Portrait of a river

The story of trout fishing on the Tongariro is a tale rich with monster catches, celebrity anglers and culture clashes.

- CHRIS MOORE

It's fitting that a review of a book dealing with one of the world's great fishing rivers begins with a bow to Izaak Walton.

"I love any discourse of rivers, and fish and fishing," Walton wrote in his 1653 book The Compleat Angler.

And a discourse is what you receive in Grant Henderson's exhaustively researched history of the Tongariro River. These waters may be a universe away from limpid English trout streams, but the angler's basic creed remains approximately the same as it did when Walton observed that angling "may be said to be so like mathematics that it can never be fully learnt".

Chronicling the rise - alongside a few declines - of a river so deeply embedded in the collective psyche of international trout fishing aficionados would be a daunting prospect for any writer. Anglers, especially the fly-fishing variety, are a disputatious tribe, but Henderson writes his measured account with the unflustered assurance of someone with six decades of fly fishing in his tackle bag, much of it spent on the Tongariro.

FISHING THE TONGARIRO: A History of Our Greatest Trout River by Grant Henderson
(Bateman Books, $59.99 hb)