the beaches and the countryside there and it’s easy to see why he loved them. I think initially he just liked exploring and being a boy. But then when he went to boarding school the headmaster and the English master used to sneak him out of school to go trout fishing with him. The first poem he had published was called My First Trout so that’s when the association between writing and trout fishing began for him.

At boarding school, too, the boys had these dugouts on the school farm that they lived in at the weekends and even retreated to after classes during the week. It seems to me that in many ways the school wasn’t all that strict despite being a conventional boarding school. Anyway, Dad and his friends hung out in these dugouts having Tom Sawyer-like times. Obviously, being in nature was pretty important to him even then. I think also it was essential later for his creative temperament. It gave him inspiration for his nature poetry and a sort of spiritual, if you like, as well as a physical escape from any life pressures he was experiencing. When trout fishing you’re constantly observing of nature, so it fitted in very well. And because you have to think about what you’re doing, you can’t brood too much on anything else. It provided him with a sort of time-out, or respite, from what he was working on. Often when you go back to work after that you’ll find that your mind has solved the problem.

The house and its garden fit very well with Douglas Stewart’s love of nature.

This is the house we moved to in late 1953. Dad liked living at St Ives because it was so close to the bush. He spent an enormous amount of time just walking in the bush. It wasn’t very rugged walking, but it was unspoilt. You can reach Ku-ring-gai National Park quite easily from here and make your way down to Bobbin Head through the bush. Mum and I would often go with him – I don’t think Mum ever made it to Bobbin Head that way though. Dad hated going out to lunch when he was younger. He thought it was a waste of time to sit inside when he could be outside. He loved dinner parties but not luncheon parties. Even at Christmas he was always dying to escape and disappear into the garden. He seemed to actually feel claustrophobic at such social occasions. He could write inside in an office but then he did seem to need to be outside and be in nature.

This front room was built on after we moved here. It was Mum’s painting studio. That wall (gesturing to the brick wall behind her) was originally the outside wall of the house. And that (gesturing to the room on her left) was the lounge room/dining room. It’s quite a small room but somehow we fitted all that furniture in there. There was the lounge/dining room, the kitchen, my little bedroom and their bedroom. Still we had people to stay – I can’t remember or imagine where they slept. David Campbell used to stay here for a night or two whenever he came to Sydney during the 1950s and 60s. Dad’s sister Helen and her husband Joe came. My grandmother, Mum’s mother lived with us for a while. I don’t know how we fitted them in. Eventually my parents had a room built on out the back to accommodate guests which was also Dad’s writing room.

The Seven Rivers would have been written before that. He did a lot of writing in their bedroom. He used to shut himself in after breakfast and after that it was bad luck if Mum wanted anything out of the room. Of course, it was written on a typewriter – as were all his books – not with a word processor.

Dad also liked St. Ives because there are beaches quite close to here. He did some beach fishing and he swam a bit. He used to take me down to Mona Vale and we’d swim in the ocean pool – the surf was usually too rough. Dad had quite olive skin, hazel eyes and dark hair. Mum had black hair, blue eyes and white skin that burnt easily so she avoided going out in the sun. Dad just went brown. I always think of his colouring of being a bit like the Moonbah – olive green and brown. He was well camouflaged for trout fishing.

It wasn’t just you and your father on fishing trips, of course. Your mother went too.

Yes. My parents were married in December 1945. They honeymooned at Duckmaloi near Oberon at Richards’ guesthouse. They drove up in a borrowed car. Although she had become accustomed to the idea of Dad going trout fishing very early in their courtship, it was the first time Mum herself had been on a trout fishing holiday and it was terribly hot that December. There is a chapter about it called Honeymooning with Henry Handel Richardson in my book Autobiography of My Mother. The coolest place was under the guesthouse. There was an area where you could sit and read. The fowls had also taken refuge there. Mum and Dad, too, spent quite a bit of time with the fowls under the house on their honeymoon.

