Set in 1956, Coming Rain delves into Australian bush mythology to examine romantic notions of mateship. Itinerant shearers, Painter and Lew, are a makeshift father and son team, unrelated but thrown together when Lew is placed in Painter’s care by his mother. When adolescent Lew falls for a squatter’s daughter, trouble brews. Wildness, and the possibility and futility of taming it, becomes a key theme.

The opening scenes introduce an unexpected heroine, a dingo searching desperately for prey to nourish her unborn pups. Cut then to a sad and sultry war widow emerging from the surf on Cottlesloe beach. A fight ensues between lifesavers and the shearers, one that foreshadows the novel’s preoccupations with love, violence, abandonment, class, loneliness, trust and loyalty.

Flipping back and forth between the shearers’ lives and the dingo’s quest for survival, there is frequent violence, unsettling and graphically depicted. Men brawl. Animals are hunted, culled and kill each other but Coming Rain is also a revelation in its quiet and beautiful observation of labour and landscape. Daisley’s reverence and knowledge of the outback transcends the cliché of heat, dust and flies, inviting readers into a mesmerising world of desert flora and fauna. Indigenous terms mingle with language that is direct and visceral. The minutiae of the woolshed and animal behaviour are brought to life with skill and affection.

Sally Keighery is a freelance reviewer.