With just those two words, uttered down the phone line, you knew something deemed newsworthy was coming.

No surname was necessary because that voice was one of the most recognisable in Australia, having been part of public life for five decades.

It belonged to Tim Fischer, a man who ended his life seemingly carrying more titles than the mobile library that serves his spiritual home at Boree Creek.

The most prominent was deputy prime minister, a job he had from 1996 to 1999.

Yet reaching such a position, the highest possible for a National Party politician in the federal arena, did not alter Mr Fischer's knockabout personality.

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In an era before focus groups and saturation polling, the MP knew the pub test was just as important as the newsagent test, that is what people were talking about when they picked up their tabloid or broadsheet.

Hence his regular calls to The Border Mail throughout his time in parliament and beyond.

Not that our paper was alone, his successor as deputy prime minister Michael McCormack had similar contact when he was in the editor's chair at The Daily Advertiser in Wagga.

At the opening of the Tim Fischer gallery at Lockhart in May, he detailed one.

"I well remember...a phone box at Collingullie which Tim was phoning in a story (from) and got bailed up by a rather savage dog," Mr McCormack said.

"Only Tim could turn that into a newspaper story that appeared on the front page, only Tim had that rare ability to be able to get his facts out about the road grant he was announcing, and also get across the fact he was in a lot of trouble, bailed up by a dog in a Collingullie phone booth and get a cartoon on the front page of the paper.

"That was Tim."

Mr Fischer had a self-styled ability to mix the international and the local.

He could be calling about the Svalbard seed vault in the Arctic circle in Norway on one call and then pointing out the benefits of a fast train station at Barnawartha North in the next.

Unlike many politicians his interests were not limited and upon retirement he still felt it was important to be part of public debate.

He stoically pushed for a very fast train and argued General John Monash should be elevated to the rank of field marshal.

But Mr Fischer's greatest legacy was gun control.

After the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, Mr Fischer had to convince rural folk that a ban on automatic and semi-automatic firearms was warranted.

He faced hostile crowds at meetings, including one in Wodonga, but his argument prevailed.

While not a product of the social media generation, Mr Fischer became a Twitter type and that was where you would find him pushing for gun control in the US.

In the wake of this month's assault rifle slaughter in the Texan city of El Paso, he urged Australia's Foreign Minister Marise Payne to push her American counterpart Mike Pompeo for change.

"ElPaso (sic) gun shootings today is The (sic) 249th in the USA so far for 2019 - no other country comes anywhere near this," Mr Fischer tweeted at the time.

"#MarisePayne should raise gun laws direct with #MikePompeo in Sydney today as what's the use of an Alliance with a nation so dysfunctional on guns."

However, Mr Fischer's love of his family, wife Judy and sons Harrison and Dominic, shone out like a new XPT as he left federal politics.

"I made the mistake on Saturday with Judy at around lunchtime of looking at the forward nine-month schedule as leader, as Minister for Trade, as Deputy Prime Minister," Mr Fischer said in 1999.

"It is cruel in a sense, cruel to our young children and it is not fair on Judy either.

"I suddenly realised that if I do this next year or through to the end of the Olympics, I'll go out feet first."

Fate gave him another two decades which saw him become Australia's ambassador to the Vatican and author books on outback heroes, East Timor and naturally trains.

While he was known as Two-Minute Tim, a nickname bestowed by former Albury mayor Harold Mair for his whirlwind approach to life, Mr Fischer was not a mere sprinter.

His contribution was as broad as the Indian Pacific train line, after having branched out from the family farm at Boree Creek.

Having become a national treasure he was simply able to say 'Tim here' and have people listen attentively.

And to the end Mr Fischer kept fighting like the farmer sowing in the hope of rain or the passenger awaiting a better Border train service.

Vale.