It’s fitting that a review of a book dealing with one of the world’s great fishing rivers begins with a bow to Izaak Walton.
“I love any discourse of rivers, and fish and fishing,’’ Walton wrote in his 1653 book The Compleat Angler.
And a discourse is what you receive in Grant Henderson’s exhaustively researched history of the Tongariro River. These waters may be a universe away from limpid English trout streams, but the angler’s basic creed remains approximately the same as it did when Walton observed that angling “may be said to be so like mathematics that it can never be fully learnt”.
Chronicling the rise – alongside a few declines – of a river so deeply embedded in the collective psyche of international trout fishing aficionados would be a daunting prospect for any writer. Anglers, especially the fly-fishing variety, are a disputatious tribe, but Henderson writes his measured account with the unflustered assurance of someone with six decades of fly fishing in his tackle bag, much of it spent on the Tongariro.
He knows his river intimately and the relationship is reflected in something that, especially with its use of archive photographs, becomes much more than another fishing book. He charts changing social attitudes and the clash of cultures, especially over the sale of Māori land in the central North Island and the pressure on what had been a valuable food resource for local iwi by expanding European farming and the introduction of new fish species.
By 1898, introduced brown trout had spread from Lake Taupō into the Tongariro, spawning a new (and lucrative) potential tourist attraction. The size and quality of the river’s brown and rainbow trout quickly became irresistible for trout fishing devotees in the decades before World War I. Despite its relative remoteness, the Tongariro became the focus of international piscatorial pilgrimages, accompanied by heavenly visions of 13kg rainbow trout and daily catches in the double figures.
Let’s not forget that fishing for many has always been the true religion. So British army officers, retired admirals, jaundiced English businessmen and invalided tea planters made the long journey to cast their lines on the Tongariro. This was sport on a grand level and Henderson distils the rich flavours of the time.
Some visitors were obsessional trout fishers; others made the trip to New Zealand for the experience itself. Like the Welshman Major RWW Jones, whose deep and almost romantic affection for the river saw one of the Tongariro’s most popular pools named after him after his death on the eve of another trip to New Zealand in 1922.
The American writer and outdoorsman Zane Grey arrived in New Zealand in 1926. At the time, Grey was one of the world’s best-known authors. His name is still synonymous with the Tongariro, as his fishing expeditions attracted the attention of the press and the government, which assiduously milked the accompanying publicity for New Zealand. Grey was a complex man but one besotted by the “swift cold waters of this most beautiful and famous of trout streams”.
Royalty in the form of the Duke and Duchess of York (later George VI and Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother) bobbed along in Grey’s wake, arriving in the late 1920s, donning waders and travelling in a 25-car convoy to a regal riverside campsite. Despite an apparent absence of fish, Tongariro had received the royal imprimatur.
But the visits by the rich and famous form a comparatively small part of a book, which also covers the many other arguably heavier issues that have confronted the river and those concerned with its welfare during the past century. Some questions were contentious and highly political, notably the fractious saga of the Tongariro power development scheme.
The river’s environmental health continues to be an issue alongside climate change, land use and pollution. Other discourses involving fishing techniques (fly or spinner? wet or dry?) might be regarded by non-anglers as somewhat esoteric.
Nevertheless, Henderson somehow manages to weave them all into this cohesive and absorbing portrait of the Tongariro and, naturally, its fish.
As a river’s biography, this is potent stuff.
Fishing The Tongariro: A History of Our Greatest Trout River by Grant Henderson.
