Tasmania's classic dry-fly river, a hundred and ninety-five kilometres of Midlands meadow water from the hills above the Tooms junction through Ross and Campbell Town country to the South Esk at Longford, wild browns under red spinners in spring and hoppers in autumn, four gauges, and forty-seven years of the Trefusis record.
Every Australian fly angler who reads has fished the Macquarie in their head before they fish it in their waders, because this is the river the island’s dry-fly writing was made on: a slow, clear Midlands meadow stream where a brown trout drifts up under a red spinner in the October sun, looks at it for a full second, and decides. The Tinamirakuna / Macquarie is rated among Tasmania’s finest trout rivers, and Inland Fisheries Service manages it as a wild fishery. It rises in the hills east of the Midlands, gathers the Tooms River, drops past the Blackman junction into the meadow country at Ross, winds through Campbell Town’s Elizabeth River, the Isis and the Lake River to the Brumbys Creek junction below Cressy, and joins the South Esk at Longford after a hundred and ninety-five kilometres. It is not a big river in the numbers. The Trefusis gauge has watched the upper river since 1979 and its median never reaches a cubic metre a second, which is why the typical range on the chart below is so narrow and why the fishing is in the pools and the glides, not the riffles. Spring is spinners and duns, summer is early, late and polaroiding, autumn is hoppers tight to the grass. The three stretch pages take the river in turn, and the rules change where the authority changes them, at the Brumbys junction.