Tough Country

Description

Tall tales of bushmen, bulldozers and back-country blokes 'It was the mid-1970s and I was about eight, I thought it was completely normal for your old man to pull out a high-powered deer-hunting rifle and fire it through the kitchen door from the breakfast table...' In the 1970s and 80s, Barry Bellamy was a fair old bushman, traversing the back-country from Hawke's Bay to the far north in a blue ex-airforce Land Rover. His son Mike would join him as he took up work, wherever he could get it. Tough Country is Mike's story, about a bygone era of bushmen, scrub-cutters, hunters and shepherds. Later, Mike forged his own life working on the land, and his stories of the characters of the 1980s and 90s, from tradies to digger-drivers, are as hilarious as they are quintessentially Kiwi.

Mike Bellamy is a New Zealand author and earthworks contractor who lives in Taupo, New Zealand. His first book, Tough Country, was about the lives of loggers, hunters, scrub-cutters, fencers and bushmen in the New Zealand hinterland. Bellamy also spent 30 years in the mining country of Western Australia, which is the setting for his second book of yarns, Tough Outback.