Headwaters to Ross

Above Ross the Macquarie is a different river from the one in the books. It comes off the hills east of the Midlands as a quick, cold stream, gathers the Tooms River at the forty-six kilometre mark and the Blackman River at eighty-two, and only in its last few kilometres above the Midland Highway bridge begins to slow into the meadow water it is famous for. The fall of the river shows it: the upper Macquarie loses most of the height the whole river will ever lose in these first ninety kilometres. The Trefusis gauge sits about two-thirds of the way down, and has read the river since 1979; its record is the river’s year drawn on the whole-river page. The fish are wild browns, in our experience mostly small and fit as headwater fish are, holding in the pools and the tails of the riffles rather than the thin water between. It is grazing country and the access is what IFS has negotiated and marked with signs. Fish it in spring when the water has settled and the first duns are up, or in autumn when the hoppers are on the grass, and fish it as small water: one careful cast to a pool and a step upstream. The meadow river below the bridge will still be there.