William T Cooper AO is that classic figure; the man honoured in his own circles but hardly heard of in the outside world.

To describe him simply as a "wildlife painter" is incorrect for it gives a false impression of the particular skills, which have made him famous in his chosen field. Mr Cooper inhabits a world that falls between illustrator and painter.

He is one of a comparatively small group of person's worldwide that paint wildlife illustrations for scientific publications.

In these days of advanced photographic technology, to speak of using paintings in books like Parrots of the World, The Birds of Paradise and Bowerbirds and Kingfishers and Related Birds (all illustrated by Mr Cooper) may seem odd, yet this is the method used and it is this field Mr Cooper has made his own.

Working from field studies, he creates his paintings back in his studio' working in watercolours or sometimes pen and wash, Oils, Acrylic, on canvas, board, archival paper or a mixture as he feels on the day.

As he says, there is a fine line between illustration and painting but his work is universally accepted as being painting and not illustration.

"I regard them as scientific paintings aimed at being aesthetically pleasing," he said.

He is regarded by many as a direct artistic descendant of the famous bird painters of the 19th century John Gould and John Audubon.

The massive USA produced Masterpieces of Bird Art 700 Years of Ornithological Illustration used one of his paintings on its cover, a dramatic study of one of Australia's parrots, and describes him as "the foremost practitioner of the Gouldian style in the world today".

Mr Cooper's qualifications for his work are grounded in a lifetime's study of, and respect for, his subjects.

He grew up in the Myall Lakes area near Newcastle where his bushman father taught him respect for the wildlife that surrounded them. As a teenager, he worked part time in a private zoo and there the zoo owner taught him the craft of taxidermy.

Taxidermy has taught Bill Cooper the framework of a bird. By looking at the skeleton he can tell how many feathers the bird has. Alternatively he can tell where feathers go on a bird. It is this amazing knowledge of birds that puts him on another level and apart from other bird painters.

These skills as a taxidermist and painter have been combined to make him the painter he is today. You see Bill Cooper has drawers full of parts of birds in his study. If he comes across a road kill he stops collects it and then returns it to his studio. There he sketches it, every part of it. Its wings, feet, legs, head, beak, beak closed, beak open. He preserves what he can. All of the sketches, and bird parts are carefully filed away. Each species of bird is placed in its own drawer. He notes colour variations on the sketches.

This means that when he is ready to paint a particular bird he can go to that drawer and pull out all the material that he needs.

He planned to "paint birds" from an early age. I can remember telling my mother that when I was five," he said. Though when I was painting as a young man, it was always landscapes and seascapes rather than birds.

I sold them through galleries in Canberra, Melbourne and Sydney. I still dreamed about painting birds but that was in the days before the environment became so important and you just didn't paint things like that. There was no demand.

While his parents encouraged his interest, it remained a hobby, albeit a profitable one, for several years, though he never attended art school.

"Sir William Dobell told me not to. He said to stay with my own style, and I did," he said. By the time he was 30, Mr Cooper was display manager for a chain of shops in Newcastle. He was also earning more from his painting than from his job, so he resigned to become a full time painter.

His opportunity to enter the world of scientific bird painting came through a chance meeting with wildlife scientific writer Keith Hindwood, who saw his work and immediately involved the artist as an illustrator for a book, A Portfolio of Australian Birds, which was published in 1968.

From this book sprang a 20-year association with Joseph Forshaw that has, so far, produced works on New Guinea birds of paradise, Australian parrots, and the completed six volume Kingfishers and Related Birds. His credits include stamp designs for Papua New Guinea, a featured appearance in Masterpieces of Bird Art, illustrations for Visions of a Rainforest and an ongoing project with his wife Wendy, Fruits of the Rainforest.

He holds the Academy of Natural Sciences (USA) Gold Medal (1992) for distinction in natural history art and was awarded the Order of Australia in 1995. His studies, which appear in his books, are recognised by private collectors around the world.

He does not exhibit as many artists do, mainly because he lacks the time to gather paintings together. The paintings are always sent off as soon as they are finished," he said. I sometimes wish I could gather a few together so I could look at them. In 2003 this dream came true with a 32-painting exhibition at Morpeth Gallery. This was the first exhibition that he had in 23 years.

>It took one hour and 10 minutes for the 30 paintings to sell on the preview night, the remaining 2 sold the following day.