In Autobiography of My Mother Mum talks about how she discovered the joys of trout fishing even on that first trip. She was funny, my mother, because there is all this stuff that’s come out after she died about how she, in fact, had an affair with Norman Lindsay before she met my father. But she and Norman, and my father, just became such good friends. So on her honeymoon while Mum experiencing her first trout fishing holiday she was also reporting back to Norman about it all. It sounds weird but I don’t think it was that weird; it never felt weird to me. Despite the heat, she did manage to venture out into the countryside sometimes at Richards’ and she wrote excitedly to Norman about the things she’d seen such as her first echidna and a skylark’s nest with speckled eggs inside.

Like Dad, she really loved nature. She grew up in the country town of Yass. After her family moved to Sydney she still went back to Yass for the school holidays and stayed with her grandmother. She was attracted to the oddities of nature. She used to have a collection of beetles, moths and dead lizards in her school desk at Kincoppal in Sydney. She once went to a fancy dress parade at school as ‘my desk’. She sewed her desk collection onto the dress and girls awarded her first prize. The nuns weren’t so impressed, she used to recall.

A little like her collection of moths and other bits and pieces that she included in the Kosciuszko Fishing Map.

Yes. She loved that aspect of nature. We were all so entranced with the map when she was painting it. Trout fishing holidays offered her great opportunities for landscape painting too.

When we started going to the Kosciuszko area she just loved the colour of the bush as you go up the Mountain where it gets a blue colour. She adored painting that country. She came out to the stream with us quite often as well. She did lots of drawing and painting on site. But sometimes she would stay back at The Creel and paint in the bedroom. Particularly because whenever we went there she seemed to come down with some sort of gastric attack. So she’d have a couple of days just staying in that big verandah room, recuperating and painting. She did a number of still life paintings there, of things she’d collected, such as everlasting daisies, lichen covered rocks and river driftwood. It was also where the painted the map

She looked forward to the trout fishing holidays as much as he did although she never, as far as I know, ever picked up a rod in her entire life. But she was very keen on eating trout. She was mad about fresh trout and she loved having trout for breakfast. At places like The Creel they would always cook what you’d caught. Later on they had a pact that she could paint for part of the holiday and he could fish for the other part. Very few women trout fished in those days anyway. I didn’t every see anyone else with a daughter fishing during the years I went with Dad. You didn’t see many young people fishing at all, not at the age that I went.

Did you often fish with your father?

We went trout fishing for three weeks every January from 1959 to 1968. Then I had a break from fishing for ten years. We had a couple of family holidays on the Badja when I was little but he spent more time child minding than fishing on those and I was far too young to fish myself. Our Kosciuszko fishing trips were family holidays built around the school holidays. Dad had a theory that three weeks was the perfect break. Two weeks was too short a time for a holiday, he said. But after three weeks you started to miss home and wanted to get back.

David Campbell usually joined for a few days. David being a farmer could never take a long break away from the property because there was always some farming crisis that had to be attended to. I remember we were always waiting for David to arrive – a tractor would have broken or an animal had had a mishap – and he would be delayed.

But I always really enjoyed it. I found trout fishing much more fun than sea fishing. We had plenty of beach fishing holidays, including a couple in the Bay of Islands where Dad’s father had retired to in New Zealand. We rented a caravan twice, driving once down the South Coast of New South Wales and the other time heading north. Then Mum put her foot down. A caravan is very romantic but it’s very cramped. After that we rented holiday houses up north. For a few years we went to Nambucca Heads. David Campbell occasionally joined us there too. We walked for miles out on those rocks walls you get and usually we caught nothing except toadfish and a few rock cod, which you couldn’t eat.

I just found trout fishing more exciting. I liked, as I said before, being actually in the rivers. I don’t think it ever occurred to Dad that I wouldn’t like to go trout fishing.

Were there special places that he especially looked forward to?

