Philip Weigall gives praise to the editor and his latest book.

My memories of the original The Truth About Trout hark back to early explorations of the Tasmanian highlands with like-minded friends. A copy of this book was carefully stowed in the daypack or glove-box, to be referred to whenever a particular set of circumstances was encountered. As the instructions quickly (and to our minds, often miraculously) led to success, we came to call this book ‘The Bible’, and its then semi-mythical author, God. We were only half joking.

With the passage of time, we found the book offered much more than just de facto Tasmanian guiding. On return to the mainland, we discovered that, now we knew what to look for, there were in fact tailers on our local lakes; that we could polaroid home waters under the right conditions; and that good dry fly fishing could be enjoyed if one located these funny things called wind lanes. I even found whitebait feeders in west Victorian estuaries during late winter and spring.

General principles were reinforced—fishing windward shores, not blindly wading out deep, the critical importance of presentation, not getting too hung up on imitation . . . And with a title like The Truth About Trout, and a fisheries biologist author, who could doubt the wisdom of the advice?

In hindsight, we didn’t always get the point. While Rob Sloane may have intended that we should design and create our own functional patterns, in fact we searched feverishly for the exact patterns that God himself would be using. Without perfect fly pictures in the book, we worried that our Fiery Brown Beetles were not quite the right shade, or our Fur Flies were of incorrect proportion.

So picture a windy spring day many years ago, and friend Lindsay’s shouts of joy at finding, half buried in the Little Pine mud, what he announced to be “God’s flybox!” Though its contents were a little rusty, this treasure contained what could only be genuine Sunset Flies, Plastic Gum Beetles, and Fiery Brown Beetles in surely just the right shade of fiery brown! Now we could really catch some trout—and we did. Only years later did we finally meet the man himself, to discover that Lindsay’s precious icons were not actually Rob’s own, and the patterns weren’t quite right. All of this proved, in a round about way, the truth about the opportunism of trout. Perhaps we didn’t need the ‘perfect’ fly after all.

The Truth About Trout disappeared off the last bookshop shelves long ago, only reappearing expensively at occasional tackle auctions. It was always going to be hard to beat the original, but almost twenty years on, The Truth About Trout Revisited has done it. The beautiful hardcover and the high production standards wrap this treat appropriately. Rob Sloane has progressed over the last two decades into one of Australia’s best angling photographers, and the dozens of new shots illustrating Revisited do a fine job accompanying the original text. Meanwhile, detailed Trevor Hawkins drawings show precisely what the patterns in ‘God’s flybox’ should look like!

The margin notes are so extensive as to virtually constitute another book, and can in fact be read almost independently of the main text. They provide a fascinating record of what has stood the test of time, the progression of ideas and theories, changing attitudes, waters that have come and gone, and even some entirely fresh approaches.

After all these years, it’s hard to think of a ‘how-to’ book which has had a greater impact on Australian fly fishing than The Truth About Trout. The Revisited edition only adds to its worth. It also gives a new generation of fly fishers (and those of us stupid enough to have years ago ‘lent’ our original copies to forgotten persons) another chance to have this classic sitting on the shelves.

Published and distributed by FlyLife Publishing (2002): $39.95.
Online orders shop.flylife.com.au