An Accidental Bushman

An Accidental Bushman

Growing up in small town Taranaki, Ross wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. He just knew that he enjoyed hunting, hiking, trapping, fishing, and exploring the wilds of New Zealand. The outdoors was Ross’ element.

During his first year out of secondary school, a chance newspaper advertisement launched Ross upon a career that would take him through many adventures over four decades, through 42 countries, and innumerable close shaves.

In An Accidental Bushman (the prequel to Cannibals, Crocodiles and Cassowaries, published in 2019), Ross tells about how it all came to be—and about some of the incorrigible larrikins, precarious predicaments, and hair-raising exploits that shaped his training and early career as a Forest Ranger in New Zealand.

Ross has a way of telling a story that draws you into the moment and sweeps you along with the action. There are plenty of laughs (some at Ross’s expense) and enough scrapes and shenanigans to make you wonder how Ross ever survived to write the book!

An Accidental Bushman sometimes reads like a hilarious instruction book of what not to do, with many of Ross’s ill-fated adventures stemming from what simply seems like a good idea at the time—like his disastrous introduction to boating with no experience, no safety gear, and ultimately no working engine! Ross makes a habit of crashing vehicles, manufactures cyanide possum bait (and lives to tell the tale), gets seriously lost in the bush on a hunting trip, spends a night in a haunted hut, gets marooned on an island amidst swirling floodwaters, contracts hypothermia, and survives some memorable culinary disasters. It’s clear that without his uncanny knack of always falling on his feet, Ross wouldn’t be with us to tell these stories today.

Ross also shares yarns of the colourful bunch of larrikins with whom he trained, worked, hunted and socialised, regaling us with tales of interrupted trysts, foul revenge, forest fires, thieving wildlife, crippling hangovers, poaching, parties, and motorised mayhem.

The book includes some 60 photographs from Ross’s vast collection which richly illustrate his writing.

Cannibals, Crocodiles and Cassowaries

Cannibals, Crocodiles and Cassowaries

A New Zealand Forest Ranger in the Jungles of Papua New Guinea

More great yarns and true adventures from the author of "An Accidental Bushman".

It is 1967 in Papua New Guinea.
Despite never having left New Zealand before, Ross takes to living and working in the jungle like he was born there, right down to learning Pidgin and eating bush meat from some particularly suspicious sources.

From hair-raising experiments with stump-blasting to being caught in the arrow-fire of a tribal battle, Ross’s life is never dull. He has a tug-of-war with a reef shark over his dinner catch, witnesses (& photographs) a young men’s initiation ritual that few non-natives have ever seen, visits cannibals and head-hunters in their isolated villages, gets caught in storms at sea in an open boat, climbs to ancient rock-paintings and burial caves, experiences the mysterious power of native superstition, races against time to get death adder victims to hospital, witnesses more post-mortems than he cares to remember, gets arrested in PNG’s Eastern Highlands for photographing a chain gang at work (& talks his way free with photos intact), goes crocodile hunting with a barking dog for bait, seeks out the isolated tribe that suffers from the “laughing death” (kuru), encounters fascinating customs among isolated tribes, and collects the artefacts that formed the backbone of the National Museum of New Zealand’s PNG collection at that time.

When he encounters jungle bridges that have lost their decks, he drives his Landrover across the stringers! When asked by the NZ National Museum’s Curator of Pacific Ethnology to procure or photograph a rare fertility figure that no-one in PNG is even prepared to talk about, Ross makes a secretive deal with a witchdoctor that results in him smuggling one out of a remote village wrapped in his spare shirt.

The book includes some 60 photographs from Ross's vast collection which richly illustrate his writing.

The River is my Highway

The River is my Highway

A New Zealand Forest Ranger in the Jungles of Borneo

Living and working in the remote Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Ross Lockyer had never heard about Indonesia. Yet in 1973, he was offered a forestry supervisor’s job based in Samarinda, Indonesian Borneo, and fell in love with the place on his first day.

Ross worked on the rivers and in the remote jungles of Indonesian Borneo for the next five years, quickly learning local languages, immersing himself in the Indonesian way of life, and learning the ways of the mighty Mahakam River and the Makassar Straits on which he spent most of each working day. 

Compared to pre-independence PNG, living in isolated Samarinda seemed like the height of luxury to Ross, although coming from sparsely populated PNG, Ross’s first experience of Samarinda was a true assault on the senses with its crowds of people, dozens of mosques, crazy drivers, and myriad overpowering smells. Yet overlooking the city was the new and illustrious Lamin Indah Hotel, which boasted a classy bar and restaurant and attractive and sophisticated female staff from Java, in particular the beautiful Lestari—surely a Java Princess!

