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There has been something of a fashion in recent years to dismiss what might loosely be called ‘rural’ poetry because the vast majority of Australians live in cities near the coast. Nevertheless, ‘rural’ poetry keeps appearing, and not just in the works of Les Murray. A considerable number of Australian poets are only one generation away from the land (even John Tranter was born in Cooma), and their childhood memories can often be a rich resource. Admittedly, there are not many actually working it; the reasons for this are often at the core of their poetry. A few perhaps are inclined to be nostalgic (even sentimental) but there is also, as Craig Sherborne has observed, an ‘anti-pastoral strain in Australian poetry’. Among the more recent exponents of this tradition are the late Philip Hodgins, John Kinsella (in his wheat belt poems) and, to judge from A Paddock in His Head, the Victorian poet Brendan Ryan.
- Book 1 Title: A Paddock in His Head
- Book 1 Biblio: Five Islands Press, $21.95 pb, 84 pp
It is crucial to realise than none of these poets, including Ryan, is ‘anti-pastoral’ in any literal sense. In fact, like many people who have left the land, they are deeply ambivalent. They dislike the hardships, the narrowness and meannesses of farming life, but they cannot help obsessively chewing it over in their minds – and, in many cases, making frequent trips back (which tends to prompt new poems).
Ryan grew up in a big Catholic family on a dairy farm at Panmure, in Western Victoria. He now lives within sight of Melbourne at Portarlington, on the Bellarine Peninsula. His memories of life around Panmure are both bleak and vivid. His poems are no advertisements for the dairy industry. Ryan is no less clear-eyed in his portrayal of the impact of the farming life on husbands and wives, sons and daughters. In ‘What It Feels Like’, the poet lists what seem like symptoms of a disease but doesn’t hazard a diagnosis. ‘It is a farmer growing up once his parents have died / three unmarried sisters avoiding eyes on their way out of church ... / teenage lovers divorcing twenty years later ... / a man taking to his car with an axe.’ Interspersed with this, it should be noted, are other lines that are more lyrical: ‘It is a chorus of crows in the red gums by the river ... / It is a gust of wind shuddering through a row of eucalypts.’ Yes, the young men are obsessed with football, they drive too fast and die young, the ‘daughters either married early or left in a hurry’; but there are good reasons, nevertheless, why the poet keeps on coming back, either literally, or to use his rural childhood as material.
There is much negativity in A Paddock in His Head, but on the cover is an almost romantic photograph of dairy country around Warrnambool, taken by the author. Most of the poems end either on a note of depression or anger (the man ‘taking to his car with an axe’) or on a high (such as in the preceding poem, ‘The Outer Limits’, which concludes: ‘Every place on the farm is held together by memory’).
In terms of tone, Ryan favours the laconic and the understated. His poetry is far from plain, however, studded as it is not only with obsessively remembered detail but also with imagery (‘a tree leaning on its elbow’, ‘Like competing stories, jonquils struggle over barbed wire’, etc.). Even so, it is the force of social observation that is the poetry’s mainstay.
Ryan understands farming communities, their explicit and unspoken rules. There are positives, but the negatives predominate. The image of his father who ‘laughed so much / his false teeth were loosened. // He knew everybody and I was the son / nervous, tense, tagging along’. Or, more depressingly, ‘Road accidents, suicides, careless deaths / a district catches its breath // as memories trail a family’s name’.
Not all the poems are on dairy farms, however. About a third of them are located in the western or north-western suburbs of Melbourne. Life may not be so good on the farm, but in poems such as ‘A Summer Conversation’, ‘North’ and ‘A Walk to the Supermarket’, it is hardly better in the city. This is where people who leave the farm wash up, along with migrants of different kinds and those who, in a bar, are ‘two beers from being narky’ and ‘read each other like backroads / frosted glass keeping the world outside’. It is a place where ‘The shopping plaza creates the skyline’ and Commission flats are ‘embedded in a landscape’. This, then, is the other side of Ryan’s doubleness. The farm had to be left – and not without pain. Sadly, the city alternative is no more satisfying. ‘I sign for what I cannot afford, gaining / a petrol discount, more bags than I can carry / and the life I’ve been meaning to live’ (‘A Walk to the Supermarket’).
Ultimately, A Paddock in His Head is neither pessimistic nor resentful. It is a work where life is looked at squarely and recreated with great visual skill, both in what is seen and what is remembered. In effect, both the farm and the western suburbs are viewed with a sort of puzzled affection rather than complaint. As Ryan says at the end of ‘Tourist in My Home Town’: ‘I remember the decision to leave / had nothing to do with returning.’
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