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. Inland Fisheries Service rates the Tinamirakuna / Macquarie among Tasmania’s finest trout rivers, and manages it as a wild fishery; nothing has been stocked into it in fifteen years and the browns that live in its pools were born there. 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.