Goulburn Valley Fly Fishing Centre / Our history
Before the shop, there was a raft.
By Anthony Boliancu
David Pickering ran the Four Ways Café in Thornton. Geoff Hall was an art teacher who’d fished the Goulburn since he was a teenager. They got to know each other because their boys were mates at Alexandra High School.
In 1993 they bought a Zodiac together, made a rowing frame for it and took it down the Goulburn. About an hour into that first drift, a trout came up for a dry fly.
By the end of the day, they knew they were onto something. They never looked back.
Thornton / 1994–1996
A fly shop at the Four Ways
In 1994, David and Geoff opened Goulburn Valley Fly Fishing Centre in a side room of the café. You could buy a hamburger at one end of the building and a handful of flies at the other. They sold patterns for the local water, guided on the Goulburn and the Rubicon, and introduced anglers to fishing the Goulburn from a raft.
I got to know them in 1995, while I was still at university. The following year I moved to Thornton to guide full-time. One of my early jobs was building our website. I wrote fishing reports and put up photographs so anglers in Melbourne could see what the river was doing before they drove up.
Beside the Goulburn / 1997–2002
From a tin shed to 10,000 mud bricks
In 1997 we moved the shop into a tin shed on sixteen acres beside the caravan park at Thornton. What we wanted to build there was the kind of fishing lodge we knew from America: somewhere you could stay on the river, learn to cast and go fishing with a guide, all from the same place.
Some of our guests helped pay for it by buying their fishing days in advance. Two investors helped us finish the job. The walls took 10,000 mud bricks, all made on the property. The timber was milled there too.
The mud-brick lodge opened in 2002. There were cottages for guests, stocked lakes for teaching and the Goulburn alongside. Not long after we also began importing the purpose-built drift boats that eventually took the place of the rafts.
From the photo albums
Beyond the Goulburn
How we came to fish further afield
The first Southland trip came about partly because of drought at home. We began guiding in New Zealand under our concession in January 2000. Dunrobin, beside the Aparima, became our base. Some of the anglers from that first season have been back with us many times.
I started hosting Montana trips in 2010, during our winter at home. It was in Montana that I met Travis Smith, one of the founders of Patagonia River Guides. That friendship is how our guests came to fish with his team out of Trevelin, Argentina. Over the years we’ve also travelled with anglers to British Columbia.
Back on the Goulburn
The people who kept coming back
Geoff left the business in 2016 and recommenced guiding part time in 2019. David stepped back in 2018, the year the Thornton property was sold and we moved to Alexandra. David and his partner, Nella, kept taking the drift boat out to fish together.
The Millennium Drought, the financial crisis and the Black Saturday fires were part of the Thornton years. In Alexandra it was the pandemic, then the floods of 2022. Guiding has supported a number of local families through those years. For all the days our guides have spent on the river for work, they still go fishing together on their days off.
We closed the Alexandra shop in November 2025. We still guide the Goulburn and teach people to fly fish around Alexandra and Thornton. Some of the anglers who walked into that little room at the Four Ways still fish with us. These days we meet them at the river.
Anthony Boliancu
