hand
through the weedy edges, and in ten minutes we had secured a quart-pot
full.

"Peter," who regarded our rods with contempt, was the first to reach
the boulders at the edge of the big pool, which in the centre had a fair
current; at the sides, the water, although deep, was quiet. Squatting
down on a rock, he cast in his baited hand-line, and in ten seconds
he was nonchalantly pulling in a fine two pound bream. He leisurely
unhooked it, dropped it into a small hole in the rocks, and then began
to cut up a pipeful of tobacco, before rebaiting!

The water was literally alive with fish, feeding on the bottom. There
were two kinds of bream--one a rather slow-moving fish, with large, dark
brown scales, a perch-like mouth, and wide tail, and with the sides
and belly a dull white; the other a very active game fellow, of a more
graceful shape, with a small mouth, and very hard, bony gill plates.
These latter fought splendidly, and their mouths being so strong
they would often break the hooks and get away--as our rods were very
primitive, without reels, and only had about twenty feet of line.
Then there were the very handsome and beautifully marked fish, like an
English grayling (some of which I had caught at Scan's Creek); they took
the hook freely. The largest I have ever seen would not weigh more than
three-quarters of a pound, but their lack of size is compensated for by
their extra delicate flavour. (In some of the North Queensland inland
rivers I have seen the aborigines net these fish in hundreds in shallow
pools.) Some bushmen persisted, so Gilfillan told me, in calling these
fish "fresh water mullet," or "speckled mullet".

The first species of bream inhabit both clear and muddy water; but the
second I have never seen caught anywhere but in clear or running water,
when the river was low.

But undoubtedly the best eating fresh-water fish in the Burdekin and
other Australian rivers is the cat-fish, or as some people call it, the
Jew-fish. It is scaleless, and almost finless, with a dangerously barbed
dorsal spine, which, if it inflicts a wound on the hand, causes days
of intense suffering. Its flesh is delicate and firm, and with the
exception of the vertebrae, has no long bones. Rarely caught (except
when small) in clear water, it abounds when the water is muddy, and
disturbed through floods, and when a river becomes a "banker," cat-fish
can always be caught where the water has reached its highest. They then
come