Barry Crump

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Barry Crump MBE (May 15, 1935, Auckland, New Zealand–July 3, 1996) was a New Zealand author of semi-autobiographical comic novels based on his image as a rugged outdoors man. Taken together his novels have sold more than a million copies domestically, equating to one book sold for every four New Zealanders.

Born in Papatoetoe, Auckland, Crump worked for many years as a government deer-culler in areas of New Zealand native forest (termed bush). He collected his experiences in his first novel A Good Keen Man in 1960. This novel became one of the most popular in New Zealand history, and Crump’s success continued with the more fictional Hang on a Minute Mate (1961), One of Us (1962), There and Back (1963), Gulf (1964), A Good Keen Girl (1970), Bastards I Have Met ( Graham Kirk ) (1971), and others, which capitalized on the appeal of his good-natured itinerant self-sufficient characters and idiomatic “blokey” writing style.

Crump travelled throughout Australia (where he hunted crocodiles), Europe, Turkey, and India, the result of which was his conversion to the Bahá’í Faith by 1982.^[1] He married five times, including a one-year marriage to the poet Fleur Adcock and a longer marriage to Robin Lee-Robinson, and had nine sons and no daughters. One of his sons, Martin Crump is now a well-known radio broadcaster.

Crump was also well known for appearing in a series of acclaimed New Zealand television advertisements for Toyota’s four-wheel drive cars, which relied on his image as a stalwart “bushman.”

He was awarded an MBE for services to literature in 1994, and died in 1996.^[2]