australian bamboo fly rod makers  -  a brief history

                                                Max Stokes' Bamboo Fly Rods (lender Ian Stokes)

Introduction

The craft of making fly rods from bamboo is growing in Australia, as in many other countries where fly fishing thrives. 

The craft is celebrated with ‘Cane Days’ run by several Australian fly-fishing clubs, and preeminently at ‘Cressy Cane’[1]  a gathering of cane rod enthusiasts over three days on the banks of Brumbys Creek in Tasmania, at ‘Hayes on Brumbys’ where it is hosted by master casting instructor and guide Peter Hayes. Founded by David Hemmings, who wanted to share his own love of bamboo with others, Cressy Cane is a celebration of making and fishing bamboo rods. Most attendees are makers, but even those just passionate about or interested in bamboo have been welcomed. 

Topics include all aspects of rod making, casting and fishing bamboo. Transferring knowledge, sharing information and supporting the craft of bamboo fly rod making for posterity is something embedded in the spirit and culture of Cressy Cane. And for a number of years, Australasia’s leading bamboo rod maker Nick Taransky[4] has conducted rod making classes in the weeks adjacent to Cressy Cane. 

The circulation list of current and former attendees since the first gathering in 2014 comes to over 60 names, of whom well over half are or have been Australian bamboo fly rod makers. For most of them, rod making is not their main occupation, but it is their passion and they produce beautiful rods of the highest craftsmanship.

But what of its history in Australia? In other countries, particularly the US, the UK, France, Germany and Italy, where the craft of bamboo rod making thrives, its history is well documented and celebrated. However, Australia’s fly-fishing literature is largely silent on the history of our bamboo fly rods and their makers, and information about them scattered and patchy. There is no recorded history yet to provide an anchor for today’s Australian bamboo rod making, and the topic has never been explored at Cressy Cane, given its focus on the body of practical knowledge gleaned through the American masters (makers such as Payne, Young, Garrison, Dickerson, Gillum), which has supported the work of contemporary Australian makers.

This site seeks to fill that gap, by sketching the history of Australian bamboo fly rod making. Its immediate context is of course the history of Australian fly fishing for trout; the full story is much older.

The International Context[2]

Our story really starts with the origin of the dressed hook and the fly rod. 

Claudius Aelianus, in around 200 AD, recorded the practice of fishing in rivers of Macedonia. The fish were described as spotted, active takers of natural flies. The locals eschewed the delicate naturals and wrapped onto their hooks ruby coloured wool and a couple of cock hackles. Over the centuries, such flies were not designed to float intentionally, but many probably did for part of their drift. The Macedonian rods were described as short as six feet.

Through the dark ages and into mediaeval times there were references to angling, but not much detail. Then in 1496 came the famous Treatyse of Fysshyng with an Angle attributed to Dame Juliana Berners, which contains the various fly patterns from March to August. Trout rods in Europe and England may have evolved locally from short to very long…

It seems very clear that for centuries or even longer anglers understood that the fall of the fly on the water was the most likely time for a bite. Many flies were designed with bristles, palmered hackles etc that would tend to float for some time. But the method of fishing was largely across and down, unless dapping with wind assistance. In the second edition of his book The Vade Mecum of Fly Fishing, 1846, George Pulman described the intentional drying of flies: “Let a dry fly be substituted for a wet one, the line switched a few times through the air to throw off the superabundant moisture, a judicious cast made above the rising fish, and the fly allowed to float towards and over them, and the chances are ten to one that it will be seized as readily as the living insect.” In his History of Fly Fishing, 2011, Andrew Herd defines: “A DRY-FLY is a fly which is fished on an upstream cast and which sits with the majority of the fly above the surface of the water.”

In the 19th century trout rods necessarily began to evolve towards single handed casting and eventually to distinguish a faster action for dry flies and a softer one for wet flies and nymphs. In this process anglers and manufacturers sought lighter and stronger rod materials and to abandon hickory, then greenheart, etc. and rods became as short as 8 feet. Calcutta cane was the preferred material, split and glued up. 

