The Brumby by Mary Elwyn Patchett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When I began this, I had two problems. The first was that I kept confusing it with The Silver Brumby, a series I adore with a fierce and heartfelt passion, and it took a while for me to disentangle The Brumby from that. Both books are set in similar spaces, feature a horse called Yarraman, and a silver brumby. I even got to the point of wondering whether they were the same authors and had to do some research before I could satisfactorily figure out who was who and what was what.
My second issue was that this felt a little slow, a little stiff, and I wasn’t quite sure if there was going to be enough space in it for me as a reader. Some texts can feel tight like that and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that they need to be told and don’t necessarily need to be heard by me. Or sometimes it’s that my reading and the context that I bring to it don’t connect. Not everything is everybody and that’s okay. And for a long time I wondered if this was going to be one of them.
And then all of a sudden, I started to understand it. The Brumby is a story that’s cut from the same cloth as things like My Friend Flicka and For Love of a Horse and it is really rather good. You know the drill: a child wants – needs – a horse. The child is lonely in a way that, perhaps, they do not completely understand or even realise. They seek completion. And the horse will provide that. They will love and through that love learn what life can be.
The child at the heart of The Brumby is Joey; a boy who lives in the countryside in a place past the end of everything. This is the wild edge of the known world and it is brutal. Life is hard and often violent. People make choices that are not easy nor are they wise. The day can turn dark, so very swiftly.
Patchett understands how difficult life can be in this space and what it takes to survive that and trusts the reader to understand that as well. Chapters shift from Joey’s perspective through to that of the brumbies and somehow it never loses track. It’s full of such respect for the reader. And I respect that immeasurably. I respect how Patchett goes to the reader: love is wonderful but it costs and sometimes it might hurt and sometimes you might lose everything. It’s bare boned, emotional, vicious, and often incredible stuff.
(It’s important to note that I do read this as an adult and so, younger readers might still find some of this difficult to handle. If they’re managing something like Green Grass of Wyoming and particularly the more adult angles such as Nell’s story, then I think they’ll be alright).
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Daisy May Johnson 
I did exactly that when I saw the title of your post – assumed it was connected to the Silver Brumby books!
It really baffled me! I don’t know enough about Australian children’s literature to figure it all out but there must have been something in the water that year – they’re both published 1958 as well! I need to look into it some more, I think!