WITH DON KNOWLER

I have much in common with William Boot, the bumbling war correspondent in the satirical novel about journalism, Scoop. Or so I have been told by readers of this column.

Although I tried to develop the image of a cool, jetsetting journalist, at least during my younger days, I’ve never quite escaped the shadow of Boot, the nature writer for the Daily Beast who found himself sent to Africa to cover human conflict by mistake.

Notebook in hand, sharp pencil at the ready, I thought I had a “hold the front page” persona far removed from the dithering, confused and lost Boot during my own days covering wars in Africa. But Boot stalked me at every turn.

It was, after all, the lure of birds – and elephant, rhino and lion – that landed me on the “Dark Continent” in the first place, and, strangely, a meeting with the man whose own deeds in northern Africa had inspired the Boot character.

William Deedes, the editor of Britain’s Daily Telegraph, had come to the then Rhodesia to witness the last of Africa’s colonial wars. Sipping gin and tonics with Deedes in Salisbury’s historic Meikles Hotel, it occurred to me that Evelyn Waugh had displayed a spark of comic genius to make a nature writer the butt of satirical jokes about journalism in the 1930s, and the nature of war.

The war correspondent, and conversely the nature columnist, was the mainstay of newspaper content in troubled times since the advent of the newspaper as we know it. And although the nature column went out of fashion in the late 20th century as newspapers struggled in the age of television and later the internet, it has now made a comeback. So much so that the Guardian in Britain is not only publishing its country diary each day, but even some of those columns going back 100 years.

The Mercury itself employed the “Peregrine”, Michael Sharland, for 60 years before he retired in the 1980s and are happy for me to continue the tradition. But I don’t think the erudite Sharland was ever compared with William Boot.

My latest Boot episode came on a day when I was being a little more intrepid than usual. I had travelled to the SouthWest wilderness in search of the orangebellied parrot (pictured). At that moment I was ecstatic, ticking off the bird at last after searching for it over several years the hard way – unsuccessfully seeking the tiny parrot in its mainland wintering grounds.

As I waited on the remote quartzite runway at Melaleuca for the flight back to Hobart, a reader of the Mercury recognised me, saying: “You don’t look a bit like Boot!”

I wasn’t so sure. My thoughts were still with the parrot and the journalist inside me wanted to cry out “scoop” in celebration at finally seeing the bird.