Fishing tales from the Tarago

I do wish Toyota had not brought the Toyota Previa, aka Estima, to Australia as the Tarago. I tried doing a little research on our Tarago River on the web and the Toyota Tarago dominated the site. There are pages and pages of Taragos for sale, still.

I wanted to find out more and talk about our local river, though by the standards of most countries it would hardly be called a river at all – perhaps a brae, or a rill, or a burn or – well something small. We should probably call it a creek.

When I was a little tacker we’d fish in the Tarago out past the Robin Hood, walking the river from Fisher’s Rd or Stocks Rd. It was a big river then, I seem to recall, but as I got bigger it got smaller.

The Tarago rises in the Bunyip State Park near Gentle Annie campsite on the Noojee-Yarra Junction Rd and also near the “Bunyip Gap”, of which I had not heard. Mind you, I found that the Bunyip rises near Tomahawk Gap, also unknown to me, I need a better set of maps! It picks up Muddy Creek and the Labertouche Creek before joining the Bunyip. It once emptied into the Great Swamp. The Great Swamp covered almost 100,000 acres and the Tarago-come-Bunyip was the main feeder of water into this vast and always-wet flatland.

The Bunyip collects the waters of Back Creek, Diamond Creek, Ryson’s Creek, Tea Tree Creek and Cannibal Creek before it meets the Tarago and again I have to ask why the less than mighty Bunyip is a river and not a creek.

It doesn’t matter whether they are rivers or creeks – in West Gippsland we have only the Bunyip and Tarago, the Tarwin (at a pinch), the Bass and the Lang Lang rivers – and they are all rather small. We can’t be too choosy.

The Tarago is 30 miles long (49 of those metric things) and drops over a thousand feet (320m) before it surrenders its name to the somewhat lesser Bunyip. The Bunyip then keeps its name until it gets under the Longwarry Rd where it becomes almost immediately the Main Drain. That traverses the Koo wee rup Swamp, once known as the Great Swamp – and it was.

The Main Drain is most emphatically not the original course of the river, because once it entered the swamp it really had no defined course. The sandpits between Koo wee rup and Bayles (Plowright’s and Water Washed Sand) were mining well-defined riverbeds long dried up, even with occasional topaz among the gravel). In the long-ago that might have been part of the Bunyip’s course, before the swamp was drained.

Back, however, to the Tarago, a more important and more interesting river than we might think. It is scientifically interesting as a home for the Australian Grayling, the Tupong and the Short-finned eel. I’ve been fishing in that river many, many times, and I’ve never seen an Australian Grayling nor a Tupong. I’m not much of an angler and I don’t really go fishing to catch fish.

It is good to know that flows from the Tarago Reservoir are partly controlled to provide environmental safety for the fish in the river. Some of those fish carry little transponders so they can be followed as thy come and go, and so the river can be managed to provide enough water for them, and enough to stimulate their spawning and their migrations.

These flows are controlled by the Victorian Environmental Water Holder, a statutory body which holds the entitlements to enough water to maintain the health of some of our river systems through environmental flows, as long as there is enough rain. The Thomson, Latrobe and Macalister Rivers are also looked after by them – but their website does not mention the Tarago. It should.

Australian Grayling are still threatened with extinction and their presence in the Tarago is very important. They were once thought to provide great sport on light gear, but an adult would usually be little more than seven inches long, though specimens up to a foot long have been taken. In the late 1860s there were huge fish kills of the Grayling, believed to have been due to a fungus imported with salmon brought in and released here.

The Grayling lay their eggs in river gravels where the water is clean enough and the young hatchlings come downstream and out into the salt water, where they grow for about six months before coming back to the rivers. I don’t know whether they return to the same river or not.

They are a streamlined silver fish with a dark back somewhat green in colour and were once known as Cucumber Fish – it is good to know what they look like because the penalty for catching one is very, very steep.

The Tupong is another fish where my knowledge had to come from the internet, and that is always something of a worry, but there are Tupong in the Tarago so I could not avoid the issue. The Tupong has many names, including Freshwater Flathead, Sandy Whiting, Sand Trout and Marble Fish.

Again, like the Grayljng, he is a little bloke and adults might be as small as four inches or as much as 12 or 13 inches. They are bottom-dwellers in still pools or under overhangs, sometimes burying themselves to lie in wait for the tiny creatures they eat. The Marble Fish name comes from the colouring, which can be a very varied “marbling”. It is described by the three sources I consulted as “common” in coastal streams – I’ve never seen one, but then I’ve never used gear small enough for such a small fish.

Do you see why I said there was more to the Tarago than we think?

There are also Brown Trout in the Tarago Reservoir and sometimes in the river itself, though they are bigger in the reservoir. Salmo trutta, also sometimes called Sea Trout because they can be found in saltwater occasionally, is a voracious feeder and skilled hunter that was introduced and that has decimated the populations of native Galaxias.

Originally they were found across Europe and Asia but are now known around the world, sometimes welcome and sometimes not. There were several tries to introduce Salmo trutta to Australia until there was success in Tasmania in 1864. These efforts were all around bringing out eggs, but once the trout were established in Tasmania live fish were introduced to mainland streams.

I’m afraid the most common fish in the Tarago is the eel, or, more correctly, the Southern Short-finned Eel. These eels might look a little snake-like but they are among best eating of all the fish in Australian waters, as long as they are taken from clean water, or unless, as some people do with carp, they are put in a bath, a tank or some such for a week or so in clean water,

There is more the Tarago than all this, though. I’ll be back shortly with more about the only ‘real river’ we have in the area.