The third book in the adventurous series about Ross’s life, The River is my Highway brings to life a whole new series of exploits, including provoking and then assuaging a local war, single-handedly destroying village ablution facilities with a speed-boat and facing a barrage of nasty consequences, hunting local wild-life in the most committed way imaginable, loading log-ships at sea, smuggling hi-fi gear, searching for log pirates, and fronting up to the Dayak Queen. Between escapades, Ross somehow finds time to woo the lovely Lestari and start a family.

This book includes some 75 photographs from Ross’s vast collection which richly illustrate his writing.

Get ready for more colourful, laugh-aloud yarns from the master story-teller who brought you An Accidental Bushman and Cannibals, Crocodiles and Cassowaries. Once you start reading, you won’t want to put this book down!

Meanwhile, Back in the Jungle...

Meanwhile, Back in the Jungle…

Living and working in New Zealand in the 1980s isn’t much fun when there are leech-infested jungles somewhere out there to be explored and isolated tribespeople to befriend. So when Ross Lockyer’s mate, Swampy, telephones him with a job offer that seems like simple madness, Ross jumps at the chance to escape civilization yet again.

In his latest book, Ross heads into the remote, unmapped jungles of Indonesian West Papua (Irian Jaya) to set up a base camp from which to survey and establish a new forestry concession. He’s spotted the perfect camp site from the air, but there’s nowhere to land an aircraft, so first he must find his way to it by water, riding a drum of avgas in an overloaded dug-out canoe into the unknown, across the open sea and up a tangle of crocodile-infested, mangrove-clogged creeks. And that’s just the start of it!

The new concession is located in an area where there are no roads, no communications, few villages, and no airstrips—only dense jungle inhabited by a few small, primitive, nomadic tribes, some of whom still practice cannibalism and head hunting. There are no maps, no doctors, and no trappings of civilization. It’s just the way Ross likes it! And with the only decent bathing spot around infested with crocodiles, thousands of miles of jungle to lose his survey crews in, and a mysterious Papuan with blood on his hands for a body-guard, what could possibly go wrong?

Ross is in for some real eye-openers this time, experiencing the miracles of modern medicine, eating bizarre bush tucker, meeting jungle tribespeople so isolated they have never seen a white man before, and narrowly avoiding death on numerous occasions. Then there’s the flood that threatens to wipe out all he’s worked for.

And when that’s all sorted to his satisfaction and life begins to get a bit cushy, it’s time to take on the jungles and tigers of Sumatra. Throw in the odd corrupt official, heart-stopping boat ride in the dark, wild buffalo encounter, a round-the-world trip with more trips across the Argentinian-Brazilian border than Ross cares to remember, and trouble with the Sumatran locals, and surely it’s time for Ross to bring his wife and kids over to join in the fun!

Get ready for more hilarious and heart-stopping tales from the author of An Accidental Bushman, Cannibals, Crocodiles and Cassowaries and The River is my Highway. This time the yarns go global!

This book contains some 100 photographs from Ross’s vast collection, which richly illustrate his writing.

But That's What Elephants Are For!

But That's What Elephants Are For!

In his fifth book, Ross emerges from the remote jungles of North Sumatra, Indonesia, to take up a Managing Director’s role in the bustling city-state of Singapore.

But prior to that, in 1984, when Ross receives an invitation to undertake a forestry consulting job in the secretive, closed country of Burma, he can’t turn it down. And it is here, in a perilous land split by militant factions and guerilla warfare, that Ross comes face to face with the beautiful and powerful Burmese timber elephants. It is fascination at first sight, and Ross regales his readers with wonderful stories of these enthralling creatures, both emanating from his own experiences and from those of the men who lovingly train and work with them. Ross’s Burma story is a unique insight into the fascinating life and work of the Burmese timber elephant and the mysterious teak forests where no foreigner has been permitted to venture since the British departed in 1948.

Fortunately, once Ross moves to Singapore in 1989, he’s not required to operate a desk full-time, and soon he’s off on business with his usual boundless energy to South Africa, Swaziland, Thailand, The Philippines, Japan, and many of his old haunts around Indonesia. He even manages to negotiate the red tape of communist China to achieve a three-week lecture tour in the Land of the Dragon, accompanied by government minders, and staying in guesthouses on communes where he gets to experience the dubious joys of Chinese haute cuisine. Snake soup is just the start of it!

Ross also fills his readers in on some of the adventures that happened between books. Join Ross as he snorkels among the eerie wrecks of Japanese WWII aircraft off the end of the Tarawa Airfield in Kiribati, and as he evades death around South-East Asia by plane, train, crocodile, and a Dayak uprising.

Settle in for more riveting and hilarious real-life yarns from the author of An Accidental Bushman; Cannibals, Crocodiles and Cassowaries; The River is my Highway; and Meanwhile, Back in the Jungle…:  This latest collection of adventures won’t disappoint!

This book includes some 100 unique photographs from Ross’s vast collection, which richly illustrate his writing.