In later years he really loved the Moonbah. We both did. In earlier days I think he loved Brindabella. I think everywhere he fished had its own appeal. It may have been because he was getting older that he liked the Moonbah so much – it’s very pretty country around there and it’s accessible. It was a nice place to picnic and Mum was happy painting. There were a number of places where you could reach the river, driving through people’s properties and so on.

The Creel was right on the Thredbo River. You turned off the main road up to the Summit before you started the climb up and there it was. There was a rattly old wooden bridge across the Thredbo just before the turn-off. The Thredbo itself was a beautiful big river. Well, big is not the right word. It was a small river, in fact. You know, like from here out to the front gate in width, but it was big compared, to say, the Moonbah. We fished the Thredbo at various place all the way to Thredbo village. Everybody imagined that the lake when the old Jindabyne and the valley were flooded might be good for fishing. We tried it a few times but never had much success. We didn’t really like it. You miss having a trout stream where you can see a fish rising on the far side that you can actually cast to. When you’re walking up the stream you can cast to either side put your fly right where they’re rising. Dad did like fishing the Three-Mile Dam near Kiandra but that was much smaller.

The Snowy was really big. We fished around Waste Point near where the Thredbo joined it which went under water and places higher up. We weren’t that sad to see old Jindabyne disappear under water. Old Jindabyne was not really that fantastic. My father wrote the poem Farewell to Jindabyne that isn’t very complimentary: Many a time thus viewing the total township / And thinking how soon it was to be buried in water / Like drowned Atlantis and never to be heard of again / I have thought: the sooner the better. On our first Kiandra holiday Mum did quite a lot of paintings of old Adaminaby going under water. She was quite taken by the image.

Getting there must have been a challenge sometimes compared to today.

Because for many years we had second-hand cars we always seemed to spend some part of our holiday having them repaired. Dad said the long drive from Sydney to Cooma and then all the rough roads we went on going fishing would shake something loose. That’s why we became so familiar with old Jindabyne – waiting for the car to be fixed. The first car we took to The Creel was a pale blue Austin A40. It was not a big car. That was the year that we became friends with Reggie Harris, (aka Percy Mathers). There must have been three of us in the back unless I sat on Mum’s lap but I would have been too big for that. What a squash! Then there were the fishing rods – they had to go from the front seat to the back – they weren’t made up but they were still quite long. Also there were what seemed to be endless gates that had to be opened going through paddocks. That was my job. I used to wish there wasn’t going to be a gate or that someone else would open the gate.

Your father had some health problems from time to time.

He couldn’t go to the Second World War. He was rejected twice on medical grounds, which explains how he had time to go trout fishing in the 1940s when he first met my mother. It also meant he had plenty of time to court my mother during those years. Shortly after the second rejection he was diagnosed as having an ulcer so that might have had a bit to do with it. He was put on a very strict diet for a year afterwards. He did air warden duty at Kings Cross but I don’t think that occupied too much of his time.

After that his health was fairly good at least for the years in the 1960s. I never had any sense of him not being fit then. But when I started back fishing with him in 1978 his breathing was beginning to become a problem and of course every year after that it worsened until the last year, 1984, when it took all his strength just to make up his rod and walk from the car to the bank of the Moonbah.

Was it difficult, growing up with famous parents?

Mum wrote a letter to Norman in which she talked about moving up to St Ives and how it would be would be good for me because I would have friends of my own and Dad wouldn’t have to spend so much time with me, which she implied was a bit of a chore. But I never felt that as a child. When we lived in the studio he spent an amazing amount of time playing with me. We had a circular table and he and I used to spend a lot of time sitting under the table and having imaginary tea parties. He seemed to be able to participate in childish games with ease. We were always building houses – small ones out of rocks – for the mermaids at the beach and for the fairies in the bush at Springwood. There’s a description in The Seven Rivers about how we went on Jack Snow’s tractor and found the entrance to Fairyland. We also did a lot of building for the river mermaids on the holiday.