For many years, Mr Cooper lived in the Newcastle area, though he and Wendy loved the Far North and made frequent trips there.

They now live on a 65ha block of almost solid rainforest in Topaz in far north Queensland.

We came here because of' bushfires, Mr Cooper said. We had so much trouble with neighbours always burning off and having bushfires we decided to come to an area where there were no fires.

He coaxed Wendy, a self taught botanist, into writing the text for Fruits of the Rainforest, which covers 620 species of fruit found in the rainforests.

Wendy works closely with the National Herbarium and all the species have been recorded by the Herbarium.

She was always interested in it but up here she got really serious about it," he said. Now we are working on the second book. That book took us another six years. It will be published in 2004.

In addition to that, he plans another book on New Guinea birds of paradise next year and has some ideas for more paintings landscapes and seascapes this time.

He also has a dream, which he may work on one day. I want to do a book on the rainforest from top to bottom," he said.

"I'd start above the canopy and work down through the layers to end with the forest floor it would be the scientific world's gain if William Cooper could bring such a dream to fruition.

"Wompoo Pigeons" painted for the Morpeth Exhibition 2003

William T. Cooper is recognised as one of the world's leading wildlife artists. He has been described as "arguably Australia's finest ornithological painter". His careful and accurate attention to the detail of his birds and their habitats has been widely acclaimed and really does need to be seen to be believed. It's simply awe-inspiring.

Having been born in Newcastle, Bill now lives in the tropical rainforest of North Queensland. His incredible resume is the stuff of dreams. He has worked with Sir David Attenborough, published many books in collaboration with some of the world's finest scientists and has won several awards. In 1994 he was awarded the Academy of Natural Sciences (USA) Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art. This award is only bestowed periodically to an artist "whose artistic endeavours and life's work have contributed to man's better understanding and appreciation of living things". This award, therefore, is a true honour for any wildlife artist. In 1995 Bill was awarded the Order Of Australia for his contribution to art and ornithology. You can see that Bill's resume really does impress.

Bill's works are held in some of the world's most prestigious art collections. These include many private collections as well as the collections of the National Library of Australia and the Papua New Guinea Government. In fact, the Papua New Guinea Government even commissioned Bill to design two sets of postage stamps in the 1970s.

His published books are highly prized by collectors of some of the world's finest bird books. Many of his books have been produced in collaboration with the likes of the late Keith Hindwood, one of Australia's leading ornithologists and Joseph M. Forshaw.

Sir David Attenborough tells the following story of how he first came to visit and meet William T Cooper and how together they made a film about the Birds of Paradise, called "Portrait Painter to the Birds".

Bird painter William T Cooper has a pretty unusual backyard. For one thing, it's surrounded by tropical rainforest. And for another, a member of the world's most astonishingly beautiful avian family, the birds of paradise, regularly visits it. That family's greatest fan, Sir David Attenborough, could hardly resist a visit himself.

The common interest Sir David and Bill Cooper share in the birds of paradise dates back to the last century, with the production by John Gould of a lithograph of the lesser bird of paradise. Says Bill: I was so impressed by it. And I still think it's a marvellous painting, and really romantic though when you see the birds in the wild, it doesn't look at all like that. "

It's no accident, then, that when the two got together to make a television programme, a bird of paradise got the starring role.

Scientific drawings are not, perhaps, the most obvious choice for a Christmas card. Even so, the pairs of birds perched companionably beside each other on the cards many of us have just sent were intended originally to be illustrations for ornithological monographs. And very pleasing they are, too.

They are so accurate scientifically that even your most expert ornithological friends won't be offended; and they are drawn with such elegance that they will also delight your more aesthetically inclined ones. Their range, too, is considerable. Bearing in mind the season, you could choose an appropriately wintery one a robin perhaps, or maybe a barn owl as an emblem of wisdom.

Or you could go all out to dominate your friends' mantelpiece with a spectacular pair of toucans or a couple of hummingbirds in flight. You could pick a design that was drawn nearly 200 years ago; or you could choose the work of a contemporary Australian artist who, in the opinion of many, is one of the greatest ever to work in this tradition, William T Cooper AO.

The fashion for bird books with spectacular coloured plates started at the end of the eighteenth century, at a time when exotic nature, and in particular, the tropical parts of it, was only just becoming known to European scientists. The books were usually great folio volumes as much as two feet tall. The earliest ones show the birds in somewhat stiff poses, perched on sketchy branches with little or no background behind them. But die images are so wonderful and striking, and illustrate so vividly the splendour of the natural world, that it became fashionable for men of substance and culture to acquire such books for their libraries.

