Atlantic salmon were Atlantic fish, never seen anywhere else. As many said, if God had wanted them in the Southern Hemisphere, he would have put them there.
“Tasmanian Atlantic salmon” is a descriptor which arouses passions beyond most other three words, not just across Tasmania, but nationally and internationally. For participants in salmon farming, environmental activism, policy making, angling and dining, salmon is a poster-child for their perspectives.
What is less recognised is the genesis of Tasmanian Atlantic salmon, its extraordinary and formative role in the transition of Van Diemen’s Land to a new Tasmania, and how it has been a unique actor in an evolving narrative of salmon and its adopted island – one of identity, place and belonging.
A mere half -dozen generations ago, new settlers saw the island as “barren” and “uncivilised”, notwithstanding the strikingly beautiful landscape had been populated for perhaps 2,000 generations. They desperately wanted to reshape the island with all the familiarities of “mother country” and surround themselves with as much “goodness” as one could accumulate in a penal colony – to retain an identity in a new place far from “home”.
Nowhere in the world were people so far from their birthplace. Nowhere did distance make an English heart grow fonder for anything from home. From the first convict ship in 1804, arriving vessels were something of a species ark. In came sheep, cattle, horses, dogs, pigs, and poultry; oak, fir, poplar, elm, ash, birch, poplar; apple, lemon and pear trees; strawberries, raspberries, cherries, potatoes, cabbages, lettuces, onions and peas; roses, carnations, and dahlias; pheasants and deer; swans and bees. The anything and everything approach also landed the fox, rabbit, hare, starling, blackbird, willow, hawthorn, scotch thistle, blackberry, stinging nettle and gorse, and collateral pests like snails, slugs, wasps, moths and butterflies.
The insatiable demand was fuelled by isolation, insecurity, nostalgia, loyalty and ego. It was conspicuous to visitors: “thoroughly English people clinging with tenacious affection to the memories and associations of home” (colonial judge, Henry Francis); “most delightfully resembles England’ (Charles Darwin); “junior England” (Mark Twain); “everything … is more English than England” (Anthony Trollope).
New maps named counties as Cornwall, Buckingham, Devon, Dorset, Kent, Glamorgan, and Somerset. Towns and villages were christened Launceston, Ulverstone, Perth, Ross, Brighton Margate, Swansea, Perth, Ross, Devonport, Campbell Town, Oatlands, Melton Mowbray, Bridport, and Orford. Rivers and streams, which presented an English, Scottish or Irish familiarity, were named Esk, Derwent, Tamar, Liffey, Forth, Leven, Ouse, Mersey, Ouse, Don, Cam, Clyde, Dee and Shannon.
But in these fine waters there was a problem. This most southern land and sky could be easily furnished with transplanted animals, plants, trees and birds, but rivers were a different realm. In his fine handiwork, as military men, administrators and rising esquires saw it, God had distressingly forgotten to put salmon or trout in them. Unlike mainland rivers, invariably flooded, muddy or dry, Tasmanian streams looked perfect for fly-fishing, but the “best” fish were conspicuous by their absence.
Men could go fly-fishing – the first Australian reference to fly-fishing was about a day’s outing on the Plenty River – but the catch was native fish like grayling and galaxia. They could also call fish with a superficial resemblance colonial salmon, or Australian salmon, but salmon they were not. There was none of the drama and tension of a true salmon pursuit, and, if victorious, a feast of what angler-novelist Charles Kingsley described as the finest “of all heaven’s gifts of food”.
Atlantic salmon were Atlantic fish, never seen anywhere else. As many said, if God had wanted them in the Southern Hemisphere he would have put them there. But early Tasmanians could not see that it had to be that way. Just as the heavens needed stars, so a stream without English fish was nothing. If good men were to follow God’s exhortation to “rule over the fish”, they wanted man’s most admired fish.
Transplanting salmon across the world was a dream which became an obsession. The first public airing came in 1833 after the delivery of the first hive of English black honeybees by a Royal Navy convict surgeon-superintendent and Royal Geographical Society member. Dr Thomas Wilson further excited the colony with a promise to bring out “English fish”. The Hobart Town Chronicle said if the “noble attempt” for salmon and trout was successful. it “will indeed commemorate his name to the latest ages of a grateful posterity”.
