I feel I have lost part of myself with the death of Harry Butler at the age of 85. Though I had known him to be suffering from cancer for many months, he always seemed to me to be one of the immortals.

Harry was a great part of my childhood, when the WA Naturalists’ Club’s annual Wild Life Show at the Perth Town Hall was, for me, one of the most exciting events of the year.

Harry, looking much as he did when I last saw him late last year, was the star performer, holding an audience of us Junior Naturalists spell-bound as he handled venomous snakes and passed lizards and all manner of other creatures around.

Always a brilliant and fascinating lecturer, he awakened in me, at least, a lifelong fascination for wild life which even my miserable school could not destroy.

He took us to the Yanchep caves north of Perth, and in one – today closed and removed from maps in obeisance to political correctness – showed us shuddering Junior Naturalists a pile of Aboriginal skeletons. These skeletons – I think there were 49 counted – were all women, and the skulls were bashed in. They had been thrown into the cave through a hole whose light we could see far above.

There was no other way out of the cave, apart from the recently-made artificial entrance we had come in through. A gruesome detail was that some of the skeletons had been found in places which suggested their owners had been thrown in alive and crawled away. (I later, sensing a story, wrote to the Minister asking why the cave had been closed and its name removed from the maps, and what had happened to the skeletons, but received no answer).

As a reporter on the West Australian, I covered Harry’s and others’ work at Operation Ord Noah – the rescuing of animals from the flooding Ord Dam. Harry had a small dinghy, and in this we paddled through the turbid water in the drowning rooms of the old Argyle homestead, water goannas and Johnson crocodiles splashing away from us. Amazingly, Harry reached up in the darkness to pull down and bag the venomous snakes which festooned the rafters. We also landed on one of the temporary islands armed with .303 carbines to shoot the scrub bulls which had been marooned there and which were too ferocious to be saved (some of the cows, certainly wild enough, were roped and brought to land).

He pointed out skid-marks on the bank where a big man-eating salt-water crocodile had launched itself into the water. We saw plenty of Johnson crocodiles but no ‘saltys’ (I don’t know if today there is water-skiing on the dam).

The larger islands, Harry explained, would become natural isolation laboratories or zoos, each with its own population of animals.

When he turned over a stone there was always a lizard under it. I saw this time and again. Once when we stopped at a waterhole with almost no birds or animals he went straight to what he had expected to find – the skeleton of a feral cat which had eaten it out and then starved.

He said he had acquired the ability to sense the presence of animals when living in the desert with Aborigines. He had been initiated into two tribes and was their acknowledged lore-giver and bearer of their traditions. Once, talking to an old Aborigine, he had him demonstrate what I, a sceptic, can only explain as telepathy.

In the evenings at the Ord camp he talked and lectured on wildlife (‘Dogs will keep little snakes away from your camp. The problem is, they attract big snakes’). The tough bull-catchers and other wild and woolly Kimberley bushmen listened to him in respectful silence.

At Ord Noah he rescued a great variety of small marsupials and reptiles, including some very rare ones. The only creatures on which he had no mercy were feral cats. He had earlier put a group of crocodile-poachers out of business, though he was reticent as to the exact details.

Harry’s great work was, of course, to educate the public on the need for both environmental conservation and development, through books aimed at children, and his television programmes, including the series In the Wild. He developed and applied a whole body of techniques for restoring mined-out landscapes, though his insistence that conservation and development were both essential and must go together aroused the fury of the ‘Deep Greens’ and brought him a number of death-threats. His office at WAPET (WA Petroleum) in Perth (later Chevron) had no windows.

It was a far-sighted decision by WAPET to appoint him environmental consultant to the Barrow Island oil-field which he made a model of its kind. Once, when a cyclone cut the island off, he was able to feed the whole camp on ‘bush tucker’, fish and giant oysters.

Behind the ‘hairy battler’ facade, and despite having no degree (an honorary doctorate was conferred on him later) he was a learned man, well-read in history, the classics and science-fiction, a member of a number of scientific societies and of the exclusive New York Explorers’ Club. To those who knew him well he sometimes revealed a mystical streak.

Among many other unusual things, he was given a high (acting, unpaid) rank in the British Navy so he could command a group of officers on a desert survival course. He was also a songwriter with a great store of classical poetry in his head.

Once he came to our garden with a machete and slashed at the old bark-bound lemon trees. ‘Marion,’ he told my mother, ‘trees are like people. When they get older and bark-bound it does them good to be slashed!’

I wanted to visit him in his last illness – he was by that time a widower – but he was emphatic he wanted no visitors or even cards. Perhaps there was something reminiscent of the deaths of the bush animals he loved in this. I was glad to receive his last letter, written when he must have known the end was very near, but expressing tranquillity and affirmation. His many public honours are a matter of record, as well as the title of ‘national treasure’, which embarrassed him, but I am also in a position to know some of his many private kindnesses and good deeds. He is a loss to Australia as well as to his many friends.