The First Law of the Bush
Former King Country rugby player Geoff Parkes is making a name for himself as a New Zealand bush crime novelist.
Geoff Parkes second historic bush crime novel has been published.
Parkes, who grew up in Taumarunui, played for Piopio Rugby Football Club and for King Country in early to mid-1980s – his contemporaries include Te Kūiti’s Glynn Meads – before emigrating to Australia in 1988 where he now lives and works as a rugby writer and crime novelist.
“It was just a good time,” he said of his formative years. “A good place to live, a good place to play rugby, a good place to play cricket in summer, water skiing on Sundays at Lake Taupō, all that sort of stuff.”
Penguin Random House Australia published his second novel on January 6, The First Law of the Bush, 11 months after his first crime novel When The Deep Dark Bush Swallows You Whole.
So how did Parkes end up writing New Zealand bush crime novels?
“I always wanted to write fiction, and it was just a matter of finding the time in and around work and other commitments,” he said.
For the last 12 years Parkes has written a weekly opinion column for Australian online sports website The Roar.
“The main thing I wanted to write about was the King Country region. A lot of it links to the Whanganui River that’s sort of got a bit of a hold on people that lived close to the river and also the volcanoes,” he said.
“The second thing was the era. I wanted to write about the 80s because I thought it was a fascinating time where we’ve grown up in this very sort of British male dominated society where the women were expected to cook and look after the kids and they were really only starting to have careers and the men were work hard, play hard, drink hard.’
Parkes finds that era fascinating.
“That’s not enough for a book though so I needed a plot and so I decided that it would be a crime novel and base it around a shearing gang and a missing backpacker and so the crime sort of came third if you like.”
Parkes’ second novel, set a decade later in 1993, opens with the death of a worker on the Makatote Viaduct south of National Park and features the same lawyer as his first.
“It’s a more honest crime book,” Parkes said. “I’m not just writing about where I grew up.
“New Zealand is one of the things that I really wanted to write about. The bush has such a strong identity. It’s partly to do with age, how dense it is, how dark it can be and wet and all of that.”
Geoff Parkes at a book signing session in Paper Plus Taumarunui for the book signing! ‘A World In (Union) Conflict; The Global Battle For Rugby Supremacy’
Parkes is a keen bush tramper.
“I’m about halfway through my third book and it doesn’t feel like it’s so rushed or anything because as long as you keep chipping away at it steadily, you don’t feel under pressure. I try to write most nights.”
Parkes said he received emails from readers thanking him for bringing back memories of rural New Zealand of their youth. “The smell of the shearing shed, walking in the bush, and all that sort of stuff,” he said. “Everyone’s got that shared experience of growing up in New Zealand. It’s quite distinctive. It’s certainly very different to Australia”
It sounds quite self-indulgent.
“A little bit, yeah, for sure. And more so in the first book. I think I got a lot of that out of my system. But the language is there. The way people talk and stuff like that. We know what it’s like. We live in that, and there is a distinctive sort of language that rural New Zealanders use.”
Parkes gets back to New Zealand a couple of times a year, visiting his mother Joyce, 93, in Taumarunui.
The First Law of the Bush