Home Thoughts From Abroad

BY SEÁN BYRNE

FLY FISHERMEN IN GENERAL ARE A PATIENT BREED. EVERY YEAR THEY WORK DILIGENTLY FOR ELEVEN AND A HALF MONTHS, THEN COUNT THE DAYS AND FINALLY THE HOURS TO THEIR ANNUAL FISHING TRIP.

My trip each year is to the Warren River, in the Southwest corner of Western Australia, where the hot sun and the encroaching bush make for a difficult fishing environment, and a scarcity of fish. Last year’s trip was a complete disaster. The drive from Perth in late September was slow due to a storm. The rain beat unrelentingly on the windshield of my car. The wipers were unable to cope with the deluge and several times I pulled into a lay-by to allow the worst of it to pass. When I arrived at my cottage the rain had eased, but the overflowing river covered the paddock at the back of the house. As I unpacked my car a duck and her brood sailed towards me, exploring their new-found playground and quack quacked a greeting as they passed. There was a gentle rain that first evening and I sat on the veranda in the fading evening light, tying flies and dreaming of fishing trips past. I especially remembered those fish caught in ice-cold mountain streams in the West of Ireland. The small, speckled trout that danced on the water in anger when hooked and swam away with a derisive wave of the tail, like a two-fingered salute, when released. And big trout from the Midland Lakes, fine Lough Owel trout that never showed on the surface until it was time for the net. Powerful fish that could pull a large boat around the lake with ease. But most of all, those wonderful trout from the River Boyne, with bellies the colour of fresh butter, like pirouetting rainbows they leaped against the setting sun. What I wouldn’t give to be sitting on the banks of that great river now, just below Bective Bridge. To sit with my back to the Great house with its sombre grey-stone exterior and to face the skeletal ruins of that ancient abbey where 800-year-old ghosts guard its naked walls. I would sit for hours in the spot below the bridge, light up a cigarette and gaze longingly into my fly box while listening to the water as it bubbled

Left: Bective Bridge with the Abbey in the background Photo: Eileen Doolan

over the weir. Sometimes I’d look into the fly box for inspiration, hoping that the right fly would leap into my hands. And maybe I might catch that two-pounder that had been rising under the second arch of the bridge for the previous three months. I’d sit and try to figure out how to get the fly out to the fish without it dragging in the current from the arch. Finally, I’d give up saying ‘good luck to him’ and be content to leave it at that. I could walk for hours along that river without ever casting a fly. Just walk and sort out the problems of the world in my head. And when all the problems were solved, I would stand and wait, and watch the river and the sky. I would wait for something to happen because something always did. I was standing below Mary Lavin’s house early one morning. There was a crashing noise in the copse on the opposite bank beside Bective House. Suddenly a stag appeared crashing through the undergrowth, its antlers catching on the lower branches as it ran. A pigeon took to the sky disturbed by the noisy stag. A hawk circled above and when it spotted its prey, dived like a Mig fighter and took the pigeon in its claws. It broke the pigeon’s neck as it went and disappeared again as quickly. Nothing was left but a flurry of feathers blowing in the wind. My thoughts were disturbed by the sound of footsteps on gravel. I looked up and saw him coming towards me walking through the rain. The water dripped from his Akubra. On to his long bushman’s coat and finally fell in a mini waterfall onto his boots. He carried an old cane fly rod of dubious ancestry. His hat was covered in flies of every size and colour and his weather-beaten faced smiled when he saw me. I beckoned him to sit beside me on the veranda and we spoke initially of flies and rivers and trout, both captured and lost. He told me that he was eighty-five years old. He came from Oughterard in County Galway and had migrated to Australia in 1939 as a twenty-three year-old country boy. Thomas Furey, it seems, lived a life of regret, a life of unfulfilled dreams and longing. After sixty years living here I would have assumed that he would call Australia home. I quickly realised after a brief time in his company that home to him was Ireland. I was amazed at his capacity to remember his birthplace in perfect detail. Every Hawthorn bush and moss-covered rock on the lane down to the lake was clear to him. He spoke longingly of his beloved Lough Corrib, of its many islands and churches and of its famous trout. Big, deep-bodied fish that lived on the bottom of the lake and only came to the surface when the Mayfly danced its final sequence and then lay, spent, on the water to die. “Then they would come up,” he said, “mighty trout of ten and fifteen pounds and even bigger, with their short snouts and fat yellow bellies. The splash, the lifting of the rod and the fine silk line running across the water like the Sligo Express train, that’s what I miss.” He mused. “Did you ever go back,” I queried, “for a holiday?” He shook his head, “not even for a holiday.” “Why?” I asked. He thought for a moment. “I was afraid that it would be somehow different, that things might have changed and nobody would know me. But most of all, afraid that the trout would be bigger that I remembered, that I wouldn’t be able to leave them and come back to my family in Australia. So, I never went.” “Do you regret coming to live in Australia,” I inquired. “No, I don’t regret coming here. I’ve had a good life in this country. A wonderful wife, now gone, God rest her, children, grandchildren, a nice home, enough money and plenty of friends. No, I don’t regret coming to Australia,” he paused briefly, “but I do regret leaving Ireland.” I didn’t understand. “What do you mean,” I said. “Well, it’s simple really,” he answered. “The feeling for home is a seed planted at conception, it germinates in the womb and flourishes on mother’s milk. It never leaves you. Australia is just not home to me. You’re Irish. Someday you will understand.” The old man left and I sat there with my flies and feathers and furs and my memories of Ireland. I realised that I saw a little of myself in that man. Maybe in forty years’ time I would be that same person, regretful and sad and longing for the impossible. So, I made a promise to myself, that next year I would go back to Ireland and fish the rivers and lakes of my boyhood. If things have changed, well so be it, at least I will have laid that ghost to rest. ☘