By: Dennis V. Morris
Three books. One name. A life that keeps shifting, carrying old soil forward while chasing new roads.
Mike Crum writes with grit in his hands and wind in his lungs, and it shows. In Roots and Wheels of Change and now in Waka to Whangarei, he builds a body of work that is lived as much as it is written. One book examines how a name is forged. Another looks outward at how a man remakes himself when the map of his days changes. And the newest traces the lines between friendship, identity, and whenua in a country still shaping its story. Together, they read like companion volumes about heritage, risk, and belonging.
Roots begins in a farmhouse above a gurgling stream where the Crums are known for bricks, barley, and a rum that burns like a confession. Cain Crumb learns distilling in the Caribbean, marks his first barrel C. RUM, and returns to the borderlands where England blurs into Wales. Say it fast enough and a family name reshapes itself, as if the letters were hammered on an anvil. From there, the legend grows: masons, farmers, chapel Sundays, fog in the beech woods, and eventually a family stepping onto New Zealand soil with faith and tools. Crum doesn’t write history as dates; he writes it as work, risk, and love carried in crates. You feel hands on stone, see lintels set true, and watch a line of children claim a future their parents could only imagine.
Wheels of Change begins in a quieter key: a long marriage that ends without fireworks and a man who chooses motion over drift. He reaches for the thing that has always set him straight. A bike. A road. Then the world opens. Cairo hums with horns and heat. Sudan offers bread from people who have little but share anyway. Gondar’s castle rises from highland dust. Lions breathe just beyond the canvas. On the Chobe, elephants slide through water like moving islands. There is a day on the Elephant Highway with a mock charge close enough to lift every hair on your body. There is a 216-kilometre push that ends in sugar, grit, and a grin. Through it all, the voice stays plainspoken and kind, making space for courage, doubt, and scars that never asked to be heroic.
And now Waka to Whangarei extends the arc. It begins in the classrooms and fields of the 1970s and 80s, Tikipunga High, where worlds collided, Pākehā and Māori, orchards and city streets, rugby fields and gang colours. At its heart is Pene, a boy who grew into both menace and mana. His story, gang patches, forestry shifts, Harley rides, and finally a return to Te Reo, marae, and mokopuna, run alongside Crum’s own. One life straight, structured, and steady. The other rougher, riskier, but rooted in whakapapa. Their friendship, and the contrast between them, becomes a lens on New Zealand itself: fractured by colonisation, stitched back together by memory, and still learning how to hold two truths at once.
Read these books side by side, and a pattern emerges. In Roots, a family fights for land, steadiness, and a name that will hold. In Wheels of Change, a man rides toward the parts of himself that still want to be tested. In Waka to Whangarei, two lives intertwine, one Pākehā, one Māori, carrying history, hurt, and hope in equal measure. All three are honest about cost. Leaving a valley is hard. Leaving a marriage is, too. So is leaving behind a language and then choosing to reclaim it.
But the pages aren’t heavy. They are alive. They ring with stone on stone, the bite of a tyre on dust, the murmur of waiata rising in a hall. They remind you that heritage is not something stored; it is something lived, spoken, worked, and passed on.
Start with any of them. Then get the others. You’ll come away with smoke in the soil, salt on your lips, and a trilogy that insists memory and motion belong together.
