How does Lawson bring out the simple yet hard life the Drover's wife leads ?

In "The Drover's Wife," however, Lawson gives a much more nuanced view of gender roles in the bush—perhaps because his mother was a radical feminist. His hero is not a bushman, but rather the bushman’s wife. “The Drover’s Wife” is actually quite critical of the typical Australian legend, and sympathetic with the Australian woman. The drover’s wife may be “thin and brown” and no longer have very many dreams of her own, but she is a doughty, stoic, and persevering figure in the wilds of the bush. She is consumed almost wholly with her and her children’s survival, and is prepared to do anything she can to that end. She is smart and intuitive, and seems to waste little of her precious time bemoaning her fate; rather, she meets every crisis that comes her way with unbending resilience. She may not be able to do everything—the grass fire “would have won but for four men riding by who arrived just in time,” and she cannot stop the flood from washing away the results of years of their labor—because “there are things that a woman of the bush cannot do.” While this phrase might seem to attribute these limitations to her gender, it could also be seen as a frank acknowledgement that going up against the vagaries of Nature is not an easy feat, even for a strong bush woman.

Lawson’s heroine is not completely without dreams, despite her isolation and arduous living conditions. She admits to admiring the fashion pages of the Young Ladies Journal and to dressing up and promenading in the lonely, barren countryside as if she was in a city. It is a quiet, melancholy image but the salient characteristic of this woman is her resignation. She may admire fashion and think about other lives, but she knows what she must do out in the bush, and if she were to leave she would “feel strange away from it.”