The other day Archie and I were going for walkies through Braidwood, taking in the essential Australianness of our our surroundings: the gum trees, the Kookaburras, the utes chugging by on the King’s Highway. And then something popped into this scenario that caused a bit of a jolt — a reminder of a different time, a different place, a different me.

And the thing that achieved all this was not something momentous — a bit like Proust’s sniff of those Madeleine things, it was actually quite prosaic in the general scheme of things. Or rather, they were. They were the shapes of a brace of numida meleagris — the Helmeted Guineafowl, which is something very much out of Africa.

No-one who has travelled in pretty much any part of sub-saharan Africa will have missed seeing these prehistoric-looking birds, about the size of a turkey, methodically scratching and picking their way through the savanna, often in large groups (known satisfyingly as a confusion of Guineafowl), hunting for beetles and grubs. Others will know them as a delicious game fowl, delectable roasted in a white wine sauce, slow cooked in a crock pot with bacon, garlic, vegetables and potatoes, or braised with paprika and peppers.

They are not well-suited to flying: they’ll burst noisily out of cover, gain a bit of height, and then glide to the next bit of cover. And this habit is what inevitably drew my mind back many years to another country. Aged about 14, my oldest friend, John, and I went to stay at a farm in a rural area of Zimbabwe called Nyamandhlovu, which means ‘meat of the elephant’ — perhaps because of its rich, fertile soil.

We were desperate to be the kind of outdoorsmen we believed to be the epitome of masculine evolution — we wore baggy khaki shorts, velskoens with no socks, and checked shirts. We carried pocket knives and obsessed about motorcycles and the best kind of dog. But most of all, we wanted shoot things — strictly for the pot of course. Chief among the prey we directed our murderous thoughts toward were the numerous fat, clearly very stupid guineafowl we saw on the farm.

There was a rich mythology surrounding the guineafowl. It was said that their feathers were so tough that birdshot would bounce off and that even the bullet of a .22 would ricochet off if you fired from too far away. So it was headshots only, from 40 metres or fewer — and a guineafowl’s head is very, very small. Moreover, our peashooter .22s had no telescopic sights.

We sallied forth into the dry, brown bush — I think it must have been winter — and located a likely confusion of fowl. We sneaked closer. We probably tiptoed from bush to bush. Our trigger fingers itched. And when we were just about within range, the benighted birds exploded into flight and coasted down to earth a fair distance away. We re-engaged our safety catches and resumed the pursuit.

And so it went. We lurked. We tiptoed. We crawled. We tried approaching boldly and rapidly. I’m pretty sure we attempted an outflanking manoeuvre. Every time we came nearly close enough, they’d clatter into the air and settle a safe distance away.

Things became sweaty; we were thirsty. I cut my leg scrambling through some barbed wire; my sockless velskoens, rendered iron-hard from previously getting wet, raised big blisters on the tips of my toes. As we walked, the blisters burst; dark, loamy Nyamandlovu dust seeped in and mixed with the sweat, creating a black paste which tattooed my blistered extremities.

The guineafowl browsed on, unconcerned. Our attempts to stalk them were no more bothersome than the buzzing of a fly. Finally, defeated, hungry and thirsty, we surrendered the field without firing a shot. The birds’ armour-plated feathers remained untested. Their tiny target heads contained enough nous to see us off without interrupting their search for juicy bugs.

So why were these fowl in Braidwood? It seems they’ve been exported here, and to the US and other places, either as pets or because they are very effective at clearing out bugs, ticks and other pests from agricultural land. Apparently they are better at hunting than being hunted — at least by teenage boys with no socks.