A good keen pension plan

Alcohol could make Barry Crump violent. Photo / BOP

Barry Crump, bushman and yarnspinner, fibber and philanderer, died of a heart attack in Tauranga Hospital on July 3, 1996.

"He abused himself horribly, so there was no big surprise," says his son Martin. "He chain-smoked all his life, he was 61, he drank a lot, played up, took all sorts of substances. He was a bit naughty."

While Crump's passing may have been foreseen, the gathering outside the hospital and the legal wrangling to come was not. Crump was a notorious womaniser, having taken five wives and fathered many children. Often his chief contribution to child-rearing was insemination.

No one was quite sure how many children the author of A Good Keen Man sired – especially when the man himself never let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. His fifth wife Maggie says: "He used to love telling people it was nine. It was never nine. The actual number is five." Martin says his father "embellished his own philandering," and, including his own son whom he says Crump adopted, says the official count is six.

So, on the night that Crump died at Tauranga Hospital, many of the Crump clan became aware of each others' existence for the very first time.

Maggie recalls her first meeting with Martin. "I liked him immediately," says the softly-spoken Maggie of their meeting. "He reminds me of his dad in lots of ways, not his personality, but his stature and mannerisms." Martin's deep and Crumpish voice has served him well in a career in late-night talkback broadcasting, first at NewstalkZB and now RadioLive.

This amicable first meeting turned sour when the will was read. Martin recalls the short document as: "I leave everything to my fifth wife, Maggie. I want no squabbling over my possessions." Despite these instructions, on December 7 of that year Martin decided to squabble and filed proceedings under the Family Protection Act to contest the will.

Martin says he was acting on behalf of Crump's children, who had seen little of their father while he was alive and now felt cut out of his death. Maggie says she earned the right to the modest estate – comprising of publication rights, some personal effects, and a utility shed converted to a home on the hills above Tauranga – after putting up with a man who, at times, could be like a monster.

"Martin wasn't there to pick up the pieces in the morning when he'd been drinking Black Label whiskey all day, and nursing him, and putting up with the abuse and the shouting and screaming when the alcohol demons were there."

Martin was under no illusions that this would be a pretty fight. "The public, by my recollection, were thinking that the vultures were circling, pecking at the carcass," he says.

Three years of legal action followed, with horrendous consequences. "Nobody won except the solicitors, unfortunately," says Maggie. "It was costing an absolute fortune," says Martin. "I lost my family home fighting it."

This strain was clearly unsustainable, and so in February 1999 the two sides met and buried the legal hatchet. Maggie would keep the house and the small number of personal items accumulated by Crump over the years.

The rights to Crump's collected works, potentially worth a fortune, would pass to Crump's children after the royalties had put Maggie's son Anton (who she says Crump was in the process of adopting) thr0ough secondary education at Auckland's exclusive Kings' College. These rights changed hands on October 12, 2007, and Martin now has big plans for Brand Crump ranging from reprints to films to commercial tie-ins.

Long-time friend Jack Lasenby, who first met Crump in the 1950s while deer-culling in the Ureweras, says the departed Crump would probably be laughing – and crying – in his grave over the dispute."I think he'd have been amused by it, and disgusted – but not surprised."

Crump's Swanndri, the rifle, the typewriter and the other accoutrements of New Zealand's mythic bushman were sold by Maggie Crump at a 2005 auction for $27,000, well below pre-sale valuations, to Far North businessman Ken Rintoul. These artifacts are now on public display on the second floor of Pete's Pioneer & Transport Museum on Kerikeri Rd.

Also on public display, in probably every library in the country, is Crump's written legacy. A prolific writer, Crump penned 29 books from 1960 onwards, and with more than a million sales is one of New Zealand's best selling authors. (Crump was also fond of embellishing his sales prowess: He once said his novel Crocodile Country had been translated into Russian and more than 100,000 copies were sold in the Soviet Union.)

His stories were often short and adapted from tales he had heard around the campfire. They were about men among men, men who farmed, hunted or fished on the wild backblocks of New Zealand. His main characters – chiefly the long-running Sam Cash – were invariably thinly-disguised and inflated versions of himself. Readers, and bookstores, have spotted the embellishments: Five bookstores spoken to by the Herald on Sunday all say they classify Crump's books as fiction.

Lasenby, who hosted Crump in a bach at the end of his Devonport property in the mid-1960s, is in awe of some of the prose Crump produced. "There are touches of writing which are just so beautiful," he says.

He cites sentences like "It was so quiet you could hear a fist close," as a mark of rare talent. "That takes a lot of writing, re-rewriting, re-drafting – rarely does anything come out just like that," says Lasenby.

