Summary
There is nothing to do but think. The drover’s wife remembers fighting a grass fire while her husband was away. She put on trousers and ran out to do what she could, with Tommy at her side. Four men riding by finally helped put it out. The trousers scared the baby, though, and Alligator attacked her when he heard the baby cry. He later felt bad, swishing his tail and smiling his canine smile.
There was also a flood she could not stop; it washed all of her husband’s hard work away. She fought the cattle flu but her two best cows died. She fought the crows and eagles. She fights the evil swagmen who come by, trying to see if her husband is home. Once one came by and saw that she was alone and demanded food, but her club, countenance, and the growling Alligator scared him off.
There is not much pleasure in the bush. On Sundays, though, she dresses herself and the children up nicely to walk out in the bush. There is no one to see her, but she promenades as if she is in the city.
She is used to the loneliness, and even though she hated it when she first came here, she would feel strange being away from it now. She loves her children but life is still tough.
The candle is almost out and she walks over to the woodpile for more wood for the fire. To her shock the whole pile collapses in on itself. Yesterday she had hired an aborigine to bring her some wood and marveled at how much he brought. She gave him extra money and complimented him for not being lazy. This man, the narrator tells us, was a king and the last of his tribe; but the woodpile he made was hollow.
Tears spring to her eyes, but she manages to laugh when she sees she has poked her fingers through the holes of her handkerchief. She can still laugh sometimes.
The room is warm and Alligator tenses up because he knows the snake is near. The snake, black and five feet long, comes out warily. Alligator and the woman watch, and Alligator springs. He chomps his teeth but misses, and the woman strikes with the club. Alligator grabs the creature’s neck and shakes it. Tommy wakes and tries to help but his mother pushes him back. She crushes the snake’s head, lifts its body, and throws it into the fire. She pets the dog and the children return to sleep after the tumult.
Tommy, though, comes to her and sees the tears in her eyes. He proclaims he will never go droving. She kisses him and they sit together as the sun rises over the bush.
Analysis
It should not be particularly surprising that the legends, folktales, and wisdom of the Australian bush is, as Brian Dibble writes, on the whole rather sexist. The typical hero, writes Dibble, is “a male rural worker who is white, Anglo/Celtic, and Australian by origin. In other words, he is a subject constructed through hierarchical oppositions that relate to gender, region, class, race, ethnicity, and nationality: he is constructed as what he is not: not female, not urban, not middle-class (nor upper-class), not non-white, and not non-Australian.”
Kay Schaffer’s excellent article on women and the Australian bush acknowledges this as well, and explains how much of the literature has “the landscape [provide] a feminine other against which the bushman-as-hero is constructed.” The bush absorbs, sucks up, destroys. It is a “locus of desire” and “takes on the seeming attributes of woman;” it “threatened [the bushman] with assimilation, isolation, and death. It represented a force that might reduce him to madness, melancholia, or despair.” However, it is also the ultimate prize, the ultimate thing to conquer and to possess.
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.”
