Alligator the Dog
Because he excelled and pursued excellence in writing stories of less than 1,000 words called “yarns” or “sketch stories” Lawson developed into a master of detail. While “The Drover’s Wife” is actually one of his longer stories and more fully developed and fleshed out than his sketches, details still mattered. One of the details notably absent from this story is irony; it is resolutely sincere and dramatic. Perhaps recognizing that he needed to inject some ironic humor into this setting with “Nothing to relieve the eye save the darker green of a few she-oaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek” he names the family dog Alligator.
James John "J.T." Tyson
Lawson’s use of irony could swings easily from the humorous to the tragic. "The Union Buries its Dead" is the story of a stranger in town who gets killed before anyone got the chance to know him. He is awarded a funeral and burial despite being a completely mystery. Over the course of the story’s final 270 words the word “name” appears nine times. Buried without knowing his name, only afterward do the main characters learn his name as James Tyson. Still later, they find out that that wasn’t his real name, but only the one he went by. The newspapers, meanwhile, reported the dead man as being James John Tyson. And then, finally, the cruelly ironic final twist: even later still they finally learn the man’s real name, but the reader never hears it because by the time the story is being told, everyone had already forgotten it.
"On the Edge of a Plain"
The irony displayed in this story, on the other hand, swings uncertainly between being a little funny and a little tragic. The protagonist returns home after being away eight years exactly one day after his family has been mistakenly informed he was dead. So great is their relief that he’s not dead, after all, that they make him swear on the Bible that he would never leave home again as long as his father and mother were still alive. After a week without being able to find any work, however, circumstances changed severely. The irony of his leaving so soon is that the bulk of the story is related to his laconic description of what he viewed as his father’s emotionally overstated reaction to his coming home alive.
“The Geological Spieler”
Irony was a literary tool for Lawson which could be wielded with the precision of a single detail, lend the story a tragic dimension, be used as tragicomedy or, in this case, silently pervade through the entire narrative until the true nature of things is revealed at the end. One of Lawson’s recurring characters is at the center of the narrative as he angles to take a little harmless advantage of some rubes by exploiting what he terms a subject of fascination “to common and ignorant people” alike. The idea to make gain by passing himself off as a member of the Royal Geological Society ultimately winds up being layered with irony both for pretending to be something he wasn’t and for one of the targets of his joke pretending not to be something he was.
"The Loaded Dog"
This is one of Lawson’s most overtly humorous tales; a story so broadly conceived it almost verges on slapstick. Three miners conceive a plan to get fish to sell by using their demolition equipment, but things take a wild turn when their dog grabs the explosive cartridge and begins running throughout the campsite. The entire force of the narrative leads, of course, to the inevitable explosion, but not before first leading to that ironic moment of expectation just before the fireworks start when at least the narrator reveals the true dimension this pretty crazy scheme gone horribly off the rails:
“It was very good blasting powder—a new brand that Dave had recently got up from Sydney; and the cartridge had been excellently well made. Andy was very patient and painstaking in all he did, and nearly as handy as the average sailor with needles, twine, canvas, and rope.”
