Rivers & Lakes
How Australia drains
13 drainage divisions, 218 catchments. Pick one to open its drainage tree — mainstem to the smallest mapped creek, plus the lakes and impoundments that sit inside it.
Catchment boundaries and stream network: Australian Hydrological Geospatial Fabric (Geofabric), Bureau of Meteorology, © Commonwealth of Australia, CC BY 4.0 — simplified for display.
Start here
Meander River
A hundred and seventeen kilometres from the Great Western Tiers to the South Esk at Hadspen — fast clear water above Huntsman Lake, the shingle riffles and long runs from the dam to Deloraine that IFS calls the river's best fly water, slow broadwaters through the poppy and pasture country below — wild browns, seventy years of the Deloraine gauge drawn on the page, and a lower river open to the end of May.
Arthurs Lake
Sixty-four square kilometres of Central Plateau storage that IFS's twenty-year angler survey puts at two fish a day — a wild, self-sustaining brown trout lake, the best mayfly water on the highlands from November to February, Cowpaddock Bay from the shore, four ramps, two campgrounds, and weather that turns in an hour.
Blackwood River mouth boundary reach
The short final stretch where Western Australia's longest south-west river meets the coast — the one reach of the Blackwood that falls inside DPIRD's coastal South West fishing region, and the reason the rules change between the inland river and the sea.
Boondooma Lake
Fourteen and a half square kilometres of Queensland storage on the Boyne, an hour west of Kingaroy — stocked under the state's permit scheme with Australian bass, golden perch and silver perch, fished from a boat or the bank on the wind lanes and the drowned timber, and a Stocked Impoundment Permit to line-fish it.
Brumbys Creek
The tailwater below Great Lake — forty-four kilometres from the Poatina power station to the Macquarie through three low weirs built in the 1960s to soften the releases, a meadow stream in look and a hydro tailrace in behaviour, wild browns with rainbows, mayfly and damsels over the weed, a gauge that reads temperature, and a level that moves with the turbines.
Coxs River
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.