Summary
The setting is a two-room house built of logs and boards, with an outside kitchen and large veranda. It is surrounded by the vast, desolate Australian bush, and the nearest neighbor is nineteen miles away. This is the home of the drover’s wife and their four children; her husband, the drover, is away.
A child cries out that there is a snake, and the thin and sun-darkened mother runs over to pick up the baby, grabbing a stick along the way. Tommy, an eleven-year-old boy, tells her the snake slipped into the woodpile. It then slithers under the house. Tommy runs toward it. The large mongrel dog, Alligator, runs after the snake as well but cannot catch it. Alligator begins to dig but the drover’s wife chains him up.
She puts out dishes of milk to entice the snake but an hour passes and it does not come out. The sky is darkening with a storm but she knows she cannot bring the children into the house with the snake. She takes them to the outside kitchen and puts them on top of the table on a makeshift bed. As for her, she sits beside the table and watches for the snake. A sewing basket and copy of “Young Ladies Journal” sit bedside her. Alligator waits as well.
Tommy has his club under the blanket. He is irritable, and curses the snake and says he will kill it. The drover’s wife admonishes him to go to sleep and he finally does.
The night wears on. She picks up the stick when she hears a noise. The storm picks up and the wind almost extinguishes the candle. Rain pours, lightning cracks, and thunder roars. Although these things do not usually scare her, the recent death of her husband’s brother’s child due to a snakebite and the fact that her husband has been gone for six months now have made her nervous.
The drover had stopped that profession when they married and started farming this land, but lost all in a drought and had to return to droving. It is hard for the drover's wife when he is away, but his brother helps out occasionally.
The drover’s wife is accustomed to being alone. Her girlish dreams have vanished, and her solace is the fashion pages of the magazine. Her careless husband is decent enough, even if he sometimes forgets they are married when he is away. He brings money and takes care of her. Their last two children were born in the bush and she was on her own, once because her husband had gone to fetch the drunken doctor. In his absence King Jimmy, an aborigine, had poked his head in and saw what was happening, deciding to bring his wife, Black Mary, to help out. Another time a child died when she was alone, and she had to carry it nineteen miles, looking for help.
The fire burns low and it is late. The fearless dog waits. He is tough and angry and has killed many snakes; he will probably die this way.
Analysis
This compact but compelling short story is one of Henry Lawson’s finest. It does not have much of a plot or even character development, but the taut suspense, evocative setting, and universal themes of (wo)man against nature, motherhood, survival, and the clash of western and indigenous cultures makes it eminently readable and conducive to analysis.
To begin with, Henry Lawson was a prominent writer on the Australian bush, but he tended not to romanticize it the way some of his peers did. His initial description is rather bleak: “Bush all round—bush with no horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple-trees. No undergrowth. Nothing to relieve the eye save the darker green of a few she-oaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek. Nineteen miles to the nearest sign of civilization—a shanty on the main road.” When the drover’s wife goes out on Sundays, there is absolutely no one and nothing to see. When she needs help, she has to go nineteen miles. And while she is out in the bush, she must battle anything and everything nature throws her way: floods, drought, storms, fires, rampaging bullocks and poisonous snakes, and cattle flu. The bush is thus an isolated, wild place as far away as possible from civilization in which merely surviving is a feat. Squatters and drovers and bushmen and their families are on their own, with only their strength, assiduity, and luck to bear them through the crises. The snake that the drover’s wife must fight is not just an individual snake but also the ultimate symbol of evil, danger, and the perils of nature.
One of the more complex aspects of the text is how it deals with indigenous people, who make brief but important appearances. The European Australians had unsurprisingly hostile and prejudicial views of the aborigines, who were usually seen either as primitive brutes or noble savages. They were seen as fitting inhabitants of the howling wilderness, wily and potentially dangerous people who could not be trusted or relied upon. A 2007 piece in the Guardian described the situation thusly: “Ever since white men set foot in Australia more than 200 years ago, they have persecuted, harassed, tormented and tyrannised the people they found there. The more cold-blooded decided that the most humane way of dealing with a galaxy of peoples who would never be able to adapt to the ‘whitefella’ regime was to eliminate them as quickly as possible, so they shot and poisoned them. Others believed that they owed it to their God to rescue the benighted savage, strip him of his pagan culture, clothe his nakedness, and teach him the value of work. Leaving the original inhabitants alone was never an option; learning from them was beyond any notion of what was right and proper. As far as the pink people were concerned, black Australians were primitive peoples, survivors from the stone age in a land that time forgot.”
Charles Darwin visited Australia in 1836 and wrote of his recognition of the decline of the aboriginal people, which he correctly saw as due to alcohol and contagious foreign disease, but also attributed to a “mysterious agency” that would account for the reality that “wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal’. He also concluded that “the varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker.” A 1986 report put out by the Australian government’s Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) meticulously detailed the contemporary disadvantages the aborigines face, relating it to their problematic history with the Europeans. The report states “Conflicts between settlers and Aborigines, and the devastation caused by introduced diseases and alcohol, reduced the Aboriginal population during the first hundred years of settlement from an estimated 300,000 to 60,000. Most of those who survived had their traditional ways of life destroyed or at least suppressed.” It also states that “the reasons for the undermining of traditional authority go much deeper than references to alcohol, to material goods or to the influence of the mass media would suggest. The general non-recognition of Aboriginal customary laws was another factor…from the earliest days, European contact tended to undermine Aboriginal laws, society, culture and religion—a process which is a continuing one.”
There are three aborigines mentioned in Lawson’s text: King Jimmy, Black Mary, and the man who stacks the wood. King Jimmy and the other man have noble lineage, but have lost their power in the land due to the European influx and its ramifications. Black Mary’s very name is associated with magic; she may be the “whitest aboriginal woman in all the land” but she is still the Other. Certainly, though, the man at the end bears the most analysis. The drover’s wife is condescending to him, exclaiming how surprised she is that he is not lazy. Lawson narrates that the man was a King and the last of his tribe, but of course the drover’s wife cannot know this, and would likely have little ability to comprehend its significance. She seems shocked that the man pockets her money for having done nothing but stack the wood with a hollow center; she is indignant that he would do this, especially after she had complimented him. While it is certainly possible to feel pity for the drover’s wife in the sense that she has a tough enough life of her own without having to work harder and come to terms with the fact that she was swindled, contemporary readers will likely feel sympathy for the aboriginal man—a former King, now demoted to stacking wood for a poor white woman. The hollowness of the pile and its crash thus exemplify the emptiness of the drover’s wife’s life, and are also poignant reminders of what has happened to the indigenous people.
