Parenting & Family Quote by Rex Hunt

Rex Hunt is selling more than a pastime here; he is selling a moral geography. The “outdoors” and “beautiful environment” aren’t just scenery, they’re coded as wholesome citizenship: fresh air, salt spray, self-reliance, a connection to the nation’s coastline and waterways that reads as quietly patriotic. By pairing “fresh and salt water,” he widens the invitation to all of Australia’s aquatic imaginaries, from riverbank kids to beach kids, and positions nature as the default setting for a properly lived childhood.

Then he pivots, and the sentence tightens into anxiety. “The thing that concerns me” sounds gentle, but it’s a rhetorical siren: concern as permission to judge. The kids “stand on street corners” or “go into pinball parlours” and “call it recreation” - a neat little undercut that frames their choices as fraudulent, a cheap imitation of the real thing. Street corners imply idleness, risk, and unsupervised adolescence; pinball parlours evoke noisy, cramped interiors, pocket money, and a whiff of delinquency. He’s not arguing against games so much as against indoor, commercial leisure that doesn’t produce the virtues he associates with fishing and the outdoors: patience, skill, respect for the environment.

Context matters: Hunt’s persona was built on turning fishing into mainstream entertainment, especially in an era when adults worried about “kids these days” drifting from nature into urban boredom and screen-adjacent habits. The subtext is a recruitment pitch disguised as lament: get outside, get near water, and you won’t just be entertained - you’ll be made better.