The most spectacular of these early works and still the biggest in sheer page dimension was produced by an American naturalist, John James Audubon. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, he travelled across North America from his home in Kentucky down to Florida, in an attempt to compile a complete catalogue of all the birds of his country. Even by this date, the bird book business was becoming somewhat competitive. To make a real impact, an author needed to have one or two species that had not been illustrated by anyone before. Audubon certainly aimed to do that and indeed succeeded. But he also had two other obsessions. He wanted to show his subjects, wherever appropriate, in vigorous action, and to draw them all actual size. To ensure that they were as life like as possible, he needless to say shot them. He then took the limp corpse and skewered it to a board in what he believed to be a life like pose.

The images Audubon created in this way of birds in flight look very odd to us today, but we should, in fairness, remember that neither he, nor anyone else, had binoculars, cameras or slow motion films to help fix their trite postures in the mind. Portraying his subjects life size was not easy either. To accommodate the biggest of his birds, he had to use the largest sheets of paper then available 39 inches by 26 inches, a size known as 'double elephant'. Even so, to fit in drawings of the flamingo, the turkey cock, the great white heron and the rest of his larger subjects, he had to tuck down their he ' ads in curious positions that make them look like entrants for an avian contortionist competition. Still, the plates he produced created a sensation, and they are still
among the most dramatic of all bird illustrations.

Audubon's designs were engraved with acid on huge sheets of copper. Prints from these were then coloured by hand, as all such illustrations had been until that time. But towards the end of his life, lithography was invented. In this process, a design is drawn on a block of fine grained limestone with a wax pencil. The stone is then wetted and oily ink spread over it. The ink is next scraped off. Since oil and water do not mix, the ink comes away cleanly from the wet stone, but enough remains on the waxed fines to print the design on to a sheet of paper pressed on the stone. The process is cheaper than engraving; it conveys the subtleties of an artist's drawing with particular faithfulness. Not surprisingly, it rapidly superseded copper plate engravings.

One of the first to use lithography for a bird book was an 18 year old Londoner, Edward Lear. He is more widely known today for the nonsense verse he published later in his life, but his bird drawings are masterly. He was a regular visitor to the parrot house at London Zoo, and embarked on a project to publish lithographed illustrations of all known species of the family, bringing them out four at a time. He was a poor businessman, though, and after 12 issues, he had to give up. But John Gould, a taxidermist who was working in the zoo, saw what possibilities there were in such publications if properly managed. He was not, himself', much of an artist, but he was a good ornithologist and an excellent businessman, and his wife Elizabeth was a talented draftswoman. He and she collaborated to produce a book based on a hundred bird specimens that had been sent to the zoo from the Himalayas.
Its success encouraged him to tackle even more ambitious projects. He engaged Lear to help his wife with the illustrations. Within a few years, his wife died and he quarrelled with Lear, who left him and became a traveller and topographical artist. In their place, Gould took on three others, Joseph Wolf, H C Richter and William Hart. With their help, he produced surveys of entire continents Europe, Asia and Australia including all the known species of particular families the trogons, the pittas and the toucans.

His artists had considerable problems, though. Many of their subjects they never saw alive. Specimens of little known species were shot in far off places, and their skins, with skulls and legs still attached, were despatched to Gould in London. He compiled their descriptions, gave them their scientific names and often drew a rough sketch to show how he wanted their images to be arranged on the plate. It was then up to the individual artist to translate bedraggled bunches of feathers into representations of living birds.

By the time Gould died in 1881, at the age of 76, he had published 3,999 plates. It would be a very expert enthusiast who would claim that he could remember them all. Nonetheless, when 10 years ago I saw a picture of a bird of paradise hanging in a publisher's office in Sydney, I was some what taken aback. It was certainly in the Gould tradition, in size and in general style. But it was not one that I had ever seen before. Looking closer, I could see that it was neither a lithograph nor an engraving but a modern reproduction of a painting. And it was also, I decided, as superb a bird illustration as I had ever seen.

That was how I first came to know the work of William T Cooper. I quickly discovered that he was an Australian, then living deep in the bush country in the far north of the state of New South Wales. But, I was told; he hated towns and only emerged from his remote retreat under protest. The picture I had seen had come from a book of his paintings with a text by Joseph Forshaw, a Canberra based taxonomist, in which all the species of birds of paradise and bowerbirds are fully described.

