But we knew better; we were born in the colony—in a seaport town on the northern coast—and the aborigines of the Hastings River tribe had taught us many valuable secrets, one of which was how to catch black bream in the broad light of day as the tide flowed over a long stretch of sand, bare at low water, at the mouth of a certain “blind” creek a few miles above the noisy, surf-swept bar. But here, in Mosman's Bay, in Sydney, we had not the cunningly devised gear of our black friends—the principal article of which was the large uni-valve aliotis shell—to help us, so we set to work and devised a plan of our own, which answered splendidly, and gave us glorious sport.
When the tide was out and the sands were dry, carrying a basket containing half a dozen strong lines with short-shanked, thick hooks, and two or three dozen young gar-fish, mullet, or tentacles of the octopus, we would set to work. Baiting each hook so carefully that no part of it was left uncovered, we dug a hole in the sand, in which it was then partly buried; then we scooped out with our hands a narrow trench about six inches deep and thirty or forty yards in length, into which the line was laid, covered up roughly, and the end taken to the shore. After we had accomplished laying our lines, radiating right and left, in this manner we covered each tempting bait with an ordinary crockery flower-pot, weighted on the top with a stone to keep it in its place, and then a thin tripping-line was passed through the round hole, and secured to a wooden cross-piece underneath. These tripping-lines were then brought ashore, and our preparations were complete.
“But why,” one may ask, “all this elaborate detail, this burying of lines, and, most absurd of all, the covering up of the baited hook with a flowerpot?”
Simply this. As the tide flows in over the sand there come with it, first of all, myriads of small garfish, mullet, and lively red bream, who, if the bait were left exposed, would at once gather round and begin to nibble and tug at it. Then perhaps a swiftly swimming “Long Tom,” hungry and defiant, may dart upon it with his terrible teethed jaws, or the great goggle-eyed, floundering sting-ray, as he flaps along his way, might suck it into his toothless but bony and greedy mouth; and then hundreds and hundreds of small silvery bream would bite, tug, and drag out, and finally reveal the line attached, and then the scheme has come to naught, for once the cute and lordly black bream sees a line he is off, with a contemptuous eye and a lazy, proud sweep of tail.
When the tide was near the full flood we would take the ends of our fishing- and tripping-lines in our hands and seat ourselves upon the high sandstone boulders which fringed the sides of the bay, and from whence we could command a clear view of the water below. Then, slowly and carefully, we tripped the flower-pots covering the baits, and hauled them in over the smooth sandy bottom, and, with the baited lines gripped tight in the four fingers of our right hands, we watched and waited.
Generally, in such calm, transparent water, we could, to our added delight, see the big bream come swimming along, moving haughtily through the crowds of small fry—yellow-tail, ground mullet, and trumpeters. Presently, as one of them caught sight of a small shining silvery mullet (or a luscious-looking octopus tentacle) lying on the sand, the languid grace of his course would cease, the broad, many-masted dorsal fin become erect, and he would come to a dead stop, his bright, eager eye bent on the prize before him. Was it a delusion and a snare? No! How could it be? No treacherous line was there—only the beautiful shimmering scales of a delicious silvery-sided young mullet, lying dead, with a thin coating of current-drifted sand upon it. He darts forward, and in another instant the hook is struck deep into the tough grizzle of his white throat; the line is as taut as a steel wire, and he is straining every ounce of his fighting six or eight pounds' weight to head seawards into deep water.
Slowly and steadily with him, else his many brothers will take alarm, and the rest of the carefully laid baits will be left to become the prey of small “flatheads,” or greedy, blue-legged spidery crabs. Once his head is turned, providing he is well hooked, he is safe, and although it may take you ten minutes ere you haul him into such shallow water that he cannot swim upright, and he falls over upon his broad, noble side, and slides out upon the sand, it is a ten minutes of joy unalloyed to the youthful fisherman who takes no heed of two other lines as taut as his own, and only prays softly to himself that his may be the biggest fish of the three.
Generally, we managed to get a fish upon every one of the ten or twelve lines we set in this manner, and as we always used short, stout-shanked hooks of the best make, we rarely lost one. On one occasion, however, a ten-foot sawfish seized one of our baits, and then another and another, and in five minutes the brute had entangled himself amongst the rest of the lines so thoroughly that our old convict boatman, who was watching us from his hut, yelled out, as he saw the creature's serrated snout raised high out of the water as it lashed its long, sinuous tail to and fro, to “play him” till he “druv an iron into it.” He thought it was a whale of some sort, and, jumping into a dinghy, he pulled out towards it, just in time to see our stout lines part one after another, and the “sawfish” sail off none the worse for a few miserable hooks in his jaws and a hundred fathoms of stout fishing lines encircling his body.
This old Bill Duggan—he had “done” twenty-one years in that abode of horror, Port Arthur in Tasmania, for a variegated assortment of crimes—always took a deep interest in our black-bream fishing, and freely gave us a shilling for each one we gave him.
He told us that by taking them to Sydney he could sell them for two shillings each, and that he would send the money to a lone, widowed sister who lived in Bridgnorth, England. Our mother deeply sympathised with the aged William (our father said he was a lying old ruffian), and always let him take the boat and pull over to Sydney to sell the fish. He generally came back drunk after twenty-four hours' absence, and said the sun had affected him. But Nemesis came at last.