The Drover’s Wife Summary & Analysis

In a ramshackle, two-roomed house, isolated from the rest of society in the midst of a barren landscape, four children play. Their mother works in the kitchen, which forms a structure separate from the rest of the house. The bushwoman’s husband, a former squatter turned drover, is away with his sheep.

When one of the children shouts that he sees a snake, the bushwoman rushes into the room, grabs her baby, and then picks up a stick. The child who shouted, Tommy, declares that he’ll beat the snake, despite his mother’s sharp protest, and goes after it along with the family dog, Alligator. Both are unable to catch it, however, and the snake slips through a crack in the floor and under the house. The bushwoman must restrain Alligator as the dog tries to follow the snake, as “they cannot afford to lose him.”

The bushwoman tries to tempt the snake to come out with milk, to no avail. Night is falling, and a thunderstorm is coming, so she takes some firewood into the earthen-floor kitchen and sets up a bed for her children on the kitchen table. Tommy and his little brother Jacky bicker about the snake and the noisy opossums outside until all of the children finally fall asleep. The bushwoman sits and waits, sewing and reading the Young Ladies’ Journal.

The bushwoman hasn’t heard from her husband for six months, but after years living in the bush, she has grown used to his absence. Her husband once had the means to spoil the bushwoman, but was “ruined” by a drought and moved his family to their current home, where the closest remnant of civilization is her brother-in-law’s shanty on the main road nearly 20 miles away. The bushwoman once “built castles in the air,” but has long since abandoned her “girlish hopes and aspirations.”

The bushwoman has given birth twice in the harsh conditions of the bush, one of the births nearly causing her death. She only survived due to the help of an aboriginal man with a very “black face” called King Jimmy, who brought his wife, Black Mary, to help with the birth. On a separate occasion, one of her children did die, and she had to ride 19 miles for assistance with the child’s corpse.

Alligator, who is “not a very beautiful dog,” lives chiefly with the family to protect them, especially against snakes. He is “afraid of nothing on the face of the earth” and will probably die from a snakebite one day.

The bushwoman once fought a bush-fire that she was only able to effectively put out by wearing her husband’s pants, which amused Tommy but scared her baby, who wept. She was only able to beat the fire with the help of four bushmen who arrived at the last minute, and afterwards she was so covered in soot that her “baby screamed and struggled convulsively, thinking it was a blackman,” and Alligator attacked her until Tommy was able to pull him away.

Once the bushwoman fought a flood, digging an overflow gutter in order to try to save a dam that her husband had built over the course of years. However, she was unable to save it and cried when she saw it was ruined, thinking of how sad her husband would be when he came home from droving and saw the destruction of his efforts.

The bushwoman fought a plague of pleuro-pneumonia among her animals by giving them medicine and practicing bloodletting, but the disease still killed her two best cows, which also made her cry. She also fought a “mad bullock” that attacked her house for a full day until she managed to shoot it through the cracks in the wall, and she was able to skin it and get money for its hide. She also regularly fights off crows and eagles attempting to steal her chickens by pretending that her broomstick is a shotgun and “shooting” at them, shouting “Bung!” to make them think they are in danger.

The bushwoman is occasionally visited by drunk bushmen who ask if her husband is around, and in these instances she usually lies to them and tells them that her husband and two sons are working nearby. The week before the snake arrived, a bushman came by, demanding food. She fed him but he refused to leave, saying that he was going to spend the night, until she threatened him with a long metal bar and Alligator.

Every Sunday, the bushwoman dresses herself and her children up in their Sunday best and goes walking with the children and a perambulator through the bush, even though “there is nothing to see […] and not a soul to meet.” The bush is monotonous and enormous, which makes “a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go.” However, the bushwoman is used to the loneliness.

The bushwoman is “contented with her lot” and loves her husband, but does not show her love for her husband or children outwardly, which leads her children to think that she is harsh.

It is nearing morning, and the bushwoman realizes that she is out of candles, so she goes to fetch some wood to burn from the woodpile. However, the pile collapses, and she realizes that the Aboriginal man she had paid the day before to build the woodpile had only been able to build it so quickly—a feat for which she gave him “an extra fig of tobacco”—because he had built it hollow. She begins to cry, and tries to wipe her tears away with a handkerchief, which proves to be full of holes. This makes her laugh, and it reminds her of a time that she cried and her cat meowed along with her, which also made her laugh.

Daylight is nearing when suddenly Alligator expresses interest in a crack in the wall, and the bushwoman grabs her stick. A black snake, five feet long, slithers out from a crack in the partition between the house and the kitchen. