He was a graduate of
University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia and later worked as a researcher at the
University of Adelaide in
Anthropology. He undertook his Ph.D. at the
Australian National University in linguistics and became one among the leading authorities on the languages of Papua New Guinea. He performed several pioneering surveys of the languages of the
Sepik region of
New Guinea. The first of these, his Ph.D. research under the supervision of
Stephen Wurm, was published as
The Ndu languages (1965), and established the existence of this closely related group of languages. In subsequent surveys, Laycock found the
Ndu languages were part of a larger language family extending through the middle and upper Sepik valley (the "Sepik subphylum"), and in 1973 he proposed that these languages formed part of a
Sepik–Ramu phylum. This remained the general consensus in the linguistic world for over 30 years. While more recent work by
William A. Foley and
Malcolm Ross has cast doubt on a link between the
Ramu – Lower Sepik languages and the
Sepik languages, the "Sepik subphylum" seems established as a genuine group. Laycock also first identified the
Torricelli (1968) and
Piawi groups of languages. He published numerous papers in linguistics and anthropology. He was described by his fellow authors of
Skeptical (
David Vernon,
Colin Groves and
Simon Brown) as a 20th-century 'Renaissance Man' as his interests were wide-ranging from Melanesian languages, to
channelling,
Tarot cards and
bawdy songs. He was a Fellow of the
Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), Vice President of the
Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) and a member of
Mensa. A keen member of the
Australian Skeptics he entertained many people at Skeptic's conventions with his demonstrations of
glossolalia and going into trances. After his death, Laycock's meticulous work on the
Enochian 'language' (which was allegedly channelled to an associate of the Elizabethan mystic
John Dee) was turned by a colleague into one of the very few classics of skeptical linguistics. He died, after a short illness, in
Canberra, on 27 December 1988. ==See also==