The Tasmanian tiger was still roaming the Tasmanian grasslands and the swift parrot flew in its thousands when Mercury writer Michael Sharland put pen to paper 100 years ago to start what has become one of the longest-running nature columns in the world.
The motivation for the column had two aims – to draw attention to wildlife’s wonders and to highlight threats facing our fauna and flora.
“These nature notes are introduced with the object of arousing an interest in, and an appreciation of, our native animals and birds,” wrote Sharland under the pen name of Peregrine. He said he wanted to “encourage the younger generation to regard our wild creatures with a little more attention than some of them are now disposed to do”.
Sharland went on to write the column he started on Thursday, April 7, 1921 for 60 years before retiring in 1981, five years before his death at the age of 85. The “nature notes” survived in the hands of noted Tasmanian naturalist, Len Wall, before I took over 21 years ago, the Mercury re-branding the column “On the wing” to reflect readers’ growing interest in birds.
The columns over the past century have indeed not only captured the wonder and magic of Tasmania’s unique and prolific wildlife but its vulnerability in the modern age.
It is not surprising that in his first column Sharland drew attention to the tiger, or thylacine, which was rapidly vanishing from the Tasmanian landscape. Although he described the thylacine as a “living fossil” of a type of marsupial which had vanished from the rest of the world, thylacines were still being hunted legally in Tasmania.
“It is hard to think that no very great period of time must elapse before the tiger will share the fate of its ancestors in other lands,” Sharland wrote.
Nine years later, the last of the known wild population was shot in Tasmania’s north-west. And the species became extinct when a captive thylacine died in Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo in 1936.
The fate of the thylacine was to form a tragic backdrop to Sharland’s writing but he never allowed emotion to cloud his reasoning. And the column’s emphasis remains not so much on activism but education, conservation and advocacy.
Stories abound to this day about the larger-than-life Sharland. Nature writers before his time were defined as gentleman amateurs, often from the clergy, dressed in corduroy and tweeds and stout boots. The chain-smoking Sharland brought the world of journalism to the craft.
While at school in Hobart, the teenage Sharland developed an interest in journalism and he started out as a copy boy, then gained experience on the mainland, working for the Sydney Morning Herald before returning to Tasmania. He was to outgrow journalism, however, joining government to pioneer what was to become the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Department. But he never outgrew his enthusiasm for his weekly column, which ran initially in the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail before this publication was absorbed by its bigger sister, the Mercury.
Sharland’s early columns were published during what can be described as the heyday of the genre. The idea of extolling nature had grown as steadily as newspaper circulations in late Victorian and early 20th century period and the status of the nature writer became so familiar it was used to comic effect in Evelyn Waugh’s 1930s satire on Fleet Street, Scoop. The story revolves around a nature writer and expert on the mating habits of badgers, William Boot, who is accidently sent off to cover a war in Africa after being mistaken for his newspaper’s war correspondent.
Although William Boot fitted the image of the early nature writers who pursued what was described as the “pastoral” approach to recording nature, strolling the countryside and noting “curiosities”, the age of the modern exponents of the art laid the foundations for a vital canon in literature, environmental writing.
Inevitably in the 21st century, with declining flora and fauna species, the emphasis is now on conservation but there is still room for extolling the simple pleasures of watching nature in the backyard.
My own emphasis on birds reflects the fact that they are always in evidence in our daily lives: always in sight, always heard. They are the public’s window on the wider world of nature.
And after a year of coronavirus lock-down, Australians have looked afresh at the wildlife on their doorstep and been fascinated by what they have seen.
The events of the past year related to Covid-19 seem a long way from the tranquil, peaceful world that Sharland entered with his first nature column. The Illustrated Tasmanian Mail not only gives a snapshot of nature, but a glimpse into the world of Hobart at that time. Life might have been at a slower, more relaxed pace but Gould’s Pharmacy in Liverpool St still had demand for a tonic, Gould’s Phosferine, to “build up a wasted nervous system”.
For those of a less nervous disposition, the Fashion Fancies page reported on the best-dressed Hobart women were wearing. Among advertisements was one for ”fleeced-lined bloomers, with elastic knees and waist”, priced at nine shillings and sixpence.
As we celebrate our 100th anniversary, readers of another newspaper with a century-old nature column , the Guardian in Britain, are being treated to snapshots of that country’s past. “Country diary” columns from exactly a century ago are being republished once a week on corresponding dates. The Guardian column started in 1905 and I have yet to find any column worldwide coming even close to matching this longevity. The nearest is the Mercury’s, and it can boast the longest running wildlife commentary in the country.
While the Guardian has always used several writers, Michael Sharland ruled the roost in the Mercury, even when he went on holiday. During his 60 years of output Sharland missed only three editions, while on service with the military service during World War II in Papua New Guinea. He used to post his columns to his wife to be transcribed, but three were lost en route as a result of enemy action.
Although Sharland was a little before my time and I never met him, I feel a deep bond with the Peregrine. I have the books he wrote, though, including a field guide to Tasmanian birds published in 1949. And I have made a pilgrimage to a rocky outcrop named in his honour, Sharland Sugarloaf in the Central Highlands.
Those who knew him said he never struggled to find subjects for his 50 columns a year and when I’m asked if I ever run out of ideas I simply point out that birds are always in the news. Not not a week goes by without a bird story in the national media. The latest is the phenomenal success of the orange-bellied parrot breeding program this year, giving hope that a species once down to a mere 12 wild birds can be saved.
It’s not just about birds, of course. Our mammals are also struggling. Sharland in his first column not only mentioned the fate of the tiger, but that of the Tasmanian devil, which in 2021 fights for survival in the face of habitat loss and a terrible cancer that has decimated its number.
He wrote: “The devil and the tiger are undoubtedly dying races and their great scarcity in the island, and therefore the world, should be sufficient reason for allowing their last few years on earth to extend over as long a period of time as possible, if not for ourselves, then for the sake of future generations.”
Talking Point, Mercury, Hobart; Saturday, April 3rd, 2021