Va le Mc S ea
“VIC McCristal died
yesterday,” said Peter Johnson,
the S&FP candidate for the
March elections in NSW.
“Borsak said to ring you.”
There’s another irony:
Robert Borsak, MLC, and I
were hunting chital deer in
the rut only the week before
not far from Bellingen on the
North Coast where McCristal’s
family were pioneer cedar-
getters. Vic was born here 86
years ago and went on to
become one of Australia’s
best-loved outdoors writers of
the ’60s, ’70’s and ’80s.
He died at Cardwell in North
Queensland much mourned by
a legion of people who
regarded him as our most
influential hunting and
sports-fishing writer. As his
nephew Gavin Atkins correctly
noted, the man known by
many as McSea inspired
thousands of Australians to go
outdoors and encouraged them
to tread lightly.
When I was a kid I had
three idols who played a large
part in making me who
I am today. Novelist Ernest
Hemingway instilled in me
a love of sharp writing and
a lust for African hunting.
Jack O’Connor, the US
hunting guru, taught me
the worth of custom rifles
and stoked the boiler on
sheep hunting.The Clark Kent-like Mc
Cristal – a bushman turned
unlikely celebrity and
philosopher – hid his
superhero status under a cape
of self-effacement. While
basically shy, he was pushy
enough to recognise he was a
better writer than most of the
scribes he read in the
shooting mags. He submitted
his first article to the
38,000-a-month circulation
Australian Outdoors
magazine in 1954. Vic’s
unique writing style (“A lure
is a lie told by a man to a
fish”) and eye for detail
quickly established him as a
professional.
As a teenager Vic did a stint
on Bellingen’s Courier Sun
newspaper, but when I first met
him, he was a meat inspector at
the Bourke Abattoir.
Yesterday, I came across a
1960s Outdoors in which Mr
Cristal – then Roving Outback
Reporter – Nick Harvey and Icareer — and campaigned for
catch-and-release fishing,
a novel idea then.
He exposed the hypocrisy
of the secretive deer stalkers
of the 1960s who refused to
share any information, calling
them “The Deer Klux Klan”.
He wrote me a “Well done”
note when Ian Coombes and
I published our best-seller,
The Australian Hunter, which
divulged the whereabouts of
all the deer in the nation.
I attended a few guns
seminars with Vic and was
always taken by the intensity of
the man, his honesty and
sincerity. He refused to write for
hunting magazines in the end
when editors started changing
his copy to make a kill sound
like the “clean” end of a dog
turd. Political correctness.
Vic is survived by three
sisters, many nephews
and nieces and an army of
older fans who miss him
mightily already.90 | SPORTING SHOOTER _ APRIL 2015The man known
by many as
McSea inspired
thousands of
Australians.”
I heard the news
when returning
home with my
mate Roger Green
in mid-January
after fishing the
reefs off Port
Macquarie for
snapper.
A few of McCristal’s
eight books.PA RT I NG
SHOT NEWS, VIEWS AND INSIGHTS – BY COL ALLISONfeatured in the same issue.
Nick moved to Sporting
Shooter and I later became
hunting editor of Outdoors
before it folded.
Mc Cristal shot heaps of
animals, including many,
many buffalo in the Top End.
But he was always a shooting
conservationist, never killing
for tallies as was the norm of
his era. On the fishing scene
he was appalled at the killing
of all marlin caught off Cairns.
He took a typical moral stand- the kind that punctuated his