A snake. A woman. And a big stick…

Why Everyone Should Read Henry Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman left alone in the bush with her family, in possession of a good long stick, will try to bash the brains out of any snake that dared to show its beady little eyes.’

    Whilst not the beginning to ‘Pride and Prejudice’ that Jane Austen had in mind, Australian colonial writer Henry Lawson believes otherwise in his short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (1892) centred around an unnamed drover’s wife who protects her children from the dangers of the bush such as snakes. Before we delve into the rabbit hole that is Lawson’s story, you might ask ‘Why on earth would I read Australian colonial literature?’ My response is: ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ What makes Australian colonial literature so fascinating is how it contributed to constructing Australian identity as unique to its British heritage through its representations of the Australian bush and Australian characters. In particular, Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’, foregrounds how the dangerous Australian environment bred tough, resilient people – specifically the ‘Australian’ female bushwoman, who as opposed to the traditional British woman, challenged traditional Victorian femininity and reinforced stereotypical traits within the Australian identity such as stoicism, determination and triumph over adversity. Fast forward 132 years, a contemporary Australian audience can interpret the bushwoman as ironically reinforcing the myth of a toxic masculine Australian identity.

Caption: How we believe the good ol' Australian bloke was born from the bush

               It starts, as many good stories do, with a snake, a woman and a big stick…

Snakes on a Plain

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“Snake! Mother, here’s a snake!” A gaunt, sun-browned woman dashes from the kitchen, snatches her baby from the ground, holds it on her left hip, and reaches for a stick.” Her panic is clearly cantered around what this serpentine trespass means for her children, especially when we later read that ‘She is not a coward, but recent events have shaken her nerves. A little son of her brother-in-law was lately bitten by a snake, and died.’ As part of the native fauna, Lawson’s inclusion of the snake is not just as a symbol of danger within the Australian landscape, but also as a religious symbol, one associated with evil and death. It was a snake in the Genesis that tempted Eve and Adam to sin by eating fruit from the forbidden tree. It was because of the snake, that humans were exiled from paradise and cursed by God to live a mortal life of hardship and survival. Thus, the snake also reminds readers that the bush is a place where paradise is an illusion, an untameable land of dangers, hopelessness and doom. Following a Christian perspective, applicable for this narrative which was produced within 1890s colonial Australia where Christianity was dominant, the bush is the embodiment of God’s curse on humankind for daring to disobey him, contributing to the national perception of a hellish Australian environment. 

Lawson’s Mad Max Outback

    To understand Lawson’s bushwoman, we must understand more about the hostility and dangers of the bush setting in which she lives in. Funnily enough, the setting reminds me of the dystopian barren outback associated with the Mad Max movies, mostly because of the oppressive mood it creates. 

    At the beginning of the story, it is revealed that there is ‘Bush all around – bush with no horizon, for the country is flat,’ conflating the sense of entrapment, emptiness and the family’s isolation all at once. The 'uplifting and joyous spectacle of the bush' is further continued by the notion of decay and doom which is created in the imagery of the ‘stunted, rotten native apple-trees’ with ‘a few she-oaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek’. The environment is so harsh and hostile that even native trees struggle to survive, ending up malformed and decaying. The ‘sighing she-oaks’ is a pathetic fallacy that attributes human emotions of despair, unhappiness, discontent to the bush whereas the waterless creek further emphasises a sense of doom to be without water is to die. Notably, Lawson’s grim depiction of the bush challenged other representations of the bush by Lawson’s contemporaries such as Banjo Patterson who saw the bush as a place of natural beauty, abundance and tameable wildness, writing on and on about ‘breaths of mountain air’ and ‘rivers running clear’ and the like (check it out here!)

    That’s all very lovely, but not so much in the world of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ which represents the Australian bush landscape as an unrelentingly vicious, hostile environment where life is a matter of survival. It is from this sort of representation that so many traits within traditional versions of the Australian national identity such as stoicism, determination and resilience are reinforced. 

 

Where are the Women? WHERE ARE THEY?

    Lawson himself wrote another short story called ‘No Place for A Woman’ in about 1900 (see here for an offline version). This title perhaps verbalises the absence of women within the Australian identity which foregrounds a heavily masculinise version of Australia and Australians, contributed to by largely masculine character types: convicts, squatters, drovers, swagmen, larrikins, colonial settlers, and later, the Anzacs.

    But given the hostility of the Australian bush landscape established at the beginning of Lawson’s story, and Lawson’s own personal context growing up with his mother, Louisa, who was a strong, independent pioneer woman, we can understand that he has constructed a tough callous Australian bushwoman who challenges many aspects of traditional Victorian femininity. Lawson suggests that the harsh, rugged surroundings breeds harsh, rugged people – including women. The wife challenges the traditional Victorian assumption that women should be overtly soft, maternal and nurturing as ‘she loves her children but has no time to it. She seems harsh to them’. The harsh environment has led to the wife turning to the Young Ladies’ Journal as ‘her girlish hopes and aspirations have long been dead’ – a clear attempt by Lawson at creating an uniquely ‘Australian’ woman who rejects traditional Victorian femininity.

    It becomes clear that the drover’s absence coupled with the harsh environment has warped the wife’s feminine traits, making it necessary for her to become more masculine in her attitudes to ensure her own and her children’s survival in the outback. One of the most harrowing of her experiences is the day one of her children dies when she is alone without her husband for help or support. We read that ‘she drove nineteen miles for assistance, carrying the dead child’. It is a macabre image of an isolated, lone woman desperately trying to help her dead child. We cannot help but understand other instances of physical and psychological conflicts such as fighting off a bushfire, outsmarting a mad bullock, and sending off a lurking and potentially predatory swagman shape her into a character that reinforces Australian characters as strong, capable, stoic, and resilient. Interestingly enough, these are all traits of the traditional masculinity within the 1890s, and, according to Lawson, the ones needed to survive the harsh Australian bush.  

            The drover’s wife alone against the bush

The Flip Side

There is a flipside to this view of the drover’s wife challenging traditional femininity, and it is this: that for the wife to become ‘a man’ as if maleness is the highest form of achievement when facing struggle, is to reinforce the inferiority of women in Australia’s patriarchal, colonial society. Certainly, ‘there are some things a bushwoman can’t do’ – she can’t fight the fire, save the dam, prevent diseases in cattle, and ward off obnoxious swagmen all by herself. Furthermore, the nameless wife can be read as representative of how women within Australian history have lacked real identities and are referred to in relation to their husbands, as with the protagonist of Lawson’s story. In this way, Lawson’s character can be read as a complex reinforcing and challenging of patriarchal beliefs about women: that they are important in the day-to-day life of colonial Australia, but not important enough to be acknowledged as part of colonial nation-building in the 1890s as solely women but as 'masculine' bushwomen. Us, as a contemporary audience, might find Lawson’s drover’s wife as an outdated and flawed character who perpetuates toxic masculinity by idealising mythology of the strong, stoic, callous Australian bloke, whom she ultimately falls short of. Not all Australian men fit this image and the pressure to do so leads men to be socially destructive by denying their emotions and acting tough.  

 

What Now?

    One thing is very certain though: we can see that unlike many other colonial stories of the 1890s, Lawsons’ The Drover’s Wife’  gives a unique voice to the Australian bushwoman who is constructed as distinct to her female Victorian counterparts. Her experiences are foregrounded; her struggles and fears and triumphs are explored. Whilst there is the flip side of the bushwoman reinforcing the myth of a toxic masculine Australian identity, at least, on this occasion, her voice is not silenced. She is brought out from the shadows into the light, even if it is a ‘sickly daylight [breaking] over the bush.’

    [1500 words]

                             Henry Koenigsberg Walson