the bush
It is a barren, bleak landscape: "the country is flat and there are no mountains in the distance. The bush is made up of small, sick-looking native apple trees. There is nothing growing under them. Nothing to break the view other than the darker green of a few taller trees growing beside the narrow, almost dry creek." This image of the natural world the drover's wife must fight is crucial to setting up the entire story and in fashioning the character of the drover's wife herself.
the table
It is a powerful image when the mother puts her children on top of the rough table ("She quickly picks up up some pillows and blankets, expecting to see or lay her hand on the snake any minute. She makes a bed on the kitchen table for the children, and sits down beside it to watch all night") because that is the only place they will be safe from the snake. It reinforces the straitened circumstances of living in the bush. A table is also a place for sustenance and survival when it comes to food, and here the children are surviving in a completely different way. Another line emphasize how beautiful and melancholic this scene is: "She has an eye on the wall between the kitchen and the house, and a club laid in readiness on the cupboard by her side." She sits quietly while exuding strength, watching over her children as the storm rages around her. She is a the ultimate watchful parent, a guardian angel, a fortress of strength in the "storm" that threatens her family.
Sundays
In another stirring and beautifully melancholic image, the dressed-up drover's wife and her children walk the empty miles of the bush as if they were promenading on a city street: "But on Sunday afternoon she dresses herself, tidies the children, and smartens up baby. She takes them for a lonely walk along the bush track, pushing an old pram in front of her...There is nothing to see, however, and no one to meet. You might walk for twenty miles along this track without being able to know where you are, unless you know the bush." The image contrasts her former life and the life she occasionally thinks about with the life she has now. Her clothes suggest civilization and urban areas while the environment is all wild nature and the life she has now. This image is thus an interstitial one, a representation of her connection, no matter how tenuous or imaginative, to multiple worlds.
the drover's wife and Tommy
Lawson ends his story with the following line: "she pulls him to her worn-out breast and kisses him. They sit thus together while the sickly daylight breaks over the bush." This is a lovely image and one that alludes to classic Madonna-and-child images from medieval and Renaissance paintings, while transforming them. Here her breast is "worn out" rather than virginal. Her care for her children is shown through her hard work and strength, rather than her innocence and grace. As Lawson said earlier in the story that the children think she is hard on them, this image is a counterpoint to that. It's not that she does not love them and does not want to show it, but life in the bush often precludes such displays of sentimentalism. It takes danger, a threat to their existence, to evoke this cathartic emotional moment.
