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Dialect
Flashbacks
Explanation and Analysis—Thinking About the Past:
"The Drover's Wife" contains many short flashbacks within the frame story of the bushwoman's conflict with a snake that has entered her house, as she sits and waits for it to emerge so she can neutralize the threat to her children and herself. One such flashback touches on how the bushwoman's relationship with her husband (the drover):
He is careless, but a good enough husband. If he had the means he would take her to the city and keep her there like a princess. They are used to being apart, or at least she is. ‘No use fretting,’ she says [...] When he had money he took her to the city several times – hired a railway sleeping compartment, and put up at the best hotels. He also bought her a buggy, but they had to sacrifice that along with the rest.
This flashback to the couple's past shows how their relationship has developed over time. In the story's present, the drover cannot stay with the bushwoman or even really take care of her, although he would like to “treat her like a princess.” Lawson implies that their life together was better in times past, when her husband “bought her a buggy” and they could visit the city and stay in "the best hotels”.
The more positive flashbacks in the story usually dwell on these times, but many of the bushwoman’s flashbacks are of frightening or traumatic events: she's had to fight off floods, wild animals, disease, and more, all on her own. In this way, many of the episodes from the bushwoman's past make it clear that she has long been forced to fend for herself, taking on traditionally male labor in her husband's absence and becoming strong amid an unforgiving landscape.
Perhaps the most poignant flashbacks in the story are those that pertain to the bushwoman’s role as a mother. Motherhood is presented as both a source of happiness and as one of the most harrowing challenges she faces, as in the following passage:
The last two children were born in the bush – one while her husband was bringing a drunken doctor, by force, to attend to her. She was alone on this occasion, and very weak. She had been ill with fever. She prayed to God to send her assistance. [...]
One of the children died while she was here alone. She rode nineteen miles for assistance, carrying the dead child.
The images of the bushwoman giving birth all alone—and, in one case, losing her child and “riding nineteen miles for assistance"—are even more affecting because of the lack of emphasis the story places on these events. Each is presented as just one of a set of tragedies she must face, again emphasizing how painful, isolating, and challenging her everyday life is. As such, it's implied that the bushwoman's current face-off with the snake will become just another thing to reflect on as she sits alone at night in the bush, where there is "little else to think about."
Related Themes:
