The Drover's Wife by Henry Lawson
"The Drover's Wife" is a short story by Henry Lawson that explores themes of solitude, resilience, and the harsh realities of life in the Australian Outback. The narrative centers on a woman who faces the challenges of managing her household while her husband is away for extended periods, often driving cattle. The plot, which is minimalist in nature, revolves around the discovery of a snake in the woodheap and the woman's anticipation of dealing with this threat. Through an omniscient narrator, the story captures the emotional and physical struggles the drover's wife endures, including childbirth, the loss of a child, and various natural disasters like floods and bushfires.
Despite the isolation, the drover's wife demonstrates remarkable practicality and strength, having faced numerous crises, from wildlife threats to managing livestock health. However, her life is marked by a sense of irony; while she finds solace in small joys, such as reading a magazine, she also grapples with the loneliness and unpredictability of her existence. The story paints a vivid picture of her resilience amid adversity, highlighting her ability to find humor in difficult situations. Through this portrayal, Lawson captures not only the individual experience of the drover's wife but also a broader commentary on the challenges faced by women in rural Australia during that era.
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The Drover's Wife by Henry Lawson
First published: 1894
Type of plot: Domestic realism
Time of work: About 1890
Locale: The Australian Outback
Principal Characters:
The drover's wife , who is referred to as "she"Tommy , her elder sonAlligator , a big, black, yellow-eyed dog-of-all-breeds
The Story
Like many stories by Henry Lawson (and like those of Anton Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield), "The Drover's Wife" has remarkably little action: The plot, such as it is, suggests the absence of action that characterizes life in the Outback (the dry, sparsely settled, and inhospitable areas distant from the few major urban settlements of Australia) during the long intervals between recurrent natural disasters, such as floods, bushfires, and droughts. This indicates a technical aspect that Lawson mastered in his short stories: the construction of a coherent fiction on the flimsiest of plots. One of his aims was always to use a slight plot.
In its simplest form, the plot is limited to the discovery of a five-foot black snake in the woodheap, watching it go under the house, and waiting through the night for its reemergence so that it can be killed. The variety and violence of life in the Outback are indicated by the omniscient narrator's allusions to memorable episodes that have punctuated the drover's wife's life, which is frequently marked by her solitude from adult companionship. (She has not heard from her husband for six months as the story begins.)
She has two boys and two girls ("mere babies") and a dog, Alligator, for company; she has two cows, a horse, and a few sheep as possessions; her husband is often away driving sheep and cattle, and has been away for periods of up to eighteen months. During one of his absences she contracted fever in childbirth and was assisted by Black Mary (an aboriginal midwife); one child died when she was alone, and she had to carry the corpse nineteen miles for assistance.
Times were not always so desperate. When she was married, her drover husband took her to the city, where they stayed in the best hotel. Soon after, however, they had to sell their buggy; her husband, who started as a drover and rose to become a squatter (a small-scale cattle raiser on government-owned land), met the inevitable "hard times" of the Outback and returned to droving, with its isolation, low pay, low status, and long absences from home. The wife's only connection with the few pleasures of her life is Young Ladies' Journal—a bitter irony under her circumstances.
However, her life in the bush (another name for the Outback) has not been wholly uneventful: A nephew died from snakebite; she battled a bushfire; she coped with a flood, even to the extent of digging trenches in a vain attempt to avoid a dam break; she shot a mad bullock; she treated pleuropneumonia in the cattle (though her best two cows succumbed); she has had to control crows and magpies; and she has always had to be "the man" in getting rid of sundowners, bushmen, and "swaggies" (itinerants). Clearly, the snake poses a threat to her children, but she has successfully handled crises of far greater significance in her years in the Outback.
Still, for all her impressive practicality, she has been tricked: Only the day before, an Aborigine bargained to collect a pile of wood in exchange for a small amount of tobacco; she praised him for doing a good job and then, when the snake was first seen, discovered that the "blackfellow" (the term then used for Aborigines) had built a hollow woodpile. She was hurt and cried, but she has "a keen, very keen, sense of the ridiculous, and some time or other she will amuse bushmen with the story. She had been amused before like that. . . . Then she had to laugh."