New Zealand folk icon Barry Crump (1935-1996) was a very bright son of a brutal, ignorant father. To survive, young Barry ran away into the deep forest. He started work there as a deer culler when he was 14. He amused his mates by spinning hard-case yarns of his adventures.

Ten years later, these yarns were the basis of his ground-breaking book A Good Keen Man (1960), which he followed with the rollicking picaresque novel Hang On A Minute Mate (1961). These inspired Kiwi blokes with the rough and rugged ways of hard-case outback characters he'd met, and sold 300,000 copies each.

Then came a string of potboilers which failed to sell, four failed marriages, six abandoned sons, and two disasterous outback tourist ventures. First he shipwrecked his yachting clients. Then he failed to supervise some boys at a deerstalking camp. Five of them were drowned when a 4-wheel-drive van drove into a lake.

His father's legacy of violence destroyed Crumpy's early marriages. Crumpy just didn't know how to be trustingly intimate, only how to dominate. And in frustration he resorted to violence also.

Rough on the outside, Crump was and sensitive within. He wrote poems and a bush ballad or two, and took photos of sunsets. Seeking a solution to his problems, he turned to God, became a Bahaii, and for a time was able to give up his heavy drinking habits.

Perhaps Crump was trying to explain his efforts at fathering in his last sucessful novel, Wild Pork and Watercress. In this story, about an old bushman who helped a young misfit to grow up while on the run in the Ureweras, he finally produced a most mature and insightful story.

In his final years, Crumpy settled into a stable marriage, stopped roaming, and starred in a series of increasingly far-fetched Toyota 4-wheel-drive TV adverts until his death in 1996.

Sources -

Colin Hogg "Back Down The Track" Hodder Moa Beckett 1998

Crump family documentary, TV1, Feb 22, 1999