Wilson’s promise faded, but not the dream, and it was re-ignited when Vandemonians began seeing extraordinary newspaper reports in the 1840s about “artificial production of fish”. Two poor French fishermen had made their own discovery of the means to have an “inexhaustible supply” of trout through artificial propagation, and a wealthy Lancashire manufacturer produced “no less than twenty thousand salmon fry” costing, he said, no more than a farthing each.
Such economics, combined with the godly grace of angling (long restricted to wealthy landowners and their associates), and exquisite dining (long the exclusive province of clergy and aristocrats), meant salmon teased as a gift that could change everything.
Understanding London wanted the least spending on the penal colony, Governor William Denison proposed a “simple plan” of fish and ships: to bring out young salmon on a convict ship. The Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Lord Henry Grey, liked the pitch for an experiment costing “but a little and the result … if successful, may prove of great benefit to the colony”. But the plan fell through.
When Denison pursued the matter with a new Secretary of State, London turned to Gottlieb Boccius, an enterprising inventor who had also mastered the art of artificial propagation and cited success in producing “millions of fish” for numerous dukes and earls in streams such as the Wandle, Colne, Derwent, Lea and Wye.
No one knew how any salmon might be transported through rough seas and the tropics on a three-month journey, or whether eggs, young or adult fish stood the best chance. Fifty thousand salmon and trout spawn were placed in tubs on the barque Columbus in 1852, but all perished long before reaching Hobart.
Many were convinced the quest was an impossible dream and would remain thus. But for others it was hard to ignore the prospect of producing 20,000 salmon, for no more than a farthing.
One was an unlikely salmon dreamer, James Arndell Youl, the sheep-farming son of a Launceston preacher. He had no passion for angling and knew no more about salmon than what he had seen as a youngster in a London fishmonger window. But in the late 1850s, as he decided to retire from his pastoral success at Symmons Plains and take himself and his family to live a good life in London, Youl was intrigued with the newspaper reports of “artificial live fish” enlivening Northern Hemisphere rivers just as “we cover our fields with corn (and) … multiply our flocks!”
And an editorial in the Cornwall Chronicle caught his eye. It said bringing salmon or perhaps trout “might not pecuniarily repay the experimentalist”, but an enthusiastic man would “find his trouble more than compensated in the chronological éclat, that Mr So and So was the first person who introduced salmon into the rivers of the Britain of Australia”.
From London, Youl set about trying to resolve the question: how could anyone transport the sensitive salmon, of whatever stage, outside their natural environment for three months through raging seas and tropical temperatures, to hopefully survive in waters it had never seen?
Against considerable derision in Britain that he was mad and engaging in an ungodly quest, Youl persevered for 10 years through trial and error – many errors in fact – until he found the key to success. It saw salmon and an almost accidental addition of trout successfully transplanted and hatched to swim in southern waters for the first time.
An island dream which had become a personal obsession became a moment in history. Over three decades, Youl shipped more than a million Salmonidae: about 876,000 salmon ova to Tasmania, and 569,000 to New Zealand; and more than 5,000 brown trout, 24,000 sea trout and about 7,000 brook trout and 9,000 lake char.
It still wasn’t enough to deliver a sustainable salmon colony, but proved to the world salmon could live in southern waters. A century later, men from Norway, including another former sheep farmer, persuaded the Tasmanian government its waters were ripe for salmonid farming. Today salmon farming is the island’s largest individual primary industry, producing 90 per cent of Australia’s Atlantic salmon consumption – and producing heated debates about existential issues for man and species. And the original brown trout have bequeathed today’s world-famous trout across Australia and New Zealand.
Researching James Youl’s 19th century quest revealed perhaps the most romantic, audacious and ambitious wildlife acclimatisation feat the world has ever seen. In the 21st century, salmon’s identity and place, and its unique relationship with man, continues to evolve.
This article is based on Steve Harris’ Under the Influence of Salmon, How a Man and a Fish Turned the World Upside Down, (Melbourne Books, $39.99), to be launched in late September, 2025.
Steve Harris, a fourth-generation Tasmanian who began his journalism career in Hobart, is a former editor, editor-in-chief and publisher at The Age, Sunday Age and Herald Sun. He is a life member of the Melbourne Press Club, a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, and in 2024 was made a Member of the Order of Australia for significant contributions to print journalism.
Under the Influence of Salmon is his fourth book, following, Solomon’s Noose, the true story of a young Van Diemen’s Land convict who became Queen Victoria’s longest serving hangman; The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens, about the British Empire’s first juvenile prison in Van Diemen’s Land; and The Prince and the Assassin, about Australia’s first royal tour and act of political terrorism.