Fly fishing New South Wales

High tableland trout country between the Snowy Mountains and the coastal escarpment — treeless frost plains, clear undercut streams, wary browns that give you one cast, and the Snowy scheme waters along its western edge.

Alpine trout water around Jindabyne, Eucumbene and Tantangara — the big storages, the lake-fed rivers and the high streams inside Kosciuszko — with a short cold summer, a spring melt you can plan around, and an autumn run of lake browns into the rivers.

A hundred and seventy kilometres from the Lithgow tablelands to Sydney's drinking-water storage — a farmed trout river you can reach from a bridge, two lakes in the middle, and a wilderness gorge at the bottom where rainbows run up from the storage in winter.

Three rivers under one name in the Snowy Mountains — a meadow creek above Kiandra, the run water down to Lake Eucumbene, and a tailwater below the wall — with seventy years of gauge record drawn out on the page.

Eighty-six kilometres of walk-in Blue Mountains gorge from the Boyd plateau to the Coxs — trout-classified above Morong Creek, timber to the water the whole way down, one gauge at Cedar Ford, and almost nobody on it.

One name, three rivers in north-east Victoria — a wild alpine trout stream above Lake Dartmouth, a cold regulated tailrace below the wall with a closed season of its own, and a slower lower river down to Hume where Murray cod come into the picture.

Two rivers under one name — a cold snowmelt trout stream falling off the Kosciuszko high country and across the Monaro, then fourteen hundred kilometres of slow lowland cod and golden perch water — with sixty-six years of the Tantangara gauge drawn on the page.

A hundred and fifteen kilometres of treeless Monaro tableland stream east of Cooma — rain-fed and flashy, a chain of pools by February and a river in a week, warm enough in summer to make it an autumn and spring fishery, with the Chakola gauge's flow and temperature drawn on the page.

Four hundred and forty kilometres from the roof of Australia to the sea at Marlo — alpine melt water above the Snowy scheme pondages, a regulated Monaro river below Jindabyne past Dalgety, a wilderness gorge across the Victorian border, and a floodplain estuary at the end — with the Island Bend gauge drawn on the page.

A hundred-and-fifty-seven-hectare walk-in trophy trout dam near Wallerawang, on private land the department has opened to anglers — fly and lure only, shore only, daylight hours, stocked with browns and rainbows every year, and a satellite record of its rises and falls since it first filled in 1992.