That bloke from the bush

''They will come to hate it,'' says the man who until this year had described himself as Australia's longest-serving opposition leader. ''It's a miserable existence.'' And he'd know.

Peter Julian Ryan, who turned 60 the month before he became Deputy Premier, arrived in Victorian politics 18 years ago almost accidentally and a little hesitantly. He wasn't a National Party member and had never thought about a parliamentary career until tapped on the shoulder in 1991 by the outgoing member for Gippsland South, Tom Wallace.

Tony Stewart, his then partner in the Gippsland law firm Warren Graham and Murphy, says: ''Tom hand-picked Peter because Peter was such a prominent young outstanding-citizen type, a leader in the Sale community who everybody liked.''

But Ryan says his first response to Wallace was: ''Now why would I want to do a silly thing like that?''

He might have revisited the question many times since because his political ascent has been slow and often frustrating. Under the rampant Jeff Kennett, the Nationals, nominally in coalition, were very much the junior partner, and Ryan spent eight years on a backbench.

But he denies that he and Kennett disliked each other and says one former staffer's claim that they once almost came to blows is ''not in my nature''. (Besides, he notes, Jeff was a big fella, adding slyly, ''and he's a bigger bloke now than he was then''.)

When Kennett fell in 1999 and after departing Nationals leader Pat McNamara's heartland seat of Benalla was lost in a by-election in 2000, Ryan was leading a party that was a bare rump, with just 11 seats in both Houses and the wide perception that the Nationals were facing irrelevancy.

''It was a hell of a blow,'' he says. ''It was a long drive back from Benalla to Sale, I can give you the mail.'' It was on that drive that he decided to take the Nationals out of coalition and begin the slog to rebuild the party. But he had dealt with adversity before.

Ryan was born in Lockington, 198 kilometres north of Melbourne, near Echuca. His father, Brian Patrick Ryan, drove stock transports and his mother, Marie Teresa, was a primary school teacher. He had an older brother, Adrian, and a younger sister, Genevieve, and when Peter was about 10, their father became ill with what they later learned was a brain tumour. The family moved to Bendigo, then four years later to Shepparton to be closer to relatives. ''Ryans and rabbits and Moylans are in about equal numbers around Dookie and Shep,'' he says.

Ryan was in his final year at Shepparton High when his father died, on July 12, 1968. The same year, Adrian was called up for National Service and his mother was left to shoulder the load. ''My mother is now in her 92nd year and is an absolutely extraordinary woman,'' he says. ''She went back to teaching with the Marist Brothers and taught with them for 28 years. They ultimately made her an honorary member of the Marist order. My mum.''

Darren Chester, now federal member for Gippsland, was Ryan's chief of staff from 2004 to 2008, and describes him as very driven: ''I think the fact that he lost his father at a young age, in his quieter moments he'd admit that probably drives him to achieve even greater.''

''I don't directly see it,'' says Ryan. ''But I think of him daily, I think of him as still being here in many senses … He was a great bloke, terrific bloke. Man with an easy laugh, very well-respected by his peers. He was a strapping individual and one of the tragedies of seeing him go was he was six stone [38 kilograms] in the old terms when he went, from a guy who was about 13 stone in his prime.''

Ryan says he mainly loved school for the cricket and football in which he says he was ''very keen but very ordinary'', although he was full-forward in the Shepparton United under-17s premiership side.

He finished school with a narrow pass, but a family friend, Jack Sullivan, offered him a job in his Melbourne law firm if he undertook the now defunct articled clerks' course at RMIT. The family moved to Box Hill and Ryan took to the first year of full-time study with the same rigour he had shown in high school.

He would race to be at RMIT for the 7.45am-9am lecture. ''Then I'd hare out of the lecture room, back to the caf, to be at the card table by 20 past nine. I played a fair bit of cards during the day, on those days when the footy team wasn't training.'' Eventually he ''came to my senses'' and managed to scrape through.

The next four years combined lectures with office and court work and Ryan found one - in fact, two - of his greatest loves. Sullivan, he says, let him have his head and by 20 or 21 he was briefing barristers in the Supreme and County courts. ''I loved it. Very dynamic, very combative and probably the purist form in many ways of being able to put your case and see a result.''

His growing responsibilities were not reflected in his office accommodation, but even that turned out to be serendipitous. ''My office was a very humble environment, indeed it was part of the kitchen, under the staircase,'' he recalls. ''I was in there one day, beavering away, and this pert young thing presented herself from across the way, and her name was Patricia Christine Cusack. We struck up an association.''

In fact, Ryan was smitten. He pursued Trish Cusack in the face, he says, of stiff competition, ''and in the end I had the very great fortune to marry my very best mate. How lucky am I?''

He remains loudly and openly besotted: ''She has enormous grace and charm … she's very generous of heart, she is a beautiful person in every sense of the word and we're inseparable. Great friends, great mates.'' They have three children, Sara, 31, James, 29, and Julian, 25.

