Australia is a country that has always been quietly proud of its traditions, and for Anna Clark there is no tradition more Australian than fishing. Her newest book, The Catch, celebrates the universal pleasure of throwing in a line whilst interrogating the pastime’s history – a history fraught with tensions between coloniser and colonised, recreation and commercial enterprise, and inevitably, between human greed and the limited resources of the natural world.

From The Catch’s very first pages, Clark invites the reader to take a proverbial seat beside her on the riverbank and share in the quiet, communitarian paradise treasured by any avid fisher. Even for the most fishing-agnostic reader like myself, Clark makes it easy to understand why fishing is so important to so many. Once she’s got you invested, she launches into a detailed and considered history of fishing in Australia, from the complex and ingenious practices of Indigenous fishers to the perilous and wasteful world of early industry. Each chapter steps forward into the present, mapping the steady growth of technology and the meteoric collapses of ecosystems that has led to the intense regulation and slow recovery we see today.

Throughout The Catch, Clark takes on many voices: historian, environmentalist, cultural critic; but she never lets us forget the voice of the fisho’, a voice which animates her writing with a bevy of anecdotes and unmistakably Australian slang but also reminds us why we shouldn’t just give up on fishing. Rather than arguing in either direction, she calls for a carefully managed balance between fishers and fish, protecting nature so future generations can enjoy its pleasures. For those at home with a fishing pole, The Catch will broaden their understanding of a favourite hobby and for those like me, it’s an invitation to think more deeply about a national tradition that so often appears as people patiently waiting for something interesting to happen.