[There is a lapse in Man Shy] during the critical incident of the fight between the two bulls for possession of the red heifer. The duel is at its height and one expects a climax such as Hemingway so skilfully and excitingly presents in his studies of bull-fights, when "There was an epic quality in that battle. It had to be! It was an inevitable occurrence in the herd life", Davison interposes and drops one flat. "Epic!" The grand epithet minified by the strain to impress, through decade after decade, of beggared journalists and film-publicity men! It is no use Mr. Davison's saying that the combat was epic: he has to present it as such, to give us the so-called "epic" in action. Instead of doing that, he tries to induce an effect by the use of a cheapened word, which is followed by clichés. Further,… the narrator intrudes here in the role of commentator, and the naturalness and self-sufficiency of the tale are thereby impaired.

One suspects from this anti-climax the presence of a radical hesitancy in Davison: that he feels unequal to the great moment, unable to face it, and therefore takes refuge in banality. The same fault may be noticed in his shorter story, "The Road to Yesterday"…. It is a piece of work remarkable for the close knowledge of farming conditions and practice that it shows, and one follows all the details with the intense interest that could not be given to a mere agricultural manual. By means of a physical return to the place, and a mental return to the time, Davison relates how Arthur Sims cleared, cultivated and made fruitful a tract of bush-land: man mastering matter. But in course of time the old man retired to the city and died, his family dispersed, the farm was abandoned, and when the narrator saw it again, "little by little the bush was reclaiming its own". "The bush was reclaiming its own"! At that jejune phrase the whole story collapses, and the visitor is left to find his way back to town unattended by the reader's interest. If all the minute description, all the detailed narration, were to lead merely to such a climax, so poorly expressed, then, one wonders, was the story worth telling at all? It is true that it all means something to the traveller, but if to him the great moment presented itself only as "the bush reclaiming its own" then he was not personally interesting enough to bother about.

On the other hand, Davison's story "The Good Herdsman" … is possibly as near perfection, even at the crisis, as this writer's work could approach. That is because the crisis is a mental one, and Davison does seem to be more at home with states of mind. (pp. 11-12)

Man Shy has deservedly won praise as an animal story and as an exemplification of the love of freedom that moves beast as well as man. Perhaps it has been overpraised. Stories of this kind, which are the result of observation, treated with sympathy, written without affectation, are too rare in Australian literature. But it is not perfect, and some day, one hopes, the author will find time to reconsider some of its passages and also to attend to a few crudities of presentation … and certain flaws of style. (p. 12)