It is a spectacularly beautiful volume, directly in the tradition established by Gould, only a little smaller in dimension, with each species being given its own full page illustration and its own written description. Quite apart from the superb quality of its illustrations, it is a major scientific treatise. Cooper and Forshaw had also collaborated on a monumental work surveying the parrots of the world, and they were now launched on another enterprise concentrating in even greater detail on all the species of parrots in Australia.

It was indeed true that Bill Cooper seldom came south to Sydney, but on a later trip to Australia, I managed to get north to visit him. Since then, Bill has moved to even more remote parts, and he now lives in the heart of the rainforest in northern Queensland. A quietly spoken, gentle, bearded man, he works in a meticulously neat studio. Ornithological reference books stand on the shelves that line one side. Work in progress, with pencil sketches made in the field and pinned on a board, stand on the other. In one corner there is a little collection of lichen covered branches, which caught his eye when out walking in the forest and which he has brought back to draw in detail. That was a reminder to me that one of the notable characteristics of his pictures is the care with which he portrays the backgrounds to his birds. He includes strange tropical fruits, the ones that bird particularly favours. His leaves are not only accurate botanically but, here and there, one will have been chewed by an insect or be mottled by mould, as they are in reality.

BILL was born in the city of Newcastle in New South Wales. He had no formal training as an artist, but he had always been fascinated by birds and had started drawing them at an early age. He took some of his first attempts to Sydney's Australian Museum and showed them to the curator of birds. It was the encouragement that he got then that started him on his career.

I asked him what had sparked his interest in the birds of paradise. He could remember exactly, he said. It was a reproduction of a plate of the lesser bird of paradise from Gould's Birds of New Guinea. I was delighted to hear that because the very same plate had had just that effect on me when I had first seen it as a boy.

To my eye, Bill's illustrations rank among the finest ornithological plates ever produced. The Academy, of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia an institution that, incidentally, had provided Audubon with some of his specimen's thinks so, too. It presented him with its Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art. Talking to him, I began to discover just how demanding his kind of work is.

A species has to be illustrated in such a way that its diagnostic characters are immediately obvious. But that may not necessarily be the most elegant way to show the bird. If the key character of a species is its red vent, then it must be shown with its red vent plainly visible. If there is a difference between male and female, then both must be illustrated. If the immature form of the species has very different plumage, then that, too, may have to be included in the composition. And the drawing must be immaculately accurate down to the smallest detail. The proportions have to be precisely correct. Somehow the varying textures of the feathers must be conveyed their iridescence or downiness, their reflectivity or shininess.

And all this must be done while at the same time producing a design that is striking and fresh. The scale of that particular problem becomes apparent when you remember that not only is the subject matter nearly always limited to a pair of birds posed closely together, but that they are likely to be similar to several dozen other pairs of birds which also have to be illustrated. How do you make 340 species of parrot look so different from one another that, each time you turn a page, the next plate is a surprise and a delight? If you want to know the answer, have a look at Parrots of the World by Forshaw and Cooper.

Bill's studio overlooks a garden surrounded on all sides by untouched tropical rainforest. From it, to feed at the bird tables, come parrots and riflebirds, honeyeaters, brush turkeys and bowerbirds. His subjects, however, live all over the world. When he was working on his bird of paradise book, he made four trips to New Guinea to study the birds first hand, and some years ago, he made a long bird watching trip to Africa. He has certainly seen more species of birds in the wild than any of Gould's artists could ever have done. But even so, some of his illustrations have to be drawn from skins. They are sent to him from museums that are collaborating in his scientific projects.

Another major taxonomic book, Kingfishers and Related Birds has since been completed. Those relations include mot mots, todies, bee eaters and hornbills. It was a huge enterprise, and once again he was working with Joe Forshaw. Six volumes were published. I watched him at work, measuring a museum specimen of a hornbill. He was counting the primary and secondary feathers in its wing and using callipers to establish the exact proportion of beak length to skull. I saw how miraculously he converted a stiff kapok filled museum specimen, lying on his desk with a label tied to its shrivelled leg, into a vivid picture of a living bird perched on a branch in the New Guinea forest, full of personality and life.