In the USA early cane builders included Phillippe (1846), Green, Norris, Murphy, and Leonard. The latter became affiliated with and later owned by Wm Mills & Son, and by 1873 Leonard had a broad range of split cane rods. Leonard was the father of the modern fly rod, by then located in Central Valley New York. Three of the strong workers, EF Thomas, EW Edwards and Ed Payne, left Leonard and formed the Kosmic Rod Company, and some think that this was the purest expression of the Leonard rod. This arrangement did not last beyond the mid-1890s and each went his own way. The late 19th and early 20th century saw the beginning of Tonkin cane to replace Calcutta. Finally, around 1917 EW Edwards discovered the benefits of heat treating of the bamboo for higher tensile strength, which was rapidly taken up by other makers thereafter.

In the UK it seems that while split bamboo had become known in around the 1840s, its employment was restricted to tips of rods for many more years than in the USA. In 1879 William and JJ Hardy, the founders of Hardy Brothers in 1872, were said to have reverse engineered an American made bamboo rod to begin manufacturing similar rods in Britain, and by the late 1880s Hardy Brothers, by far the eminent UK tackle maker until the 1960s, were making rods entirely of split cane.

In all of this, the invention in England in the late 19th century of the oil impregnated silk line, varnished and polished, allowed the casting of the flies in the most artistic ways. Many of us still use such lines…

The Australian Context

Viable Brown Trout ova were successfully shipped from England to Tasmania in 1864. The progeny of those trout were introduced into other Australian states, Victoria in 1871-72 and New South Wales in 1887. In 1873 a Victorian Brown trout of close to 6 lb caught by Ballarat solicitor Robert Holmes was the first recorded trout caught on an artificial fly in Australia, followed by one of 4¼ lb a few weeks later. Rainbow trout were introduced in 1894. 

The first Australian trout fly in NSW was the ‘Bredbo’, a grasshopper-imitating wet fly most likely created by Charles Burnside in about 1901. Other local patterns were published in the early 1900s and illustrated in Howard Joseland’s Angling in Australia and Elsewhere from 1921. In 1910 Thomas Boustead Simpson, a prominent angler (and rifle shooting competitor) who regularly fished at Great Lake, introduced dry fly fishing to Australia, though English flies were not always successful. Tasmanian Dick Wigram built on Simpson’s start, inventing many exquisite flies to match the local hatches. His Trout and Fly in Tasmania (1938) became the standard work. The first locally made trout flies had been advertised for sale by the Sydney tackle shop Eastway Brothers in 1920. Insects of Australia and New Zealand, by RJ Tillyard, the first book on Australia’s insect life, was published in 1926. Robert Blackwood’s The Quest for Trout, the first local primer on fly fishing technique, was published in the same year. 

Australian societies devoted to fly fishing date from the beginning of the 20th century. The NSW Rod Fishers' Society originated from conversations, believed to have started in 1904, between Howard Joseland and a Mr T. W. Carr, city agent of the AMP Society and trout angler of note. On 5 October 1905, Joseland presided over an open meeting to form a fishing club "to be  styled 'The Sydney Angling Society', which would have for its objects the furtherance of the interests of fly-fishers for trout and the encouragement of rod fishing generally."[3] A provisional committee was appointed to draw up rules. By the first general meeting of the Society on 30 November 1905 it had taken on its current name.

A Victoria Fly-fishers’ Association was formed in 1906, attested by a membership card from that year. The original body did not survive, though it changed its name to the Victoria Trout Fishers’ Association in 1908; the Victorian Fly-fishers’ Association was reconstituted in 1932. The Ballarat Fly Fishers Club, initially known simply as the Fly Fishers Club, was founded in 1919. While the Fly Fishers Club of Tasmania dates from 1955, the Derwent Anglers’ Club (1879) was the first of many Tasmanian fishing societies, including the Northern Tasmanian Anglers’ Association (about 1900).

