The August Annual Dinner – with Greg French (25th August)

ANNUAL DINNER - CHANGE OF VENUE

We have been forced to change the venue for our Annual Dinner on Friday, August 25.  It will now be held in the upstairs Function Room at the Metropolitan Hotel, 263 William Street, Melbourne (Cnr Little Lonsdale St) 6:30 for 7:00pm. Enter through the private Function Room entrance on William Street.

Confusion over the timing of the closure of the Celtic Club has left us unable to hold our event there, hence a need to find another suitable venue at very short notice.  With the help of Celtic Club management we were able to arrange the function at the Metropolitan Hotel, only a block away from the Celtic Club.

All other arrangements for the event, including guest speaker Greg French and the traditional very fine raffle, are unchanged.

greg_blogThis year’s Annual Dinner will againbe at the Celtic Club  Metropolitan Hotel, and the date is Friday, August 25. An invitation isincluded as an insert in this issue.

Our guest speaker for this year’s dinneris well known to most of us. Greg Frenchis an exceptional fly fisher and guide,and a very popular author,  speaker, and authority on the Tasmanian Trout Fishery.

He was born in Tasmania in 1962 and isnow one of Australia’s best-known fishing identities. He spends most of histime in Australia and New Zealand, buthas fished extensively in South America, North America, the British Isles, Iceland, Eastern Europe, Japan and Mongolia.

Although he starting out as a builder,Greg has spent most of his life in nature based employment; first as a wilderness guide, then stints as a park ranger in Tasmania’s Wild Rivers National Park, and a hatchery officer at the historic Salmon Ponds.

In 1991 he co-wrote with Dr. Robert Sloane the Western Lakes Trout Fishery Management Plan for the Government ofTasmania. At about this time he began toconcentrate on photojournalism, andcontinues to write feature articles,reviews and columns for major fishing magazines such as FlyLife and FreshwaterFishing.

His best-known work is his comprehensive guide entitled Trout Waters of Tasmania, which has been updated five times since 1984, the last incantation being published by the Australian Fishing Network in 2011.

His first novel, Frog Call, was a work of literary non-fiction published by New Holland in 2002. It was well received bycritics and readers, and has been reprinted several times. Artificial, acompanion volume to Frog Call, was published by New Holland in 2008 and was also well received.

Menagerie of False Truths, published by Exisle in 2010, was an attempt to explain how functional autistics perceive the world around them. It was described byCameron Woodhead in The Age as ‘a novel that might, perhaps, rank among such infuriating works of genius as Furphy’s Such is Life and David Foster’s The Glade Within the Grove’.

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In 2011 Kiwi angler and filmmaker Nick Reygaert of Gin-Clear Media commissioned French to co-write and narrate the acclaimed documentary, Hatch. In 2013, Nick and Greg produceda companion DVD, Predator, which was lauded at the Drake Fly Fishing Video Awards and won the Best DVD award atthe 2013 IFTD tackle show in Las Vegas. Greg’s last two books, published in 2016, are The Imperiled Cutthroat (Patagonia Books) and The Last Wild Trout (Affirm Press). Both have received high praise. (The Last Wild Trout was reviewed by, IainSkinner in last month’s Fly Lines issue).

Greg has indicated that at this year’s dinner he plans to talk about how we can maintain our youthful enthusiasm for fly fishing over the years, focusing on the importance of travel and embracing new techniques. He will illustrate his theme with anecdotes and photos from
his recent travels to Europe and Greenland.

Greg is a very popular and acclaimed speaker, and we are in for a fabulous night’s entertainment on Friday, August 25 at the Metropolitan Hotel.

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