For these taxonomic illustrations, he works in watercolours, the subtleties of which can be captured down to the finest nuance by modern reproductive processes. No longer are the colours subject to the skill and variability of a posse of workers adding the colours by hand to black and white prints. His pictures are photographed and analysed by lasers into their colour components so that four separate colour printings, red, blue, yellow and black, will, when superimposed one on the other, combine to capture his original shades with great accuracy.

But that is not the only way he works. He also has a welcome change, I suspect, from the demanding disciplines of scientific illustration he uses acrylic paints to produce large compositions in which his birds are placed in a more natural setting. Some may even be half hidden by vegetation, which would be unthinkable in a scientific illustration.

Others are strongly back lit or shown in dappled light in a way that a taxonomist would find unacceptable because such lighting makes it difficult to see the true colours. In such pictures he need no longer show the birds at rest with their plumage unruffled. He can portray them in action squabbling, feeding or, most dramatically of all, in display.

No birds could benefit more from such treatment than the birds of paradise. They, after all, have the most extravagant and improbable of displays, during which they may inflate breast shields, lower aprons, erect fountains of plumes over their backs, swivel dangling feathers from the fore edge of the wings and hang upside down.

And one of these birds of paradise lives in Bill's garden Queen Victoria's riflebird. The size of a jay, the male is jet black with a patch of iridescent blue green feathers on his head and another on his breast. He is beautiful, certainly, but not outstandingly so in such a spectacular family. Until, that is, he displays. Then, with a shriek, he suddenly erects his wings into two vertical fans, blows out his chest feathers, and bobs his head from side to side, peeking out from behind his wings in an electrifying dance.

Nobody knows for sure why the members of this genus are called riflebirds. The explanations given that the first specimen collected by Europeans was shot by a rifleman, or that its plumage is somewhat like that of a rifleman strike me as highly improbable. Neither does its call sound like a rifle shot. A Frenchman, Jacques Barraband, drew the first published illustration of one in 1806. Not surprisingly, never having seen it in life, he drew it with its feathers held in a wildly inaccurate posture.

Gould himself was the first to describe the species that lives in the Daintree area. Whether he saw it in display or not he does not record. But I suspect that he was, in any case, not very interested in its behaviour. He was more excited by the fact that no one else had described this species before. By custom, the one who did so also had the privilege of naming it. That was the great prize, and Gould claimed it. In the flowery and deferential language of the period, he asked Queen Victoria if he might name this species after her and make her the dedicatee of the whole, work on the Birds of Australia. So today, it is known as Victoria's riflebird.

But William, Hart, when he came to draw it for Gould, back in Europe, didn't do much better than Barraband. He showed the bird with its body horizontal rather than upright. Its breast shield is tiny and it seems to be drooping the feathers of its underside so that it looks more like a broody hen than a bird of paradise. In fact, it was not until Bill came to paint it that it was illustrated with total accuracy.

I had long wanted to make a documentary film about Bill, showing him as the latest representative of this great tradition of scientific ornithological artists, and I had the idea that we might take this one species and show how it had been treated, with increasing accuracy, by various artists, culminating with Bill's portrait of it. Bill agreed to take part, and it was typical of the quiet but thorough way in which he works that, when we arrived at his house last year, he had prepared things so thoroughly that he had tamed one of the males from the surrounding forest to come down on to his hand so that we could film it the more easily. What is more, he had so won its confidence that the bird would come down on to my hand. I will never forget the moment that it did so and I could see its beauties at close range.

Bill has now drawn around 500 bird plates. His work on the great kingfisher folios has come to an end. What will he do next? I have one hope. Birds of paradise in display are, to my mind, one of the most astonishing sights in the natural world. In the monograph he produced with Joe Forshaw, Bill was required to show them in repose, their plumes bunched, their bibs and aprons folded away, But during our filming, Bill painted a picture of the riflebird performing his astonishing dance, his female standing in front of him. He had earlier painted an acrylic of the brown sicklebill bird of paradise hi display with the strange ruffs on its upper breast raised to frame its head as it perches on a branch above a mist covered New Guinea rainforest. It is an astonishing and unforgettable image.

These days we have come to recognise that behaviour is as interesting and as significant an aspect of a species of bird as the number of feathers in its wings. Suppose the next book on birds of paradise were to show all 43 species of them in display, what a breath taking volume that would be. It would be a new arid unprecedented milestone in the history of bird portraiture. No one could do it better than Bill Cooper.