Extract: Shane Cameron Mountain Warrior

This is the gripping, often surprising story of one of New Zealand’s toughest and most resilient fighters.

Shane Cameron rose from humble beginnings to become a dominant force in the Australasian heavyweight division. Known for his explosive power and fearless fighting style, Cameron captured multiple national titles and fought ‘The Fight of the Century’ against David Tua in the biggest boxing match in New Zealand history.

Raw, inspiring and unflinchingly honest, this book is more than a boxing story – it’s a testament to resilience, redemption and the fighting spirit of a Mountain Warrior.

Extracted with kind permission from Shane Cameron Mountain Warrior with Steve Kilgallon, published by Bateman Books, RRP $39.99.

Chapter Two - TINIROTO: A CHILDHOOD LESS ORDINARY

One of the earliest lessons I ever learned was to never punch your boss.

It would be fair to say my dad can be a bit of a hothead. He was working on a farm when one thing led to another, then Dad pulled the farm manager from his horse and whacked him.

Instant dismissal. Because Dad lived and worked on the farm, we also lost our home. We had nowhere to go; the only place was the Gisborne campgrounds.

So for nine months, we lived in a tent. I was four years old, my brothers were five and nearly three. As a little kid, it seemed like a cool adventure, but it’s probably why I’m no fan of camping nowadays.

That interlude aside, it was a great childhood. I mostly grew up in the tiny village of Tiniroto, an hour inland from Gisborne on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

I always say Tiniroto is in the middle of nowhere, but at the same time, it’s in the middle of everywhere. It consists of a pub and a school. The pub has closed down now, and the school is hanging on. There are probably 30 people in a 20-kilometre radius; your nearest neighbour might be five kilometres away.

My mum is from the Māhia Peninsula in Hawke’s Bay, and my father is from Wellington, which is where they met, but they moved to Tiniroto when I was three because Dad, who was a spray-painter and panelbeater by trade, had always wanted to get into farming.

My mum’s Māori and my dad’s Scottish, so as the old joke goes, one half wants to get pissed, and the other half doesn’t want to pay for it. Dad’s father Robert Cameron came over on the boat from Scotland when he was seven and he boxed — that was an inspiration for me when he told me his stories of running up hills at three in the morning and sparring with no mouthguard, headgear or proper gloves.

I grew up with three brothers. My oldest half-brother Mike (he has a different dad), who came along first, was whānga‐ied (adopted) out to my mother’s parents in Māhia. We’re all still close with Mike despite that. Next is Rob, who is a year older than me, and then my other brother is Gavin, who is a year younger. Both brothers ended up as butchers, Gav in Cooper’s Beach in Northland and Rob owning a couple of shops in Wellington.

Mum and Dad got back on their feet and onto another farm. As a shepherd, Dad would get work and accommodation on a farm for a year or two, then move on to the next one.

At seven, the place we lived at was called ‘Just Married’. Why? Well, that’s because that was what was sprayed on the roof. One of the shepherds who’d lived there previously had married and well. . . the signwriting took a long time to fade. It was a tiny three-bed, one-bath cottage which was deathly cold — with no insulation we would wake up in the morning with dew on our blankets. I remember having terrible nightmares in that house and to this day, my brothers and I reckon one of the rooms was haunted. But it also provided a lot of good memories.

I was quite free range as a child. In fact, we’re lucky we’re still alive. Dad would be at work, and after all her jobs were done for the day, Mum would be reading. She’d read her Mills & Boon books, and we would play havoc. We grew up fast, but it was such a good childhood.

I’ve always loved routine, and my routine at Just Married was to jump off the school bus, and go catch my horse Ben, saddle him up and ride over to the next farm where my schoolmate Anna Spence lived. She’d get her horse, and we would ride out to the back of their 1500-acre farm. I can’t remember what we talked about, but we’d do it every single night, for two or three hours at a time. At one of the other farms, I had a three-kilometre walk to school. I can remember a magpie that had a habit of dive-bombing me every morning as I walked there. I complained to Dad. He got the shotgun out and killed the magpie. Problem solved.

It was here that I got my first pet, a possum named Percy. Not just a pet possum, but an award-winning pet possum. My mate Jock Spence was walking home one day and saw a possum that had been run over by a car with a baby, still alive, in its pouch. He took the baby home, but his family didn’t want it, so he offered it to me. Rachel Moore’s particularly charming dog usually cleaned up at the Tiniroto school pet day, but not that year: I had trained Percy so that if I popped him on the ground, then walked away and tapped my leg, he would bolt over and run up the inside of my shirt and pop his head out of the collar.

I’ve still got all Percy’s certificates somewhere. Percy met a rather heartbreaking end. We went away for a long weekend to Wellington as a family. I left Percy in a closet because I thought it would be warm, dry and dark. Being about nine, I didn’t consider food and drink. When I got back, he was stone cold. With tears in my eyes, I buried him in the garden.

At Just Married, we would roam up to a wide river nearby and meet the Spence boys, who lived about 5 kilometres away on another farm, to jump into a swimming hole there. The river was probably as wide as 30 metres in some places. Haring off to swim in the river seemed absolutely normal back then, but I’d never let my kids do that, unsupervised, at the age of eight or nine.

From a very young age, I knew what I wanted to be: a shepherd. Ride a horse to work every day, muster the sheep and the cows.

My late uncle ‘Blue’ was a huge inspiration to me and drove my ambition to be a farmer, and I learned a lot from him. I was always drawn to my uncle; I’d go to work with him and ride horses. He was a musterer, and he would go around different stations for a week or so, with his horse and team of dogs, to bring sheep in to shear or drench them, or wean them, or bring the cattle in, or shift them to another paddock.

It was at Just Married that I got my first horse. It had been spooked and taken off on its previous owner, who fell, but her foot caught in the stirrup, and she was dragged along, breaking her neck. The horse was due to be shot, but my dad persuaded the owners to give it to me. I was probably eight years old when I got Ben, still so small that to put on his saddle, I had to stand on a slope and reach up.

I’d sometimes ride Ben the half kilometre to school from our next house, at Freehold Farm, and tie him up in the paddock next door — a paddock I actually own now. There were just 34 kids at the school back then, but I believe there’s as few as eight now. If I didn’t ride Ben, my routine was a circuitous route of 4.5 kilometres on foot, because I would walk 2 kilometres up a gravel road to my mate Alan Kingi’s place to collect him, before we would go another 600 metres along to another pal, Shaun Petty, before heading on to school.

Freehold Farm was the first place my parents owned together: four acres of land and a rundown three-bedroom cottage which cost them $10,000.

They carried out a renovation almost immediately, putting in a new bathroom. We put in the insulation ourselves. You should, of course, wear overalls and respirators when you’re installing it to stop the fibreglass strands breaking off and irritating your skin — we didn’t. I can remember going to scratch my bum and thinking ‘What’s wrong?’ It was red raw. The farm was deep in snow at the time and the pipes were frozen, so I couldn’t go and have a shower. My dad’s suggestion was to sit in the snow. I would have looked quite unusual sliding down the hill with my pants off.

Shane Cameron Mountain Warrior is available in all good bookstores now.