Wild About Bass

Finding & catching Aussie bass in rivers

Starlo shares a lifetime of experiences and discoveries accumulated while pursuing “wild” Australian bass in our coastal rivers: all the way from Victoria to Queensland. Learn about these unique native fish (and their kissing cousins, the estuary perch), as well as where to find them and how to regularly catch them on lures and flies.

In researching this publication, Starlo spoke with two of the country’s finest bass fishers, both of whom he admires greatly. They’ve both caught exceptionally large river bass and he was keen to seek out the details of those fish. Dave Seaman, below, is one of those fishers. Read all the insights in this 98 page bass tome!

The largest Australian bass ever recorded have all come from unnatural, still-water environments such as stocked lakes or dams. It seems that bass grow bigger in these waters because they have a year ’round food supply and don’t need to migrate up and down flowing rivers to spawn, burning lots of energy in the process. It’s also worth noting that the very largest specimens have all come from relatively warm south eastern Queensland dams containing healthy populations of bony bream, which are a wonderful and readily available food source.

This photo and the cover courtesy Scott Amon.