Wild tales pay tribute to Ian "Beat" Hill, TV star of nature series Beating Around The Bush | photos

With a few drops of melted wax poured onto a side-table, a candle is soon fixed in position and providing modest illumination for this salt-of-the-earth clan in their humble cottage of weatherboard and iron.

Except now, the candlelight is suddenly moving - the flickering flame appearing to hover in the darkness and glide eerily across the room.

Which is to be expected, of course, when you have attached a candle to what turns out to be a large turtle minding its own business in the shadows beside the couch.

Goannas in the hallway, snake eggs in the sock drawer, a crocodile pen by the backyard swingset, a tame fox named Samantha and a brolga in the bathtub - welcome to the childhood home of Ian “Beat” Hill, the lizard-loving, snake-wrangling star of the much-loved NBN wildlife documentary series Beating Around The Bush.

Hill, 65, lost his long battle with cancer last week.

His death has broken the hearts of his family (including a son, daughter and an adored grandson), his partner (the high school sweethearts found their way back to each other 15 years ago, after marriage and families with others) and his friends.

It has also touched the hearts of strangers who flocked to social media to share fond memories of the bloke with the snakes on the telly.

“I know I am not the only one who still remembers the theme song and the mad dash to the TV when the show came on,” noted one nostalgic Facebook post among the hundreds of affectionate tributes last week.

“One of nature’s great gentlemen,” said another.

With his trademark bushranger moustache and pet cockatoo Jake, Hill’s on-screen escapades made the self-taught herpetologist the TV favourite of a generation of Newcastle viewers.

Bringing the bush into our lounge-rooms, he was the boy-next-door with the 70s pop idol looks and the David Attenborough-sized passion for native fauna and flora.

The success of Beating Around The Bush - it won a Logie in 1980 and was re-run for years later - made Hill a household name in the Hunter, alongside such local screen luminaries as newsreader Murray Finlay, weatherman Des Hart and Romper Room hosts Miss Ann, Miss Lyn and Miss Kim.

And it all began in Kurri, and the home of Fred and Nancy Hill, their children and a veritable ark of orphaned and rescued wildlife.

Mate Lindsay Young recalls the first time he visited the Hills in Aberdare Street.

“There was a bushy tail hanging out of a peg bag on a bedroom doorknob,” he said.  “Someone had brought a joey kangaroo from its dead mother on the side of the road. They’d brought it to Beat’s place because he was the town’s animal expert.”

Hill’s bedroom was full of glass jars and cages of snakes, spiders and lizards. Plus shelves of the books that fed his encyclopaedic knowledge. English naturalist Gerald Durrell was an early hero.

“I began collecting reptiles at a young age and my parents always thought I would grow out of it, but I never have and never will,” Beat once told the Herald.

Brother Kevin says scrub at the end of the street was always a lure for Beat, whose interest in critters quickly became known around Kurri.

“It was not uncommon for us to come home to find a hessian sack on the front step with two or three black snakes in it,” he said.

Former neighbour Lance Richardson, writing on Facebook last week, remembered Beat’s “menagerie at Kurri when he lived with his mum, who wouldn't go into his room because of the spiders he kept”.

“One day his freshwater alligator escaped and we found it in our chook pen’s drinking-water container after returning home from holidays. There were about 10 chooks missing and the others had very little feathers left! I got a $5 reward for finding it which was a lot for an 8-year-old back in the 70s. RIP Ian.”

NBN colleague Phil “Sandy” Lomas marvels at the animal instincts of his “rough-cut diamond” mate.

“Beat was Steve Irwin before Steve Irwin,” he said.

“His knowledge and innate understanding of all creatures was all-consuming. And his enthusiasm for storytelling of animal encounters, especially those featuring his speciality of snakes and reptiles, was compelling entertainment for me and all around us.”

Ian Hill joined NBN around  the same time as Young and Lomas in 1969-70 - all long-haired, teen-aged trainee camera operators.

With fellow trainees Phil “The Captain” Gray and Lee “Crash” Craddock, Hill, Young and Lomas grew up at Channel 3 and  worked closely together on the cameras and floor crew for studio shows, TV commercials and outside broadcasts.  

The four surviving mates reunited last week to salute the leader of their “motley crew” - Gray sporting a newly inked tribute tattoo.

