Obituary: Ronald Mathias Lockley

By CATHERINE MASTERS

He once said: "Rabbits are so human. Or is it the other way around - humans are so rabbit?"

Ronald Mathias Lockley, Welsh naturalist and prolific author who migrated to New Zealand in 1970, had no idea when he studied and wrote on the habits of rabbits that his speciality would inspire one of the most popular modern works of fiction, Richard Adams' Watership Down.

In his own books Lockley's fascination for the animals led him to humanise their hopes, dreams, fears and some of the nastier emotions.

His best known work, The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964) was written from research for the British Nature Conservancy when myxomatosis had affected almost all of Britain's rabbits. Lockley's scientific study of their behaviour was later acknowledged by Adams as the inspiration for his tale of rabbits searching for a home.

By the time it was published (1971) Lockley had emigrated to New Zealand, partly in disappointment at the British Government's attitude to the environment.

After an unsuccessful battle against the siting of an oil refinery on the west coast of Wales he came to join his daughter, who was married to a Bay of Plenty farmer. He continued writing about wildlife in books about New Zealand and contributed articles to the New Zealand Herald.

He also continued battling for causes he held dear. Living in Glen Innes in 1972, he fought against an Auckland City Council proposal to put a tip on the Tamaki Estuary.

He was instrumental in saving the Glen Innes Domain and under his guidance nature trails and paths were laid out, swamps were drained and ponds, islands and nesting areas created.

He was also a founder-member of the Miranda Naturalists' Trust, set up to create New Zealand's first bird observatory on the Firth of Thames.

In his 1970 book Man Against Nature, Lockley's environmental message to New Zealanders was: "Go slow, New Zealand, go slow!"

A delicate, solitary child, by all accounts, his fascination with nature started early. At age 11 serious illness kept him on his back for the best part of a summer. Lying in the orchard of his home, he developed a passion for bird-watching.

At 17 he went farming and by the time he was 22 had saved enough to fulfil a boyhood dream and lease a deserted island near his Welsh home. A partly ruined farmhouse was the only shelter but the rich bird-life was the draw-card.

In a tale which tells much about the man, he is said to have made an offer of sterling 1 for an abandoned schooner he saw drifting towards rocks. The underwriters insisted he make it sterling 500 but eventually accepted sterling 5.

He used the timber to rebuild his house and had enough coal from the schooner to warm the house for years. The island became famous; scientists, esteemed bird-watchers and even King Ferdinand of Rumania visited.

In 1954 he bought an old Welsh manor. He made the grounds into a permanent nature reserve and later wrote about his 10 years there, much-visited by bats, owls, bees, badgers and scientists.

His love of the wild creatures enlivens his work. He could not help granting them, he said on one of his most quoted comments, "a measure of reasoning and individual action which alone makes life tolerable to the human spirit."

In Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises he holds a conversation with an old killer whale weary of the polluted oceans of the world and ready to die on the Manukau. And in The House above the Sea he talks with a "big colonising buccaneering bully" - a black-backed gull on Bastion Pt.

Lockley continued to travel and write well into old age. He visited islands from the Bering Strait in the north to the Weddell Sea in the south. In his later years he became especially fond of Polynesia. His third wife, Jean, who emigrated with him to New Zealand, predeceased him. He leaves a daughter and two sons.