More than half the book focuses on the author’s childhood and teenage years. One of ten children, Ryan grew up on a dairy farm in western Victoria. These chapters balance the rhythms of rural life, the bonds of community, and the beauty of nature against anti-pastoral elements – the brutality of farming and the monotonous drudgery of the work – together with examples of bigotry and social conformity, with the balance tipped toward the latter. It’s three parts Henry Lawson to one part Banjo Paterson. The descriptions of farm machinery and the routines of work are invariably interesting. An early chapter, ‘The Killers’, presents the slaughter of a sheep in harrowing detail:

Once the knife was sharpened and warmed in hot water, the next job was to prise apart the lice-ridden folds of wool, cut the neck and lean my weight onto the sheep to steady the death tremors. To make sure it was properly dead, the sheep’s neck had to be broken by pulling its head back against my knee until the neck bones cracked, the eyeballs rolled back and the gagging ceased.

From the author’s early teens, there is never a hint that he will remain on the land or continue in the Catholic faith. The subject to which the writing returns most often is boredom and the dream of escape. Posters of rock stars, for Ryan and his brother Mick, were ‘like prayers that we returned to each night, and which gave us more meaning than the rosary could ever give’. The author’s experiences of a Catholic high school in Warrnambool were mostly unhappy, and the Christian Brothers failed to convince him of the value of education. He sought solace in watching speedway races, organising discos, playing footy for his local club – here the book comes closest to a paean – and underage drinking in country pubs. This section of the book is peppered with family history, including the story of Ryan’s grandmother, who cared for the writer Alan Marshall. The most compelling of these chapters is ‘Ash Wednesday: A Memorial’, in which the author details in vivid and moving prose the unfolding tragedy, his brush with death, and his heroic rescue of neighbours:

The family scrambled in and I took off, but I was driving into a whiteout. I couldn’t see where I was driving. The children were crying. One of them asked their mother, ‘Mum, are we going to die?’ I drove slowly, trying to feel the road beneath the tyres, listening for the faint pummelling sound.

Brendan Ryan (photograph by Alison Girvan)

Ryan reflects on the devastation in the hard-edged poem ‘The Morning After’, in which dead cows are bulldozed ‘ten at a time, sideways, headfirst thudding / into place amongst the flies’.

The concluding third of the book, which concerns Ryan’s drift from job to job, his nascent writing, a lot of partying, and visits to (and reflections on) his place of origin, lacks the verve and ironic distance that make the likes of Peter Goldsworthy, Craig Sherborne, and Clive James such readable memoirists. But the final pages are redeemed to a degree by the eloquent titular chapter and a memorable portrait of the poet John Forbes.

The essays originally written as stand-alone pieces for Heat and Southerly tend to be the sharpest. I wonder if Ryan’s craft benefited from this focus, or if these pieces were edited with greater rigour. In many places the book is mired in the quotidian and inconsequential:

For many years, Mum preferred velvet soap and Jex soap pads to wash up with. The steel wool soap pads become smaller and smaller the more they were used and the grey hairs often congealed to a small bun from use. While Annie or Theresa might wash up, Kathryn, Mick or I might wipe. Tea towels were flicked at each other’s legs while we waited for a plate to be washed. Sometimes it took nearly an hour to wash up, but if Mum was washing, a lot of things could be talked about in that time.

Some of the chapters read like first drafts, suffering from unnecessary redundancy and cliché. Many sentences are laboured, or lose their way along the short distance they have to travel (‘The bedrooms that siblings share are often essential to the growth of brothers’; ‘Harrison’s brothers didn’t turn up at the school and by the next week the incident was forgotten by some, but not my reputation within the class’). The use of terms like ‘reflect’, ‘think’, and ‘remember’ serve as warnings of some superfluous explaining, and many of the offending sentences bookend the author’s reflections. To this extent, Walk Like a Cow doesn’t do Brendan Ryan the poet proper justice.

As social history this memoir is a valuable document; as a family history it will be of great interest, as it will be to those with geographical associations. But in terms of literary merit the book is one of the most uneven I have read. While some chapters are gripping and eloquent, I couldn’t recommend delaying an encounter with Ryan’s poetry by reading this book from cover to cover. The leaner, polished work that might have emerged from a more rigorous edit: that book I could have recommended.