Steve "Starlo" Starling has spent forty-odd years as one of the loudest voices in Australian angling, and he is not about to soften his line on the European redfin perch. Filming a kayak session on Victoria's Lake Buffalo this week with Robbie Alexander of Robbie's Fishing, Starlo openly split with his hosting mate over the great Australian redfin question: keep them all, or let them go.
Lake Buffalo, tucked into the foothills of the King Valley, has long been a quiet favourite for both Murray cod and the introduced redfin that share its weed flats. Starlo had not fished the lake in years and arrived to a 3.6-degree morning camped on the bank.
"I camped not far from here last night and I woke up to I think 3.6 degrees this morning. So very end of April, early May. It's starting to get quite cold and I don't think that'll be brilliant for the fishing, but you never know, we might be able to find something," he said as he launched.
Trolling a small soft plastic with a beetle spin arm over a 2-metre weed flat, Starlo took a small redfin almost immediately. The fish set the tone for the day's debate.
"I prefer not to. I kill every red fin I catch, even the really small ones," Starlo explained, dispatching the fish on the kayak deck. "Apart from anything else, they over-populate and stunt. So I think that by killing a few, you probably result in some bigger ones. And I do like eating them."
He is not blind to the appeal of the species. "They're a noxious pest, but they're a pretty fish, and they are a tasty one as well," he said.
"I know that Robbie happily lets go some redfin and I have no objections to that. He's within his rights to do so. You're allowed to transport them between one waterway and another, but you can let them go where you catch them," he said, before reiterating that his rule applies even to the smallest fish in the boat.
"Even one that size, believe it or not, you're going to get two little fish fingers off it. You get a few of those, you can actually make a meal out of it. I prefer not to waste them. If I'm going to kill them, I put them to good use."
The morning's cod hunt did not pay off — Starlo worked drowned timber and steep clay banks with a deep diver and never raised a Murray cod, despite Robbie's tip-off that two had come from the same line of stumps the week before. "One thing you can rely on with cod is their fickle un-predictability," he conceded.
Robbie eventually found a redfin school sitting tight in front of one of the boat ramps and started smacking them on a vertical-jigged vibe. Starlo paddled across, copied the technique and added several more to the esky in quick succession.
"That was just jigging up and down straight underneath the rod tip," Robbie noted, while Starlo confirmed it as "a deadly way to target redfin even in this shallow water."
By session's end the kill-or-release split had not narrowed, but Starlo's argument is consistent with what state agencies have been saying for years about the species — declared a Class 1 noxious fish in Victoria and a controlled pest across most southern states, redfin are believed to stunt rapidly in dense populations and out-compete native fish.
For an angler whose social-media following has spent two decades watching him kill, fillet and crumb every redfin he catches, the message landed cleanly. "Until next time, this is Starlo wishing you tight lines," he signed off, paddling back to the ramp with a cool-shadowed pile of perch in the bottom of the boat. "Looks like I'll eat pretty well tonight."