One of the most precious things I gained from both of my parents was a sense that imagination is a natural and normal part of life. And because I was an only child they both included me in their adults’ world. When I was six they went to Europe on a UNESCO scholarship for six months and they took me with them. So at that age I trailed around with them to every art gallery they visited.

I think Dad would have liked a son. But he never made me feel in any way inferior because I was a girl or a woman. He never made any reference to wanting a son, nor did anybody else. Neither of my parents questioned what I wanted to do, whether it was to go to university or about choice of a career. As a young woman Mum had quite determinedly set out to be an artist. By the time I was born she’d established herself. She’d had her own one person show before she met Dad and she clearly thought of herself as a professional artist. He accepted that’s what she was. Not only accepted, but also really loved her painting. She did all the usual domestic things as well but the household ran with the clear assumption that she was an artist. She would start working straight after breakfast and go through until lunchtime after that the light had changed. She might do a little more in the early afternoon before stopping for the day. She would then do the shopping and cook dinner. He occasionally cooked but not routinely.

I guess he just wanted to share the fishing. To be truthful, there was one part of me would have quite liked to have been going to the beach with my teenage school friends in January. They went to the beach and sunbaked. It’s probably given them skin cancers now. But that’s what I aspired to. I’d come back to school after the summer holiday white and they’d have these wonderful tans. I used to try to get in a bit of sunbaking while we were at The Creel. But although the sun was meant to be strong there it didn’t seem to burn you the same way as at the beach. And of course while we were fishing we were covered up. Occasionally I would wear the proper trout fishing gear like the leggings and everything but I would have my swimming costume on underneath. When we were fishing I would fish just with my swimming costume top and my jodhpurs. No real trout fishing person would do that. Even so I remained untanned.

We had our beach holidays in autumn or spring. Towards the end of my school years we rented several cottages at Terrigal where friends of mine lived and another friend from school came to stay with us. Dad went fishing on his own and my friends and I did girl things. We walked up and down past the local milk bar to see how many times the boys would wolf whistle at us.

The Seven Rivers has become a classic of Australian and New Zealand fishing. Did he see it as an important book?

The Seven Rivers at the moment is his most popular book by a long way. When I was growing up The Fire in the Snow was often set as a school text for final year English, so it was the work that everyone knew. I didn’t actually have to study it for my Leaving Certificate but I think it was set a couple of years while I was in high school. I would often hear lines from the play and discussions about it coming out of classrooms when I went past. If it was set, the royalties from sales increased dramatically. Whenever his royalty cheque came in, Dad would write out cheques for Mum and me as special presents; that was very exciting. His poems are still being used in quite unexpected places. You’ll have somebody saying that they want to use one as part of a school song, for example. So his poetry lives on and has a life. But the book that people love is definitely The Seven Rivers. It’s been through a number of editions and is now available as an e-book. It’s manages to combine a lot of practical fishing detail with an understanding of the philosophy, if you like, of fishing. I suppose it now also evokes a bygone era, so there’s that appeal as well.

I suppose being a poet was what enabled him to write so lyrically about fishing. He didn’t feel self-conscious about it. That’s why he and David had such a strong bond, because David was a poet as well so there was this natural understanding between them, whereas if he’s been fishing with a more blokey bloke perhaps they wouldn’t have had that understanding. It meant they could slip from talking about fishing for trout to what made a good sonnet. There was just an enormous bond between them and I think it was this combination of fishing and poetry that made their friendship so special. There were perfect for each other, really. As far as The Seven Rivers and its attractions, I think he was relaxed in writing about fishing. He wasn’t having to be careful (except for changing Reggie Harris’s name), he was just writing about what happened when he went fishing.

In his photographs he often seems to come across as a rather intense person.

Mum said he was quite intense. In fact, she said she’s never met such an intense young man after she was first introduced him. A couple of years later she painted a portrait of him and he looks really glowering in that. He was writing his play Ned Kelly at the time and she said she thought he was being the bushranger when she painted him. So I suspect that he was quite an intense and driven person particularly in his earlier years. For all that he was very relaxed when he was playing with me as a young child. My aunt Shirley recalls him as always being the peacemaker between their parents but Dad himself could explode about things. Such outbursts usually occurred when he was fretting about work or his writing and then it he would explode about something else at home. I don’t think he did that with the people he was actually working with but occasionally it happened with Mum (who was the calmest person imaginable) and me. He would be very apologetic the next day.

