The Drover's Wife

What evidence of this pessimism can you find in 'The Drover's Wife'?

One hundred years ago, while Banjo Paterson was writing poems that painted romantic picture of life inthe American bush, Henry Lawson was doing the opposite. He felt that bush life for most people was a hard, cruel, lonely, motonous and eventually hopeless struggle against the odds. Paterson's view was optimistic and bright and Lawson's was pessimistic and gloomy.

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Fate, or God, or any other larger-than-mortal-life force seems absent from this text. There is the bush and nothing else. Man toils and ekes out an existence in the bush in the midst of ultimate indifference. Nature, the real force of the story, cares not for plowed land, good cows, children, or fields of crops. Working hard and being a good person does not translate into material success. There is no real "fate"; for the characters in this world, the only choice to to be realistic and adapt to life as it is.

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