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Bite Compass
Shore / Jetty

Tarwhine

Rhabdosargus sarba

Tarwhine vs bream: a silver, gold-striped bream relative often confused with black bream, found around Perth estuary mouths, jetties and rock walls. Takes the same baits as bream — prawns, worms, bread — and is a reliable, hard-pulling catch on light tackle around structure.

Size
Up to 2kg, commonly 300–600g
Peak season
Year-round
Minimum size (WA)
25 cm
Bag limit (WA)
6

Overview

Tarwhine are the often-overlooked cousin of black bream, found year-round around jetties, rock walls, and estuary mouths in Perth. They're reliable biters on simple baits and put up a good fight on light tackle. While they don't have the cult following of bream, they're a solid catch and perfectly good eating.

Identification

Also known as Silver bream, goldlined seabream

A deep, round-shouldered bream relative, distinguished by fine gold-yellow horizontal lines running the length of the silver flanks, a yellowish belly and a dark margin along the tail. Black bream, the usual mix-up, are dusky olive-bronze with no gold lines and a longer, straighter snout; tarwhine have a steeper forehead and a blunter, shorter face. The reliable check is inside the fish: tarwhine have a black stomach lining, bream a pale one. Juvenile pink snapper get confused with both, but carry blue spots and a different head profile. Also called silver bream, which does nothing to help anybody.

How to Catch

Best Baits

Prawns, tube worms, bread dough, mussels

Lures

N/A — primarily a bait species. Occasionally taken on very small soft plastics but bait is far more reliable.

Rigs

Float rig with a size 4–6 hook set 1–2m below a bobby cork, or a running sinker rig with a small ball sinker on the bottom. Use light line and keep hooks small.

Technique

Fish around jetty pylons, rock walls, and estuary mouths with light tackle and fresh bait. A float rig drifted past structure is the classic approach. Berley with bread to draw them in and keep them feeding. Tarwhine feed in schools, so once you find them, you can usually catch several before they move on.

Best Time

Active through the day, leaning to the afternoon. Anglers rate the tide changes and a rising tide around structure. They bite year-round but are most abundant in the warmer months.

Size & Growth

Most Perth tarwhine are 25–32 cm and 300–600 g. A good one is 35–40 cm and around the kilo mark; 2 kg is about the ceiling and a genuinely rare fish off the metro jetties. They are moderately slow-growing and reach a decent age, so the 40 cm fish that occasionally comes off a rock wall has been around a while. Expect a school of similar-sized fish rather than one standout — when you find them they tend to be graded, which makes it quick to work out whether the spot is worth staying at.

Diet & Habitat

Tarwhine have flat molar teeth built for crushing, and they use them on mussels, small crabs, worms, urchins and weed picked off structure. They hold around jetty pylons, rock walls, reef edges, surf gutters and estuary mouths, generally in 1–15 m and almost always close to something solid. Widespread in WA — from Bremer Bay on the south coast up the west coast to Exmouth Gulf — with the metro jetties, Cockburn Sound and the lower Swan the reliable ground around Perth. They push into estuary mouths on a rising tide and drop back to the reef edges when the water cools.

WA Size & Bag Limits

Minimum size 25 cm
Bag limit 6
Counts toward Counts within the statewide nearshore/estuarine finfish mixed daily limit of 16. The bag of 6 applies to tarwhine on its own — it is not shared with black bream or the other bream.

Minimum size: 250mm. Daily bag limit: 6 tarwhine — DPIRD's bream-group bag applies to each species separately, so it is not shared with black bream — taken within the statewide nearshore/estuarine finfish mixed daily bag of 16. A Recreational Fishing from Boat Licence (RFBL) is required when fishing from a powered boat.

Last checked . Limits change — confirm with DPIRD before you fish.

Eating Quality

Yes — good eating, very similar to black bream, with white, mild, slightly sweet flesh and a firm flake. Scale and gut them and cook the smaller fish whole; anything over about 30 cm is worth filleting. Pan-frying, baking whole with lemon, and a BBQ hotplate all work, and the skin crisps well if you scale properly. Bigger fish are the better eaters here, not worse. The one honest caveat is that fish taken from weedy estuary water can carry a slightly muddy, weedy taste, so tarwhine off the open coast and jetties are the pick. Bleed and ice on capture. They freeze acceptably as skin-on fillets for a few weeks, but the texture is noticeably better fresh.

Where to Catch Tarwhine

Alcoa Jetty (Kwinana) Ammo Jetty (Ammunition Jetty, Woodman Point) Applecross Jetty (Swan River) Augusta (Hardy Inlet / Flinders Bay) Bicton Baths (Swan River) Blackwall Reach (Swan River) Bunbury Koombana Bay (Inner Harbour / The Plug / Casuarina Boat Harbour) Busselton Jetty Canning Bridge (Applecross/Mount Pleasant) Carnarvon (Town Beach / Babbage Island / Quobba) Cervantes (Jetty / Hangover Bay / Thirsty Point) Cheynes Beach (Waychinicup) City Beach Groyne Coogee Beach Deep Water Point (Canning River) Dongara / Port Denison (Harbour / Granny's Beach / South Beach / Irwin River Mouth) East Street Jetty (Swan River) Floreat Beach (Floreat Drain) Fremantle Fishing Boat Harbour Geraldton (Fisherman's Wharf / Separation Point) Greenough River Mouth (Cape Burney) Hamelin Bay Hillarys Boat Harbour Horrocks Beach Houtman Abrolhos Islands (Wallabi / Easter / Pelsaert Groups) Jurien Bay (Jetty & Marina Walls) Kalbarri (Murchison River Mouth / Wittecarra / Coastal Cliffs) Mandurah (Foreshore / Jetty area) Mandurah Town Beach Mettams Pool Mindarie Marina Mosman Bay Jetty (Swan River) Mount Henry Bridge (Canning River) Narrows Bridge (Swan River) North Beach Jetty Ocean Reef Marina Palm Beach Jetty (Rockingham) Pelican Point (Crawley, Swan River) Point Walter (Swan River) Port Gregory (Harbour / Foreshore Jetty / North & South Beaches) Riverton Bridge (Canning River) Rockingham Jetty Rottnest Island (Shore Fishing) Shelley Foreshore (Canning River) Sorrento Beach Success Hill Reserve (Upper Swan, Bassendean) Tranby Jetty (Maylands, Swan River) Two Rocks Marina Woodman Point Jetty (Ammo Jetty) Yallingup (Smiths Beach / Sugarloaf Rock)

Guides Featuring Tarwhine

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