An unflinching eye
more than 25 years ago, knows and loves this unforgiving country and its people. And it shows. Even such unlovely characters as the violent bigot Painter Hayes are drawn with compassion for a man of his place and time.
This is a brutal, unflinching work with moments of shocking violence. Yet it is rendered with the same compassion, the exquisite tenderness and eye for beauty in the harshest places which made Traitor so affecting and memorable.
Daisley has said Coming Rain was inspired by the 1890 painting Shearing the Rams by renowned Australian artist Tom Roberts, and by two farmers greeting each other, ‘‘had any rain?’’ – the rural landscape of WA is an almost physical expression of the belief that rain is coming, acceptance of both hope and despair, he said.
Twin narratives are interwoven. The fight for survival of a pregnant dingo pitted against both man and nature is told with tenderness and remarkable power. At the same time – mid 1950s – Painter and Lewis McCleod, itinerant shearers, arrive at the station of John Drysdale and his daughter Clara. Lew has travelled with Painter, his mate and de facto father, since his mother entrusted him at age 11. But he is no longer a boy; we first meet the pair on Perth’s Cottesloe beach when Lew lusts after a woman, triggering an explosive collision of class, sexual desire, macho violence and postwar trauma.
But when Lew and Clara fall in love, his bond with Painter is stretched to breaking point and the class and gender tensions of the outback station life are exposed, just as Painter’s earlier racist abuse of station cook Jimmy Wong has dismantled the myth of egalitarian Australia.
This is a challenging and brave book, Daisley tackling myths at the heart of the Australian identity, just as Traitor trod the delicate ground of the Gallipoli myth. Mateship, egalitarianism, friendship and betrayal, racism, stoic endurance – first published at age 56, he writes with a maturity and insight wrought of experience. His writing is at once cruel and gentle, graphically violent, including to animals, yet tender and beautiful.
With Traitor Daisley proved himself a masterful writer. Now he does so again. Both repulsive and beautiful, Coming Rain is a novel which sees beauty in the smallest flower, the flight of birds against a vast Australian sky.