VALE NICK HARVEY

FEATURE Mick Matheson

Nick Harvey, the dedicated Australian gun nut and probably the world’ s most experienced gun writer, has died; gone to ‘that great hunting ground in the sky’, as he’ d have put it. We have lost someone truly irreplaceable and the Australian hunting and shooting community is poorer for it.

He died peacefully with family around him on 21 February.

Nick had been Sporting Shooter’ s Technical Editor for almost 50 years and his dedication to the task was absolute. Even as he became ill, he still filed stories and replied to readers’ queries.

His test of the Remington 700 SPS Stainless in the March, 2024, issue of Sporting Shooter was his final one but there are a few more columns in the pipeline that will be published in coming issues, as well as a couple of years’ worth of ‘Ask the Gun Editor’. To not publish them would, in my mind, be a travesty.

It was appropriate that the last firearm he would test was a Model 700 (and a magnum at that) out of the newly refreshed RemArms factory. It was a well-proven, accurate, dependable and traditional rifle that had stood the test of time. Not only was it exactly the kind of firearm Nick most admired, but it was also a bit of a metaphor for Nick himself.

We cannot overstate his legacy. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of hunting and shooting, particularly in the Australian context, and he was generous in sharing it as widely as he could. He contributed greatly to the world’ s knowledge of handloading, yet even that was only part of the story. He knew the guns, the game, the ammunition and pretty much everything else.

I heard some say he was “too old” to review today’ s guns and comment on our modern hunting styles but that’ s not true. Nick happily kept up with it all, constantly reading and actively hunting and shooting right to the end. He certainly had opinions on everything, but they didn’ t stop him writing objectively at the same time. But he was a product of his time and I’ m sure we’ ll never see the likes of him again.

While the rest of us have become mere shooters, Nick Harvey was a rifleman, with all the pride, skill and experience the word implies. He lived an incredible life but he was a no-nonsense bloke who’ d have waved away our outward displays of grief and told us to get on with it.

Americans put all their prominent people on pedestals, and the US has a roll of revered gun writers. We Aussies don’ t do that and there are many deserving shooting journalists who probably should have gained more widespread recognition but didn’ t. Nick Harvey will be the exception and for good reason. He stood above everyone.