29/08/2026
Long before Australians🇦🇺 knew the battered hat, the campfire and the name “Bush Tucker Man”, Les Hiddins was an Australian soldier trying to understand how a person could survive in some of the country’s most remote landscapes.
His television career grew directly from that military experience.
Hiddins joined the Australian Army and served on two deployments to South Vietnam, in 1966 and 1968, working as a forward infantry scout. Australian War Memorial footage from 7 RAR even preserves an image of Private Les Hiddins in Vietnam, years before television made him nationally recognisable.
After returning from the war, he transferred from infantry to Army Aviation. Flying through northern Australia and Arnhem Land exposed him to vast areas where conventional supplies could not be taken for granted.
The question was practical: if an aircraft came down or soldiers became isolated, what food and water could the surrounding country provide?
Hiddins began studying the problem, but the knowledge he needed was already held by Aboriginal communities whose understanding of Country, plants, seasons and food resources had developed over countless generations. He travelled widely, asking local people what could safely be eaten, where water could be found and how particular plants were traditionally used.
ABC reporting notes that much of the information he gathered came from Indigenous women, whose knowledge of plant foods was especially important to his research.
His military work became increasingly formal. In 1980 he received support to study bush foods through James Cook University, and in 1987 he was awarded a Defence Fellowship to continue researching survival in northern Australia. He became the principal author of the Australian Army’s military survival manual.
That same year, Hiddins was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for his service to the Australian Army in the field of combat survival.
Among the native foods he documented was the fruit now widely known as the Kakadu plum. Hiddins photographed and collected examples during his northern research, but its use was already well established among Aboriginal people. His contribution was helping document such knowledge for military survival purposes and, later, presenting it to a much wider television audience.
Television emerged almost accidentally from the research.
In an Australian Story interview, Hiddins recalled that Aboriginal people in different regions had given him informal names connected with his work. In Arnhem Land, one was “the Bush Tucker Man”. When television was proposed, the name stayed.
The first episode of Bush Tucker Man went to air on ABC Television in July 1988.
The format was unusually uncomplicated. Hiddins travelled through remote northern Australia, often in an Army vehicle, carrying basic equipment and explaining where food, water and useful plants could be found. There was no need for a polished studio persona. His broad-brimmed hat, conversational delivery and evident fascination with the bush became the programme’s visual language.
Most importantly, the landscape itself remained central.
Episodes took viewers into Arnhem Land, the Northern Territory, Cape York and other places many Australians had never visited. Hiddins demonstrated survival techniques while discussing plants, history and the Indigenous knowledge behind many of the foods he encountered.
ABC records that Hiddins appeared in Bush Tucker Man productions between 1988 and 1996. Later programs, including Bush Tucker Man: Stories of Survival, broadened the idea beyond food to examine Australian exploration, shipwrecks and survival stories.
The television series also preserved an unusual meeting between military research and public broadcasting. What began as an attempt to improve soldiers’ chances of surviving in isolated country became educational television watched by Australians who might never themselves travel beyond the bitumen.
Hiddins continued researching and writing after the original programs ended. In 2008, James Cook University awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Science, recognising his contribution through military service, bush-food research, television and work with veterans.
His television equipment has itself become part of Australian history. The National Museum of Australia acquired material including his distinctive hat, clothing, backpack, camera equipment, radio, camping gear and an Army “snack map”. The museum describes the collection as illustrating both his survival research and the media identity that grew from it.
That distinction helps explain Les Hiddins’ place in Australian television history.
He did not arrive on screen as an actor playing an outdoorsman. The television character was essentially an extension of the soldier and field researcher who had spent years travelling northern Australia, listening, documenting and learning.
The battered hat became famous, but the story underneath it was about something more enduring: survival knowledge, the Australian landscape, and the Indigenous expertise without which the Bush Tucker Man story could never have existed.
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