A GOOD KEEN MAN?

By Colin Hogg

We pop out icons like muffins these days. Every week Holmes delivers another batch hot from its high-powered oven. It's easy to be an icon in New Zealand.

Easy-peasy. Sometimes all you have to do is read the news on television.

But there was a time when it was harder - when our "personalities" actually had personalities, when icons were made of mythic proportions, when they had to cut their own legend with remarkable acts and huge charisma. They had to climb a mountain or sell a mountain of books.

Barry Crump was the one who wrote and sold the mountain of books. I realised just how many when I read his evasive autobiography Life and Times of a Good Keen Man shortly before heading to Wanaka to interview the great man back in the early 90s.

He had sold nearly 1.5 million copies of his 20-odd books, a fact printed with pride at the back of the autobiography. It was one of the few hard facts in the book.

But Crump was a large hard fact when he came at me across the public bar of the Wanaka pub, larger than life and twice as thirsty. He was a longtime expert in handling the media - especially media blokes - and, after inquiring if I had expense money (I did), set about the time-honoured ritual of trying to drink me under several tables, including the Formica one back at his place.

The last I saw of him he was standing in the middle of the road waving me off and shouting, "Don't forget the readers." Crump had never forgotten the readers, but after a while they had started to forget him.

In the end, despite the extraordinary sales of his early books, Crump simply became famous for being Crump.

He started to become what all long-distance "characters" become, a caricature.

He became more famous for being the rough old bugger in a string of TV ads for Toyota four-wheel drives than for having written primal literary classics like A Good Keen Man and Hang on a Minute Mate.

But there was always a lot more to Crump than the convenient mask he wore for the public. There were hints of darkness, violence and tragedy about him.

And mystery. The biggest mystery of all was how he ever came to write books in the first place.

Though I only started to think these things last year, two years after Crump's sudden death (in Tauranga, of all places), when I heard there was a television documentary about Crump in the planning stages and infiltrated its ranks and teamed up with director Michelle Bracey and set about respectfully unpicking the legend.

As respectfully as you can do that sort of thing when you're dealing with a beloved legendary bloke. But behind every big, leathery, legendary bloke there's a little boy and that's where we found the start of the story about Barry Crump and what made him run - and he was as famous for his "shoot-through" lifestyle as he was for his books, in the end.

Crump had good reason to run and if he hadn't run, barely grown, into the bush in the early 50s, he would never have been able to invent himself as the eternal bushman, as he did in A Good Keen Man.

We found the scattered Crump clan and other witnesses braced for the inevitability that one day some strangers would turn up with a TV camera wanting to do the story and almost all of them were willing to talk, to fill in the gaps.


We talked to more than two dozen of them. The imperious poet Fleur Adcock who, in a moment of temporary madness, had married Crump for a few months in the 60s; the wise old man of words Jack Lasenby, who met Crump when Crump was a teenage bushman in the Urewera; ex-wives and drinking mates, abandoned sons and an angry survivor of the tragedy in which five boys died at a bushcraft camp Crump helped to run.

The theme of the programme was going to be A Wand'rin' Star, but in the end all that remained of that approach was the song - by rumbly voiced actor Lee Marvin.

In the end, it was all about balancing the light and the dark and quietly suggesting that, despite appearances to the contrary, Barry Crump was a tortured artist - a thought that might even have caused Crump himself to pause and rub his raspy chin.

Who: Barry Crump

What: Documentary New Zealand: Crump - A Wandering Star

Where: TV One

When: 8.30 pm, Monday


Pictured: Barry Crump.