Australian Herring
Shore / JettyBread-and-butter species found year-round on almost every structure and beach in Perth. Reliable on small bait rigs, bait jigs, and sabiki rigs. Great eating when bled and iced immediately.
Overview
Australian herring are the most commonly caught fish in Perth and the species most beginners cut their teeth on. Found year-round from jetties, groynes, and beaches, they're reliable biters that school in large numbers. They also make excellent live and cut bait for tailor, mulloway, and other predators.
Identification
Herring, tommy ruff (South Australia), ruff
A small, deep-bodied silver fish with a forked tail, a large eye and yellow-green pectoral fins. The species they get confused with is juvenile Australian salmon, which are caught in the same wash and look near-identical at 25 cm. Two checks: herring carry dark tips on the tail lobes and rows of small gold-brown spots across the back, and their pectoral fins are noticeably more yellow; salmon are more elongate, longer in the head, and keep growing well past 35 cm, which herring never do. Juvenile tailor are the other lookalike, and they have obvious teeth.
How to Catch
Small pieces of prawn, mulie (pilchard), chicken. Some old-school anglers swear by bread dough.
Bait jigs, sabiki rigs, small metals, tiny soft plastics
Float rig with a size 6–8 hook set 1–2m below a bobby cork, or a sabiki rig dropped alongside jetty pylons. Keep bait pieces small — herring have small mouths.
Fish off jetties and groynes using a float rig or sabiki. Berley with bread or old pilchards to draw the school in close. Once they're around, the bite is usually constant. From beaches, look for schools dimpling the surface and cast small metals or bait jigs into them.
Herring feed throughout the day but are most active in the morning and late afternoon. Incoming tide brings them closer to structure. They bite year-round but schools are thickest from autumn through spring.
Up to 1kg, commonly 300–500g
Year-round
Size & Growth
A typical Perth herring is 20–28 cm and 200–350 g. A good one is over 30 cm and pushes 400–500 g; the 1 kg headline figure is a fish most anglers will never see. They're short-lived — a few years rather than decades — and grow fast to maturity, which is why every fish in a school looks the same size. Open-surf fish generally run bigger than jetty fish. There's no legal minimum, but anything under about 20 cm is barely worth cleaning, so put the small ones back or turn them into live bait.
Diet & Habitat
Herring are opportunists — small crustaceans, worms, prawns, hardyheads, whitebait and anything a berley trail puts in front of them. They school in the top few metres over sand and weed and around any structure that holds bait: jetty pylons, groynes, rock walls, reef edges and the surf zone, rarely deeper than about 10 m. They're a temperate southern species, found from around Shark Bay down the west coast and right along the south coast to the SA border, with the metro beaches and jetties holding fish year-round. Juveniles use sheltered bays and estuaries; older fish move out to the open coast.
WA Size & Bag Limits
| Minimum size | No minimum size |
|---|---|
| Bag limit | 20 |
| Counts toward | Counts within the statewide 'all other species' mixed daily bag of 30. |
Australian herring sit in the statewide 'all other species' category. Individual daily bag limit: 20, counted within the combined mixed-species daily bag of 30 for that category. No minimum size applies.
Eating Quality
Yes — herring eat well despite the humble reputation, provided you bleed them the moment they're caught and get them on ice. The flesh is delicate, white and faintly sweet, a shade oilier than whiting. They're small and full of fine bones, so most people scale, gut and cook them whole — crumbed and pan-fried in butter is hard to beat. Bigger surf fish over 30 cm are worth butterflying or filleting: run a thin sharp blade along the backbone, leave the skin on, and accept a few pin bones. Small jetty fish aren't worth the knife work — cook them whole or use them as bait. They also hot-smoke well if you land a run of them. Eat fresh; they soften fast and don't freeze well.
Perth Tips
Ammo Jetty, Woodman Point, and Coogee Beach are reliable herring spots. Keep a bucket of berley or an oil slick going and you'll hold the school. Herring are also the best live bait for tailor — hook through the nose on a single hook and cast into the wash.