He's a self-styled, self-made man and confidence is his way of life.

At 90 years of age, Jack Absalom OAM is still putting clicks onto the odometer as he leaves a trail of bulldust across the country.

"Everything's the same, love. I do everything just the same," Absalom says to me, his voice booming as if he's swallowed a microphone.

He's telling me he's spent more time in the studio than the average painter, boxer, kangaroo shooter or author put together.

He's part of a family tree of TV men who were survivalists, travellers and romantics when it came to the Australian landscape.

It's a lineage that includes the likes of Harry Butler, Les Hiddens, Malcom Douglas and Alby Mangels.

A renaissance bushman, Absalom is a painter and a desert survivalist who embodied a quintessential Australian masculinity yearned for by TV producers of the 1970s and '80s.

But teleporting into living rooms, complete with Akubra and swag, to lecture the country on the poetic nature of the Australian landscape didn't happen in a heartbeat for Absalom.

His was a long and dusty road to stardom.

Jack Absalom made a name for himself in the 1970s and 80s. ( ABC )

He grew up in an isolated settlement called Naretha on the train line across the Nullarbor Plain. His formative years encouraged Absalom's roots to grow towards the dry centre of the continent.

When his father's back was broken in an accident, Absalom said he stepped up into role of bread-winner for his family.

And he did that by taking parrots from the wild and selling them to parrot fanciers and collectors.

They were Naretha bluebonnets, a small parrot that looks as if it has sneezed into a palette of blue eye shadow and come away with the 1980s writ large across its face.

"It's the only place in the world you could get them — so they were a prize," Absalom told Carolyn Jones on ABC Radio in 1981.

"I would pick out probably 20 nests ... and I could easily have 120 birds. That would be a year's wages if I could rear them all.

"And the guards and the engine drivers and the porters on the trains used to do all the business for me.

"I'd get letters [addressed to] 'the bird boy at Naretha'.

"Had I had those birds today, they'd be probably $20,000 or $30,000 per pair."

Those first coins, earned from observation and perceived stewardship of the land that surrounded him, were the start of a pattern in the professional life of a young Absalom.

Lure of the big smoke no match for the bush

As he grew into adulthood, Absalom decided he needed to see the world and set off towards the big smoke — Sydney.

He got as far as Broken Hill and never ventured any further. Local girl Mary Wills — a relative of the explorer William Wills — married him and they settled right there.

They would have five children together and crisscross the continent, still doing so today in a 4WD with a six-metre caravan.

His professional journey was no less eventful.

He became a kangaroo shooter, and then a manager of kangaroo shooters, telling Off Track that he had up to 60 men working for him at one time and that in the process he learned most everything there is to know about guns and people and how to handle both safely.

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It was happenstance that led to his next career move.

"I was travelling through the outback and I found this family with a husband and wife and three children. And they were [at] the stage where their tongues were swelling up choking them.

"And this chap had got a bright idea — oh we'll cut across here towards Lake Eyre," Absalom said.

This scene was remade at the start of one of the TV documentaries Absalom made in the late '80s, called The Road to Survival.

"He was the luckiest bloke in the world that I happened to come along," Absalom said.

"They were so delicate that I was four hours just bathing them, putting squeezes of water in their mouths and everything.

"I said to him 'why didn't you go and get a book about how to travel in the outback safely?'

"He said 'I tried everywhere and I couldn't find a book'.

"So I sat down, and in 10 days I wrote Safe Outback Travel.

"That book sold thousands and thousands of copies every year for 40 years."

His qualification for writing it came from no university, that is unless you count the university of his own life, which continued to make unpredictable turns across the Australian landscape.

From outback survivalist to artist

"I took up painting when I was 43 just because I looked at people looking and I said 'Look, I can't see anything in that'. Now, I had a wife and five children without a cent coming in from anything," Absalom told Jones in 1981.

"But I believe when you do something you've gotta give it your all. Like I always say — boots and all — I don't fiddle around.

"I wouldn't, say, be working at this and painting just as a hobby and hoping it will work. That's no good. There's not such a word to me as 'can't'.

"You don't say 'can't'. I reckon that should be deleted from the dictionary. You must do it."

Jack Absalom captured the beauty of his beloved bush in his paintings. ( ABC )

Absalom's lift-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps philosophy is scattered liberally through his stories like sultanas through sweet damper.

"I've got the utmost confidence in the human being. I think we can do anything," he says.

In an interview with John Casey from ABC Broken Hill that covered the astronomic success of his paintings, Absalom admitted he knew "nothing about art".

"I've never had a lesson in my life," he said.

"I never went to school full-stop, I had no formal schooling whatsoever."

And yet he was part of the popular "Brushmen of the Bush", a group of five painters from Broken Hill that included Pro Hart.

They exhibited around Australia and abroad and Absalom gave media interviews that brought him to the attention of television producers.

'Brushmen of the Bush' (L-R) John Pickup, Jack Absalom, Hugh Schulz, Eric Minchin and Pro Hart ( Submitted: AJ Reade )

He went on to star in more than 20 documentaries describing the animal and human characters of outback Australia and the public loved it.

As an author, painter and a TV personality, Absalom, along with a group of other travelling personalities from the 1970s and 1980s in Australia, were more than just the stars of a genre of television.

They were, perhaps, an answer to the cultural cringe of post World War II. They were the embodiment of a conception of Australia as a wide, dry, hot landscape, poetic in proportion, where a man could find joy, where battlers still reigned supreme.

For someone who professed to know nothing about art, Jack Absalom became a celebrated painter. ( ABC )

Beer on the dashboard in case of fire

In 1988, the bicentennial year, ABC Radio put together a series called Absalom's Outback where the audience received helpful life advice on how to repair a leaking petrol tank with soap and bulldust, how to use a can of beer as a fire extinguisher if your cigarette butt ignites the car upholstery, and how to carry guns safely in a sedan.

At the height of his influence, Absalom was asked to speak that the National Press Club on the impact of kangaroos on the Australian environment.

He tapped into his campfire yarning spirit and he had the audience laughing and cheering yet still managed to deliver some surprising messages to the assembled luncheon guests of 1980.

"I believe that we in Australia have been very, very careless. We tore into Australia with European exotic animals without thought of consequence of what would happen."

"Very few people realise that the top soil in the inland of Australia on an average is between nine inches to a foot thick. No more than that.

"I believe that the hard-footed animal that we have today like sheep cattle, donkeys, pigs, brumbies are chopping this whole country up and the wind is blowing it away.

"That 40 per cent of the inland is gone and it's gone forever. It'll never come back. This is why I came out so strongly on that TV program [Absalom's Outback].

"Because I want people to listen: this is what we've inflicted on this country. Our children are going to curse the day that they ever let us loose here."

Jack Absalom with one of his many paintings of the Australian outback. ( ABC: Aimee Volkofsky )

It's hard to know what made him more famous — his identity as a bushie or his skills as a bushie.

But it is the fact that he was both of these things: a real life Mick Dundee before Crocodile Dundee was a twinkle in a film producer's eye, and a dedicated exhibiting artist that hints at a complexity in the man that goes beyond the self-made myth.

He now spends much of his time attempting to capture the colours and scenes of Australia's interior in paint which he exhibits in his gallery in Broken Hill, along with his collection of opal, something that he calls a wonder of nature.

"I'm a great admirer of nature. I love nature," Absalom said.

"People say to me often, you know, 'do you believe in the afterlife and all this?'

"I said, 'look, I believe in nature: we were born with nature and we'll die with nature'."

To hear Ann Jones's full interview with Jack Absalom, listen to Off Track on ABC RN at 1:00pm on Saturday — or click here.