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- Ray Tyndale, ‘Farm Woman’
- Wakefield Press, Feb 2008: ISBN
9781862547469
- rrp $22.95
Ray Tyndale’s poetry collection
Farm Woman portrays a ‘richly textured life story drawn from hundreds of
interviews with country women….’, with the book’s front cover image saying
it all: the leaf-blown trees and dry eroded hills, the dozing farm animals, the
Akubra-hatted farm woman with direct glance and cheeky grin. Tyndale’s writing
exemplifies a no-nonsense attitude to life as it’s lived on the land, a
roll-up-your-sleeves approach to the daily round of duties closely linked with a faith in
what the future might provide.
The poems
follow a life’s progression through childhood to maturity with their keen-eyed
observations of lessons absorbed along the way: the run-ins with the chookhouse cock
I learnt to fend / off the
rooster with his sharp fighting spur,
childhood
experiences of working the dairy
- the calves no longer gentle
splayed around the
- churn like the spokes of a
cartwheel pushing each
- other off the teats in their
eagerness round and
- round
their tails in a wrigglefrenzy
- soon they had names and took
their turn in the dairy
It’s a
collection with the broad scope of a novel, recording triumphs and setbacks (and all its
stereotypes – she’ll only marry a farmer why send her to agricultural /
college?) in addressing the small-mindedness and limited horizons, the inherent part
and parcel of living in small communities. Marrying into a farming family rewinds the
clock of a rigid pecking order back to zero
- his brother who hates the farm
will inherit it
- because he was born first and
that’s how it is and always
- will be amen
primogeniture rules
with an
accompanying need to prove one’s self beyond the tally of mistakes and accompanying
ridicule: the undercooked roast not laughed away.
Tinsdale’s
language is spare with little concession to the emotive. While real life stories of the
land often end in disaster, in Tyndale’s version resilience leads to eventual triumph
and the declaration I am a farmer.
- our children have broken the
family mold but still have a
- way forward in the world
two farmers’ children
- Dave and me
have produced two more good
- farmers and a vet
with a deep respect for the land
Farm Woman doesn’t
pretend to high art, yet succeeds in what it sets out to do, convinces with the fidelity
of its account of an Australian pastoral way of life.