I remember he got angry with me when he was giving me driving lessons on one trout fishing holiday. I kangaroo-hopped the car – a secondhand cream Holden by then – into a flock of sheep and it completely exasperated him, which is understandable. Of course, I didn’t think so at the time. Other than that I can’t recall him ever being angry when we were fishing. He coped with the frustrations of fly-fishing quite well, really. And he was very patient with me. I was always getting hooked up a tree behind myself when I was casting. Then you have to wind your line up to the end of the rod and try to poke it free. He’d wait patiently as I wiggled the tip of my rod around hoping the fly would come free – sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t.

David Campbell in contrast to my father was overtly a fun person. I loved it as a child when David came to stay because I knew there would be laughter. David was tall, blond, very handsome and had a great sense of humour. He was the complete antithesis of my father and I loved the fun and games that ensued when David was around. Dad seemed to become infected with David’s high spirits. When he joined us trout fishing it always lightened things up a bit.

Did things change in his fishing when you left home?

Because I left home when I was twenty-one and had a fairly full work schedule, then went overseas when I was twenty five there were a few years when I didn’t see my parents as much. I didn’t go fishing with them again until I was thirty but they continued to go to Kosciuszko every year. Mum told me afterwards that there was a period when Dad actually stopped fishing because he could not bear to catch the trout. She still went painting but he just went for walks along the river and didn’t fish, so it would seem he had a bit of a crisis about fishing. I don’t know if it was just that he didn’t have anybody to fish with. But then he seemed to recover from that. He didn’t discuss it with me and I didn’t know what was going on.

He might just have become fed up with lack of fish. In the early days when he and I were on the Moonbah we would catch about ten trout each or perhaps it was ten between us, anyway it felt like we were catching fish all the time. But then the fishing changed. The last couple of years we went back we were not catching fish like that. I remember I caught one big fish – that was all. Yet I was fishing much better as an older person. I could actually concentrate and had more focus with my casting but there were not the trout to catch.

I understand New Zealanders are sometimes said to have an inordinate fear of snakes.

Some of the people I’ve talked say they find it odd that Dad was concerned about snakes and think it was because he was a New Zealander. But it wasn’t only Dad. Fishermen generally were concerned about snakes. If you read his description in The Seven Rivers of the snakes that abounded on the Duckmaloi you’ll understand why. They were almost in plague quantities.

Snakes always give you a shiver. There was a big pool in the Thredbo in front of The Creel, where we used to swim and there were rocks where you could sunbake. So in my quest for the alternate trout fishing holiday I would often spend a couple of days with the other children staying at The Creel, swimming in this big pool. There was a rapid that you could get into and it would carry you right down the end of the pool. One day I was sunbaking by myself. I was lying there with my eyes closed and when I opened my eyes there was a snake beside me on the rock. It does make you move away smartly. Mum had to be very careful when she was painting. On her honeymoon at Duckmaloi she about to put her rubber cushion down on a tussock and then she saw there was a snake coiled around it. It’s when you’re walking in that tussocky country that you feel uneasy. Not so much in bush where the ground’s a bit cleared but when you’re in particularly long grass …

We always carried our own snakebite kit – one each – a small red canister about the size of a finger which had a little scalpel for lancing the bite. You were meant to lance the bite, rub Condy’s crystals in it and put a tourniquet on the limb above the puncture. You then walked to get help as quickly as possible. I think that’s considered quite the wrong thing to do now but it was dinned into you then. Times have changed so much.

It really was another time.

When we went to The Creel I don’t think we read a newspaper for the whole three weeks. I don’t think Dad wrote letters to anybody (although Mum and I did) because the whole point of the holiday was to get away, not to be in email contact or anything like that.

