Big Rainbow Trout – Harrietville

Harrietville sits at the foot of Mount Hotham in the Ovens Valley, where the streams run cold and fast off the alps year round. That is the whole reason for the industry: trout and salmon are cold-water fish, and Australia has very few places where they can be farmed without refrigeration doing the work.

Trout are also introduced. They were brought to Australia in the nineteenth century by acclimatisation societies, established in the cooler south-eastern streams, and are now both a valued recreational fishery and a documented pressure on native galaxiids and other small native fish. A monument to them is a monument to a deliberate ecological transformation, which the catalogue's native-species subjects – the Murray cod at Swan Hill and Tocumwal, the Narrabri yabby – are not.

This is the second big trout here, after Adaminaby's 1973 fish in the Snowy Mountains, and the pairing is neat: two alpine trout towns on opposite sides of the Great Dividing Range, both built on the same imported fish.

Access is marked restricted because the site is a working farm and visitor business with its own conditions.

The catalogue cannot supply its scale, the date and the name of whoever built it.