In 1974 Ryan moved to Sale to join Warren Graham and Murphy. ''A bloke I'd never met, who was a partner in that firm, offered me a job,'' he says. He took it, he admits, for one simple reason: ''Money. It was a staggering amount of money, I think about $12,000 a year. So I said, 'Yes, I'd love to' and then got a map.''

Tony Stewart was the man who offered Ryan the job, on a recommendation from Martin Shannon, QC. ''He came down as a newly admitted guy and took the whole thing by the scruff of the neck and made it into a very substantial litigation practice in the space of a few years,'' he remembers.

''He was very good in court. Good on his feet, quick, prepared well but always had a very good demeanour, didn't do the block … If you talked with police from the old days they'd have said he was a pleasure to deal with because although he goes in hard he'd always do it with good humour and always operates on the basis that everybody there is doing the best they can for the job they've been assigned.''

Ryan says his experiences with police in those days, from the opposite end of the bar table, are what attracted him to the police portfolio - seen by many as a goldmine in opposition but a poisoned chalice in government. ''I came to know policing and I really admire those who wear the blue,'' he says.

Not many coppers reciprocate the admiration for lawyers. ''That's true,'' he laughs. ''Until they need a good one.''

Ryan became managing partner. But by 1991, Sale was in deep trouble. Esso had announced it was moving its headquarters from Sale to Southbank and the National Safety Council had collapsed. About 800 jobs were being lost and Ryan was chairing public meetings and sitting on economic development committees when Tom Wallace tapped him on the shoulder and suggested he stand for Parliament. He was preselected on May 21, 1991.

'I'm a great believer in the fact that you can only stand outside the ring for so long voicing an opinion before you have to throw your hat in,'' he says. ''When it matters, that's what you should do - either that or shut up and go away.''

Nine years later, especially after the loss of Benalla, Ryan might have been forgiven for thinking he should have taken the latter option. ''The perception was that we were no longer a relevant force,'' he says. ''No matter what we might have thought was the reality, the perception was that we'd been subsumed by the presence of the Liberals.''

His decision to dissolve the coalition was surprising but both courageous and right, says Darren Chester. ''I'd go as far as saying that without Peter Ryan in that role, the Nationals may not exist in Victoria today,'' he says. ''You can't take a beating like that and think it was someone else's fault, you have to take a good look at yourself.''

Ryan, he says, doggedly set out to recalibrate the Nationals' policies and directions; reconnect with its traditional constituency; and bolster the spirits of the tiny core of members still left. His personality was vital in attracting quality candidates.

''I set out to fix it and I did,'' says Ryan, listing the victories along the way: Retaking Benalla in 2002, when Bracks was at his zenith; defeating independent Russell Savage in Mildura and taking the Labor heartland seat of Morwell in 2006; reforging a coalition with Ted Baillieu's Liberals in 2008; and finally beating the last of the Bracks-era independents, Craig Ingram, recording the Nationals' highest primary vote and winning 10 lower house seats in November's victory.

Even Labor politicians give Ryan grudging credit for his part in the win and Bracks says the Nationals-driven Regional Growth Fund is ''the only coherent plan the Coalition has''. Weekly Times editor Ed Gannon wrote in March that the ''junior party appears to be running rings around the Liberals''.

The Victorian Farmers Federation's Andrew Broad disagrees. The Ryan/Baillieu team will be complementary, he says. ''One will be a guru on what's required to drive regional Victoria and the other will have a very strong understanding of what's needed to drive Melbourne. I think the sum of the two individuals will be greater than any one.''

Nor will Ryan hear a bad word about his Premier, gushing about Ted Baillieu's many apparent attributes: ''… just a magnificent individual … gifted in many ways … a very deep thinker. He has an architect's mind, he's a very structured individual, but with a great empathy.''

He is nearly as enthusiastic about one of his three portfolios: Police. (He is also Minister for Regional and Rural Development and for Bushfire Response.)

Police Association secretary Greg Davies suggests Ryan ''might not be cock-a-hoop'' to finally have the portfolio at a time of leadership turmoil, controversies over bugging and statistics, Office of Police Integrity investigations, and a looming pay dispute: ''Policing in this state is at the crossroads and Ryan's job is going to be ever more difficult while this climate of uncertainty surrounds the leadership of the police force.''

Speaking before the revelation in The Age last week that the OPI has been bugging the phone of one of his advisers, Ryan sprang to Chief Commissioner Simon Overland's defence in his strongest terms so far. ''I've not seen the like of the campaign that's been run against him, never seen the like of it in my 18 years in politics and in my similar time in private life. It is unremitting and it's remorseless.'' Everyone ought to take a deep breath and a cold shower, he suggests. As for the portfolio, he regards it as he does the rest of his new life after 18 years of hard political haul. ''I love it,'' he says. ''I love it.''