Virtually all Australian fly fishers in the first decades of the 20th century fished with split-cane rods (woods like greenheart being the only exception). Given the strong cultural attachment to Britain as the ‘mother country’, it is not surprising that almost all their rods were brought or imported from the UK. New rods being bought, and rods in for repair, were split-cane rods. This was the state of play until fibre-glass rods began to make inroads into the fly-fishing market in the 1950s, dominating it by the 1970s. 

The Eras

The history of Australian bamboo fly rod making can be divided, somewhat arbitrarily, into three eras:

·      1930 to 1970 – the foundation era. The foundation makers Bill Southam, Malcolm Gillies and Maurie Turville dominated this era. However, there were other makers, including Len Butterworth (Brisbane), Carter & Son (Melbourne), ‘Bluey’ Powell (Melbourne), and ‘Jim’ Jarvis Walker (Melbourne).

·      1970 to 2000 – birth of the individual artisan. The most prominent maker in this era was John McGinn, who migrated to Australia from the UK about 1980. Other makers included Tasmania’s Peter McKean, who was making rods from the 1990s until his death in 2016 and Victorian Tony Young, who started making rods in 1995 and is still making them, though he has now branched more into rod fittings.

·     The Contemporary Era - bamboo fly rod making in Australia is currently defined by a small group of makers who are involved in both making and teaching how to make bamboo fly rods, ensuring continuity of the craft through sharing knowledge and experience.  David Hemmings, Callum Ross and Nick Taransky, probably the best known as Australasia’s only full-time maker, all make exemplary rods. Biographies and bamboo fly rods made by David Hemmings, Callum Ross and Nick Taransky have been documented in detail as part of the research.    

The following pages provide biographical notes for each maker, followed by descriptions of their rods and images where we have them. The level of detail will vary, depending on the information we could find. 

We have also dedicated a section following the Contemporary Era, recognising three Australians, Ray Brown, Peter Hayes and Sean McSharry, who have championed Australian bamboo rod making as 'torchbearers'. 

[1] refer Cressy Cane web site

[2] with thanks to Sean McSharry.

[3] Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October 1905, p. 16.

[4] Kiwi Cane is a Bi-annual gathering celebrating Cane Fly Rods in New Zealand. The Inaugural Kiwi Cane, hosted by Nick Taransky, will be held in Ohakune from Friday the 19th April to Sunday the 21st of April 2024 at the Ruapehu Ski Club Lodge.

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About

The literature is largely silent on the history of Australian bamboo fly rods and their makers, the rods produced and the influencing factors during each era. This web site reflects three years of modest, voluntary, ongoing research, information gathering and recording of remnant and contemporary bamboo fly rods to provide the content that informs this history, from the early beginnings of bamboo fly rod making in Australia during the 1930's, to the present day.   David Hemmings, James Jones & Fred von Reibnitz, 21st April 2024

Acknowledgements

Jim Allen, David Anderson, Stuart Beal, Andrew Braithwaite, Ray Brown, Reece Carter, Peter Clayton, Rob Edwards, Jason Garrett (snr), Peter Hayes, David Honeybone, Robert King, Kevin Laughton, George Lincoln, Adrian Maroya, John McIntyre, Sean McSharry, John Miller, Petrina Moore, Tim Munroe, Geoff Newman, Chris O'Brien, Michael Parker, Chris Rose, Callum Ross, Stuart Rowland, Lee Ruth, Phillip Smith, Ian Stokes, Nick Taransky, Rodney Tonkin, Tim Urbanc, Tony Young, Christopher Zoppou,  Australian Fly Fishing Museum, Ballarat Fly Fishers Club, Red Tag Fly Fishers' Club, Joseland Society, NSW Rod Fishers' Society, Tasmania Fly Tyers' Club, Victorian Fly Fishers' Association, Salmon Ponds Fishing Museum, Inland Fisheries Service (Tasmania), Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery