Below the Brumbys Creek junction the Macquarie has one more job before it ends: twenty-two kilometres past the Cressy pumps to Longford, where it meets the South Esk and stops being a river of its own. This is the lower Macquarie, and two things make it different from the meadow water above. Brumbys Creek joins at the top of it, a tailwater fed by the Poatina power station whose releases can lift this stretch while the river above is unchanged, and Inland Fisheries Service keeps it open a month longer than the rest of the Macquarie, alongside the lower Brumbys, the Meander and the South Esk. The fish are the same wild browns, with rainbows among them here in the lower reaches, and the water is the same slow, clear glide-and-pool country between cut banks and cropping paddocks, with the Cressy gauge to read it by. It fishes the same way as the meadow water in spring and autumn, spinners and duns then hoppers, and it gives you an extra month at the end when the browns above have been left alone: cold water, deep pools, a wet fly or a streamer swung slow, and the season’s last fish. Longford and Cressy are the towns, the access is IFS-negotiated and signed, and the South Esk at the bottom is another river with its own page.