But despite the sales figures, English departments at New Zealand universities don't seem to take Crump's writing seriously. Professor Alister Fox of Otago University says Crump's yarns were simple and straightforward and defy literary analysis: "It's so uncomplex: 'What you get is what you see, and there's nothing more to it', as Tina Turner might say."

Historian Jock Philips, general editor of the Te Ara encyclopedia, jokes: "There seems to be an inverse relationship between the number of book sales and whether an author is taken seriously by English departments."

Fox suggests that while English departments have let Crump lie, other academic faculties have taken a particular interest in the man and his work. "You probably won't get any joy from the literary people – but you might from the gender studies crowd."

Crump's work and life has provided ample fodder for critical analysis, and critics. Maurice Shadbolt's memoir From the Edge of the Sky judges Crump and finds him wanting: "His flair for heavy drinking and beating up women far exceeded his talent for telling sometimes plagiarised tales of the back country."

Crump's reputation as a wife-beater was cemented in a television documentary featuring several of his former spouses and filmed after his death. In it, his fourth wife Robyn Lee-Robinson said Barry was so paranoid about her going public with his violent ways that he shot the family dog in front of her.

Martin attributes his father's nomadic approach to fatherhood (he only really spent any length of time with him after he'd reached adulthood), and his abusive streak, to a mean childhood. "He was running away from the responsibility, away from getting too close, because he was beaten so horribly and had the most violent, violent upbringing," he says.

The mean nature of Barry's father was laid bare with the memoir In Endless Fear, written by Barry's brother Colin. Wally Crump, the elder, is chronicled beating his children with harnesses and leaving his wife unconscious.

Lasenby, however, is sceptical of childhood and father-delivered violence explaining away all of Crump's negative characteristics. Crump was considered a friend by Lasenby, but he doesn't consider him flawless. "He was unreliable, dishonest with money and manipulated other people. I don't buy the view of an innocent Crump turned wanderer by his violent father. Much of Crump's behaviour was of its time."

But outside Crump's personal life, he and his fictional creations are recognised as landmarks of New Zealand history and nostalgia. Hugh Campbell, associate professor of social anthropology, says Crump allowed even townie New Zealanders to feel a part of the wild frontier.

"If you go back a few generations, back to the 50s and 60s, even if you were living in a city, you went to stay with country cousins. You went eeling, helped with calving and shot possums and rabbits. Crump was like everyone's country cousin," says Campbell.

But the Good Keen Man in New Zealand, circa 2009, is, says Philips, a "total anachronism". The country has moved on. "Barry Crump was popular because we then thought of New Zealanders as a Colin Meads-King Country person, and I don't think that exists any more," says Philips.

But Martin Crump, whose re-issuing of a 50th anniversary edition of A Good Keen Man marks the first publication by the son-controlled trust, isn't having a bar of criticism from literary circles or the notion that the time of Crump has passed.

Of course, Crump would have had a hard time recently, Martin concedes, "when you had the Peter Ellis business going on things got incredibly PC and it was a terrible time to be a Kiwi guy." But now Martin says the climate is conducive to the comeback of retrosexual Crump.

"I think we're more than ready for the Kiwi bloke to come back." He adds: "You can get your high-brow literature, beautifully written stuff, and sell your 1200 copies. Good on ya. But you want 1.3 million books sold? That's the mark my father left."

Crump has continued to be prolific after his death – four books have been published since his passing – but Martin says the post-funeral publishing glut is near an end. The Crump literary well is drying up and now consists only of another children's book, Chief Awatere and the Punga People, due to be released next year, and the mere first two pages of an unfinished Sam Cash novel.

So, beyond re-issues, of which A Good Keen Man's re-release this month by Hodder Moan is likely the first of many, the work of Barry Crump will have to live on in other formats. There's a film adaptation of Wild Pork and Watercress in the works, and Taika Waititi has nearly completed the script and is looking forward to directing the provisionally titled Land of Tears – next year.

Martin Crump's eyes light up at the possibilities. "Could it be a Whale Rider? Could it?" Auckland businessman and Bush Media director Roger Marbeck also sees gold in the Crumpie hills. He says there's the possibility of Crump's image being used in advertisements, but baulks at the suggestion of an action figure with a removable Swandri.

"I think the fag hanging out of his mouth might be a bit un-PC these days," Marbeck says, laughing. "But with a clip-on pig for his back? You could have a lot of fun with it."

Martin isn't setting any limits on how far Crump will spread."Yes, I'm cashing in on my father's name," he says. "Yeah, I'm doing that, but I'm doing it for a bigger cause. It's about the family."