AustLit

First appearing in The Bulletin in 1892, Henry Lawson's short story 'The Drovers Wife' is today regarded as a seminal work in the Australian literary tradition. Noted for it's depiction of the bush as harsh, potentially threatening and both isolated and isolating, the story opens with a simple enough premise: an aggressive--and presumably deadly--snake disrupts the working life of a bushwoman and her young children. Brave but cautious, the woman resolves to protect her children since her husband is, characteristically, away from home and of no help. 

As time passes within the story, tension builds, and the snake's symbolic threat takes on layers of meaning as the sleepless heroine recalls previous challenges she faced while her husband was away. A series of flashbacks and recollections propel the story through the single night over which it takes place, and by the time the climax arrives--the confrontation with the snake--readers have learned much about the heroine's strengths and fears, most of the latter involving the loss of children and dark figures who encroach upon her small, vulnerable homestead. To be sure, this "darkness" is highly symbolic, and Lawson's use of imagery invokes Western notions of good and evil as well as gendered and racial stereotypes. 

'This year, 2017, marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the Australian writer Henry Lawson. Lawson scholar Paul Eggart, in Biography of a Book :Henry Lawson's While the Billy Boils (2013), recounts Lawson's death, at the age of fifty-five, and funeral...' (Introduction)

'In the bushfire incident, the drover's wife experiences, for a few moments, dramatic transformations in her personality that are wonderfully revealing. For a brief time, she becomes a man. she crosses the sex boundary: 'She put on an old pair of her husband's trousers and beat out the flames with a green bough ... The sight of his mother in trousers greatly amused Tommy', her oldest child. This is perhaps the nervous laughter of children when confronted with a disordering of their certainties. Tommy may have been even more nervously amused if his drover father - had he been around - had put on one of his wife's dresses.' (Introduction)

'The sexual tension in 'The Drover's Wife' is stark. 

'The girl-wife

'The drover's wife has found herself in the outback, living in relative isolation in a two-room shack, one room with an earthen floor and one with a slab floor. She has four young children and a husband who is away droving for long stretches of of time - he's been gone for six months without any communication, and at one time had been gone for eighteen months. she is virtually a single mother, or a part-time wife, or maybe a semi-abandoned wife. She is used to the loneliness in her life.

'As a girl-wife she hated it, but now she would feel strange away from it.'

'Maybe life was be better without the drover being home?' (Introduction)

'If he were alive today, Lawson may not be as destructively conflicted about and disturbed by his effeminacy, and may be bolder in his assertion of himself. Even so, he would recognise the strong remnants of the primitive male culture he dealt with, and the psychological damage and suicide it causes.' (Introduction)

'Lawson scholar Paul Eggart recalls that, when he was a third-year high school student in 1966, as a prize for mathematics he opted for a hardback copy of Cecil Mann's Henry Lawson;s Best Stories ...' (Introduction)

'A small boy was walking along a bush track, hands stuck in his pockets, lips puckered in a whistle. Sunlight streamed through the leaves, dappling his path. His presence disturbed a flock of corellas, and they burst into the air, wheeling and whirring. The boy watched appreciatively, canting his head, shading his eyes, and continued on his way, until he came to a log. He stepped over i, taking his hands out of his pockets, angling his body, for it was a large log. The snake struck with impersonal dispatch.' (Introduction)

'He set the camera up by the wall in the space he used as his studio. It was one of the many rooms in the too-big house he didn't need. It was mostly empty - the wallpaper left to peel away from the walls, the plaster to crack and the dust left undusted. In the light that came in elongated grids through the barred windows I watched him move around the room beneath me, holding up the light meter to gauge the exposures...' (Publication abstract)

'Drysdale is the essential Australian painter. Many gifted painters have come out of Australia, and one of them Sydney Nolan is a universal figure. But noone except Drysdale gives the same authentic feeling of the resolute humanity that has manged to exist in that terrible continent ...' (Introduction)