The Shiralee by D'Arcy Niland
London: Horwitz Publications, 1969 (first published 1955)
I'm so disappointed that it has taken until now for me to read this book - I'm a victim of my own snobbery. I remember seeing what I perceived to be the sickly-sweet ads for the 1987 miniseries of this book - never watched it but formed an opinion anyway, which is a trap I often fall into.
But back to the book: it is excellent. The story of itinerant worker Macauley who is travelling the Black Soil Plains of New South Wales with his four year old daughter Buster. During the course of the novel we learn that Macauley has taken Buster with him out on the road after finding his wife in bed with another man. This is not the first time he has travelled these roads, and during the course of the book Macauley meets up with people from his past, as well as having run-ins with the Law. While Macauley has an embittered view of human nature and people, he is mostly met with kindness and understanding on his journey - kindness and understanding that he often rejects owing to a prideful stubbornness that means he can't accept help or a kind word.
Buster is, like many young children, able to take most things in her stride, but to Macauley she is a burden, another Shiralee to be carried and which weighs him down. This book is not only a physical journey for Macauley, but an emotional one as well, where he comes to realise not only Buster's love for him, but his love for her. When she is hit by a car and in hospital, he realises that he can't do without her, and will fight his wife for custody.
While the story is focussed on Macauley, the other characters and events speak of a hard time in rural Australia, when work was difficult to find and most everybody had to scratch to make a living. Niland had himself picked up his Shiralee and tramped the roads he writes about, and so the story has a ring of authenticity about it. During the course of the book we meet displaced Aboriginals and gain an insight into the continuing indignity they had to suffer, tramps and swagmen who had spent their entire lives on the periphery of society and how that affects them, and those that run the show - policemen and station owners and their prejudices and proclivities.
In fact it is one of the tramps that takes Macauley to task for what he's doing. He reluctantly leaves Buster with the "crazy" tramp Desmond while he ducks into town on a shopping trip. Macauley gets involved in a fight and is put in prison, where he spends the night imagining all sorts of terrible things, but comes back to find that Desmond has looked after Buster very well. It is then that Desmond sits Macauley down and talks to him - "Hear that river? There's water coming from somewhere and going somewhere and so on. It flows on a set course for thousands of miles. It's not only getting away from something, it's getting to something. It's getting away from the mountains and it's getting away to the ocean. Well, I'll tell you something. That's the way a man's life ought to be...otherwise, there's no purpose."
Desmond's little speech is the crux of the novel. Macauley has up until then been running away from things - his wife, responsibility, settling down. After he leaves Desmond, he begins to think about the future, mainly for Buster, but also for himself. While the novel does not show us whether Buster and Macauley make a new life for themselves, we do know that they will be moving to something rather than away from something, which ends the novel on a positive note.
This is a well-written novel with a good plot and well-shaped characters. It is harshly realistic, and yet emotionally tender at times. It is a classic, if an under-appreciated one.
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