New Year’s Eve
The events in the short story take place in some drought place in Australia, at New Year’s eve. The atmosphere of the place was far from festive because it was a midsummer time and the temperature was very high. The night was very dark and stuffy: “It was so dark—with a smothering darkness—that even the low loom of the scrub-covered ridges, close at hand across the creek, was not to be seen”. The sky wasn’t clouded but it was covered with smoke of distant bush fires. The image depicts how the New Year’s eve looks like in Australia: it is a hot, stuffy, and dark midsummer night, and this picture differs from the views people used to see in that period of year.
A house or, rather, a hut
The house where the family lived was in bad conditions. It was a little hut with whitewashed slab walls and a bark roof. “The walls of the kitchen were of split slabs, the roof box-bark, the floor clay, and there was a large clay-lined fireplace, the sides a dirty brown, and the back black. It had evidently never been whitewashed”. There was also a bed in the room and a grimy cross-bar, a black bucket full of warm water. The kitchen was furnished with a pine table, a well-made flour bin, and a neat safe and side-board, or dresser—evidently the work of a carpenter. The image indicates a poor house where the big family of carpenter had to live because they didn’t have money to get some better place.
The rooms in the house
The hut was three rooms long and one deep, with a verandah in front and a skillion, harness, and tool room, about half the length, behind. There lived a family of five people. The room was almost as bare as a kitchen: “There was a table, covered with cheap American oilcloth, and, on the other side, a sofa on which a straw mattress, a cloudy blanket, and a pillow without a slip had been thrown in a heap” . mother was sleeping on the bad in one room and other members of the family slept in the other. Even father mostly slept on the sofa. Everything depended on Emma’s mood. Image describes the interior of the house and how the family lived there.
Woman “bad with her head”
Emma, Nil’s wife, had problems with her mental health, or at least she said so. He was constantly complaining about terrible headache and irritation. She was blaming everyone in her problems and was saying that she is close to her death because she hasn’t been sleeping for four days. Although she didn’t look as if she was ill or suffering from some disease: “She was a big, strong, and healthy-looking woman, with dark hair and strong, square features”. Emma felt her endless power and influence on her husband and children and she often used it for her own profit. The image describes a cunning woman who cared just of her own good.