Fittingly, Hill’s funeral at Ryhope was led by celebrant Lyn Hall, another ex-NBN colleague once known as Romper Room’s Miss Lyn.

In his eulogy, Young recalled his first impressions of the young Beat: “He was a good-lookin’ rooster. He had blond hair and piercing eyes of blueish-grey. He wore his sleeves rolled up. He came from Kurri Kurri and he was bloody proud of that.

“He had a real good tattoo of a panther on his right biceps and a not-so-good homemade one of a stiletto dagger on his left forearm that his brother had helped him do at the kitchen table. He had what I called a Genghis Khan moustache which somehow gave him a slightly menacing look.”

The nickname and Kurri Bulldogs loyalty completed Hill’s tough front. “Beat”, he’d often explain deadpan, was short for “deadbeat”.

In those early days as workmates, Beat would collect Young at Mayfield on his way to work  in his old FC station wagon.

“Invariably there was a sugar bag on the passenger-side floor which could contain anything from a blue-tongue lizard to a couple of brown snakes,” Young recalls. “I’d ride into town with my knees tucked up under my chin.”

The pair’s weekends away invariably led to reptile hunting.

“Beat would nominate what species of lizard, skink or gecko would likely be found under the loose bark of a given species of tree, careful as always to give the common name, and Latin name, as well as a brief description of the habits of such a creature.

“Sure enough when the bark came off, most times there it was. We’d get back to Newcastle with bags, boxes and smelly unwashed socks containing live specimens.”​

Then there was the day the duo got their weekly pay of $25 and went for a counter lunch at the Empire Hotel in Hunter Street.

Beat disappeared after the meal.

Young: “When he came back he whispered to me, ‘Mate can you lend me $2.’ Yeah, I said. Why? His eyes lit up. ‘Well, I’ve just been across the road to Beath’s Pet Shop. There’s a beautiful diamond python over there on sale at $1 per linear foot. It’s six foot long and I’ve only got $4!’ I was suddenly the part owner of one-third of a snake of which I was terrified.”

Cessnock-raised Lomas, who went on to direct Beating Around The Bush and share the Logie for “Outstanding Contribution to Regional Television”, had a kindred Coalfields spirit in Hill.

“Beat and I were the country kids out to tackle big-city life,” he told mourners at his friend’s emotional farewell last Friday.

“Born out of Coalfield tribes - him from Kurri Kurri, me from Cessnock - we travelled to and from work together in the early days. Our families knew relatives, friends of friends and distant acquaintances. And we both hated the pumpkin-eating tribe from Maitland - good enough reason alone to be friend and ally!”

 After 10 years learning their trade, they got to make their own show. Shot over a month around Cessnock and in the Watagans, Beating Around The Bush showed everything from python eggs hatching to eagles eating mullet. Editing their footage into five 30-minute episodes took months.

“Looking back now at what we took on then at such a young and inexperienced age is actually quite scary – when not funny that is,” Lomas said. 

He cherishes those days away filming in the bush, the cold showers and the rabbit stew: “Beat and I were in heaven for the three weeks in our Watagan Mountains base camp - our team of mostly young bush virgins felt closer to the darker side.”

But Beat also got his share of what Lomas calls “critter karma”.

“He found that a handful of worm-size baby black snakes possessed the cumulative effect of their parent's poison,” he said.

And the biggest fright came one day when a retiring herpetologist bequeathed him 28 tiger snakes.

“The last he had to catch was a real serpent - six foot long and as thick as a brick,” Lomas recalled.

“As Beat lifted the last sheet of iron it was under, it came over the top - its head flattened like a cobra and its yellow throat flaring. From a standing start Beat cleared the metre-high pit like a Rio high-jumper. It would’ve been death before dialling triple 0.”

After leaving NBN, Hill worked as an independent TV producer, including on campaigns for such major advertisers as Woolworths.

Despite his successful career in the media, an industry notorious for inflated egos, he remained unaffected.

“He was always that same bloke from Kurri,” Lindsay Young said. “He only ever wore blue denim jeans. Still rolled his sleeves up.

“I’m not sure where Beat has gone to, but I like to think that he is somewhere discussing the mating habits of the western mangrove monitor  - veranus indicus - with Harry Butler, Steve Irwin and [Australian Reptile Park founder] Eric Worrall.”

Former Herald journalist James Joyce married into the Hill family 22 years ago. He is the husband of Beat’s niece, Renae.