I would like to think that he’d be a conservationist now. He felt so strongly about the bush and how important it was. In his later years he became aware of the rock carvings around Ku-ring-gai National Park and he was very concerned that they be preserved. He had the bush here at and at Springwood which he explored when were visiting Norman Lindsay and he had it when he was trout fishing and beach fishing as well. So it was very much part of his life, essential to his life, really. He also loved the water – so yes I think he might well be a conservationist if he was alive today.

It’s hard to imagine him putting every trout he caught back the way people do today.

Although we did kill and eat the fish we caught we were always aware of trying not to be cruel to trout. Then again you could say even pursing the trout is cruelty. One of the first thing I learnt was how to wet your hand before you released a trout you were going to put back and how to hold it gently in the water so it could get orientated again. You used to try and ease the fly out of its mouth – not tear it away roughly. It wasn’t just the size of trout; even if they had reached the legal size some trout just looked too juvenile to take.

Fly-fishers have always been noted for collecting bits of equipment. Was your father any different?

He had Polaroid sunglasses. They used to be here but I think they’re gone now. Theoretically you are able to see the trout through the water with Polaroids. They are different from ordinary sunglasses, I think.

And he had the fly boxes with compartments that I always loved as a child. Some were plastic and the older ones were plastic or maybe even glass and metal. When he went on the Birdsville Track with the mailman in the early 1950s (he was researching a script for the film The Back of the Beyond) he brought me back a collection of tiny gibber stone which I used to keep in one of those old-fashioned fly boxes. He never had a big wicker creel – although we both used to recite the rhyme we learnt from Reggie Harris before setting off for the day’s fishing. It went: “My rod, my reel, / My flies, my creel’’. He used to carry a green canvas bag which had a leather strap which went across his body. The leggings that we wore as snake protection came from an army disposal shop.

The there were the boots. There was such an agony, particularly at Kosciuszko, about what was the perfect boot to wear fishing because the river stones were so slippery. I nearly disappeared into the Murrumbidgee when were staying at Kiandra because I was wearing gumboots and they filled with water while I was fishing on the marshy ledge of a bog so gumboots, as well as having not much grip, obviously weren’t the answer. There was also the same doubt about waders, that they could fill up and you’d drown. Then someone at The Creel decreed that felt-soled boots were the answer.

Felt-soled fishing boots are quite common now but when Dad got his pair of boots – I don’t know whether they came from England or whatever – they were a total novelty. We regarded them with wonder when they finally arrived. The problem was they were so heavy that Dad didn’t actually wear them very often. I think he then took a pair of his regular boots off to a bootmaker and had felt attached to the soles which proved more successful.

I am going to give the original felt-soled boots and his leggings, along with his rod and the reel, to the Museum. There are some boxes of flies and some other things like the Aerogard spray we used before we went off for day. It was amazing how many flies you could collect on you back when you were fishing if didn’t use Aerogard. There’s probably enough to make an exhibition of his stuff. The fishing map is going to the State Library of New South Wales. It’s on silk and quite fragile so it really would be best kept in a climate controlled situation like the Library. Hopefully a digital image of it will soon be available and then anyone who wants to will be able to see it.

His bits and pieces will go a long way towards creating a substantial Douglas Stewart display, I think. Thank you.

You know in the early days, and even after that, my parents mostly wrote to each other when he was away trout fishing. Because people only write when they’re separated – they don’t write when they’re together. So while there’s this huge volume of correspondence between Mum and Norman – which has been used to prove the nature of their relationship – between my parents there are just these few letters. I have to be grateful to the trout fishing because it’s provided the written evidence of the relationship between my parents. I’ve enjoyed reading those letters so much, with glimpses they provide of their lives then.

I think it indicates how importantly your father and mother both regarded doing things as a family. Thank you for today. You’ve been very generous with both your time and your thoughts. Both are much appreciated.

Jim Findlay