The former Guardian and BBC journalist who was imprisoned as a spy in Argentina during the Falklands War in 1982 and covered the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 has also reported, and on occasion, helped make it.

Mr Winchester, who delivered a free public lecture at the Manning Clark Centre as part of the Australian National University's Australian Academy of Humanities annual symposium on Thursday, scooped the world on April 2, 1982.

He smuggled out photographs of Royal Marines face down in the mud under the guns of the Argentinian invaders at Port Stanley.

Shortly before taking the picture he had been sheltering under the bed of the Governor, Sir Rex Hunt, as the Argentinians shot up Government House.

Mr Winchester used his visit to the ANU to renew his acquaintance with an old friend; Canberra's copy of the 1815 geological map of England, Scotland and Wales created by William Smith.

One of an estimated 43 surviving copies of the 115 originally produced, the two metre by three map holds pride of place in the foyer of the ANU's Research School of Earth Sciences.

Mr Winchester, who notes the colour blindness that scuttled his attempt to join the Royal Navy 53 years ago means he has never seen the work quite the way its creator intended, said the Canberra example was "excellent".

The original investment, of about 25,000 pounds in the early 1960s, has turned out to be a very canny spend. ANU staff say the artefact, which came with journals and notes compiled by Smith, is now worth on the high side of $350,000.

"William Smith's story has tragic elements but ends well," Mr Winchester said. "He became obsessed with this idea that if you saw a type of rock containing certain fossils and then found the similar rocks some distance away then you were looking at the same rock [formation]."

Smith walked, rode and travelled by coach all over England, Scotland and Wales, charting rock strata and eventually producing the first ever geological map in history.

Of humble origins, he was frozen out by the scientific establishment of the day which regarded geology as a "gentleman's" pursuit.

The tide finally turned when, many years later, he was rediscovered and granted financial and academic recognition.

Mr Winchester, like Smith, can be determined and resourceful.

Both qualities came to the fore when the Argentinians rumbled his first attempt to smuggle out a dispatch from Port Stanley 32 years ago.

"I had given my [typewritten] story to the governor to take with him when he was deported," he recalls. "They discovered it in his boots and tore it up in front of me."

Left with only a roll of 35mm film, Mr Winchester enlisted the governor's teenage son.

He gave the lad the film cannister, told him to stick it where the sun did not shine and to give it to the Reuters correspondent on arrival in Montevideo.

All went to plan and, as is so often the case with Mr Winchester's work, the rest was history.