It was always the men in my family who fished. My dad, uncles and grandfather cast lures and baits off the sharp rocks and into the swell on the NSW South Coast. My mum and grandmother cooked the catch.
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I'm not quite sure how I was allowed to tag along. But I did, and I loved it. When I grew up, I realised I wasn't alone.
While the fishing stereotype is invariably masculine – men in tinnies holding up trophy barra while drinking tinnies – fishing is a little more diverse than perhaps that image allows for.
When I fished my way around Australia a few years back, there were plenty of blokes on the beaches ticking off bucket-list items like barramundi and giant trevally.
But it was just as likely to be their grey-nomad WAGs trapping cherabin and handlining for whiting alongside them. Recent research suggests about 30 per cent of recreational fishers are women, and in many Indigenous communities, the number of women who fish is closer to 90 per cent.
History also offers a broader picture.
Standing just under Mrs Macquarie's Chair it's still possible to imagine the city as it was in 1788.
Back then, you would have seen Eora women walking the shoreline gathering oysters and shellfish or paddling their little nowie canoes to handline for fresh snapper, dory and bream.
At the end of these lines, elegant fishhooks made from carved abalone or turban shells were dropped over the side of their canoes.
These nowies were nothing more than a large piece of bark tied up at both ends with vines, yet these women were master skippers, navigating their boats in the swell, hauling in fish, and wrangling infants in their tiny vessels.
And if you closed your eyes, you would have heard singing from nearby coves, where the songs of the Eora women rang out across the water and down to the fish below.
Some female colonists were equally fond of baiting hooks. In Sydney in 1821 Elizabeth Macquarie, wife of the governor, out-fished her husband in Watsons Bay.
Women were frequently depicted in 19th-century images of fishing parties.
Commercial fishing has also been seen as a predominantly-male industry in Australia. The labour of commercial fishing has dictated that historically-gendered division of work.
Yet women have been deeply involved: mending those nets, selling and buying catches and equipment, and processing fish on shore.
In South Australia's shark industry in the mid-20th century, for example, while fishermen set long-hooked lines off the back of their little boats and caught school sharks by the tonne, it was the wives who rendered down the shark livers by hand, in large backyard vats.
It was a foul, stinking job.
In recent decades, increased mechanisation has also meant women are more likely to make it out onto the boats to fish.
But fishing isn't all work. For those of us who don't fish for a living, it isn't the grind of being on the water, but its restorative qualities, that keep us coming back.
It's a form of mindfulness – watching the tide come in, or the wind change, or the sun set. And that urge for quiet solitude and contemplation isn't restricted to one-half of the population.
Anna Clark is a historian and the author of The Catch: The Story of Fishing in Australia.
