McDonald’s literary career began as a poet in the early 1970s. The elegant constraint of that craft informed his first novel, 1915 (1977). In The Ballad of Desmond Kale (2006) – which won the Miles Franklin Award, as this novel might – McDonald made his initial assay of the saga form (and into the making of folklore, as the title implies) with a tale of colonial pioneering, especially as this concerned merino sheep breeding. The sheep are back in When Colts Ran, on outback stations or anywhere that experts argue about the merits of a particular ram, and while being driven to the coast: ‘sheep covering many acres moved like cloud shadow.’ This is one of the striking similes that punctuate a virtuoso prose performance. It is both precise in image and expansive in the subject to which it gestures.

This is how McDonald introduces us to his title character, and to his title: ‘When Colts ran the ghost of himself led on, always too far ahead, always out of reach.’ Kingsley Colts (born in 1926: chronology is carefully observed throughout the book) is an orphan. After his father’s death, Colts passed into the guardianship of a swaggering veteran of the Great War, Major Dunc Buckler, MC, and his wife Veronica, a celebrated painter and a rightly aggrieved wife, ‘not being wanted by the fool she loved’. Buckler sees himself both as a prophet of Australia’s future and as the custodian of its martial past. He is ‘the living ghost of old mates, the sworn defender who spoke for the dead’. Veronica is more inclined to keep her own counsel, but it is through her estimation that we have a key to the life that Colts will lead. He is ‘a seeking soul. Such figures walked through the world half in, half out.’

Expelled from Sydney’s Cranbrook School for breaking the jaw of Wayne ‘Chook’ Hovell (whom we will meet again in Colts’s company on the book’s last page), the youth is sent to learn about the pastoral industry. On Eureka Station, managed resentfully for its city owners by a man named Oakeshott, Colts meets Randolph Knox, also an acclaimed sportsman but, unlike the disgraced Colts, former head boy of their old school. Their often fractured friendship, homoerotic on Randolph’s side and a lighter business for Colts, is the central thread in the novel and one followed for more than six decades. A good deal of their lives will be spent in the region of Flint, home to the Knox ancestral acres, and inland from the south coast of New South Wales. (By coincidence, Flint was the name of the town in Chris Womersley’s fine recent novel, Bereft). The Knoxes affect ‘a feudal relationship with Flint Junction, calling the town the village to their Sydney friends’. In that town, Colts’s existence will become increasingly hapless and marginalised.

But this being a saga novel, Colts – like Buckler (and unlike Randolph, whose brother, however, has been killed on Crete) – has been to war, in his case supplying coast watchers in New Guinea and losing a lung in the course of it. While Dunc Buckler (the ‘swash’ implicit) has written a memoir of Gallipoli, Up Against It (Angus & Robertson, 1935), and will be prominent in the right-wing New Guard of servicemen after the war, Colts is a laconic veteran. He goes on to serve with the Commonwealth Occupation Forces in Japan and then to world travels that do not see him home till 1949. Thereafter he will find a life fulfilled in many ways, but never domestically. He becomes a solitary within a community to whom his exploits and mishaps are legendary.

McDonald also has a whole continent of which to speak. He describes the horrors of drought on the Darling: ‘a scene of desolation. Bleached bones were scattered under trees. Hide and hair scrawled in shifting dust along sagging wire fences.’ Dunc’s two draught horses lie ‘stretched with dry hide where they had fallen into their last grins’. Colts and Veronica encounter, and lose their motorbike to, the Scottish goat woman Lizzie Walker, who was ‘travelling hurt through a band of poor soil called Australia’. Yet her resilience is undiminished. In one of the funniest moments in the novel, she provides a mock-heroic catalogue of past lovers. Of one of them she recalls that ‘Luton’s hams were like a grasshopper’s drumsticks from operatin’ the pedal radio on guvvermint outposts and chasin’ gins’. She adds, direly, for Colts’s benefit: ‘See what ye’re bound for, what ye’ll be?’

When Colts Ran has recurrent jokes about outback chronicler and show pony Ion Idriess, and about the great Australian jaw – Randolph’s ‘like a bag of marbles’, Hovell’s forever clicking in and out of place. As the book proceeds, characters run wild, and into one another. There is Jack Slim, an unrepentant Stalinist and brilliant teacher who is moved from Pooncarie to Flint, his son Eric and discontented wife Pamela (lover of Colts); Fred Donovan, son of Dunc and of the far western hotelier Rusty Donovan; the footballing reverend Vince Powell and his son, scientist-to-be Normie. McDonald’s anatomy of Australian society encompasses the church: Presbyterian ministers forced to learn Old Testament Greek; ‘Cattle Ticks’ meant to hoe the celibacy row; and the complacent Anglican hierarchy that reproves Vince’s enthusiasms (‘Allowances were made for the phase in any man’s life when the scriptures needed living out’).

The decades speed by. The 1960s are ‘a time of disintegration, disrespect, disenchantment, disaccord’. The 1970s are thronged with ‘wispy-bearded, sex-war veterans and used aromatic oils’, while after the 1990s ‘came that whirling run of zeroes’. Buckler survives at least until his disappearance in 1985. He was ‘an old age campaigner of a sort made in Australia … mad hatters, misplaced geniuses, authentic ratbags’. (‘Made in Australia’, by the way, was the working title of McDonald’s novel.) After death, Buckler is even recommended for inclusion in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, as ‘racist, wholly forgotten, troublesome, egomaniacal, warped but peerlessly brave’. There are different kinds and exhibitions of heroism on display in When Colts Ran. Often they complement a lostness, a loneliness of spirit that may be masked by gregariousness. This is a tale, also, of muted tragedies, as one motif reminds us: Veronica’s famous painting Goats, the goat woman and ‘the Greeks have a word for it: goat-song’ – that is, tragedy. This novel, so hectically commenced, ends calmly, in benediction. It is McDonald’s finest work and clearly one of the novels of the decade.

CONTENTS: NOVEMBER 2010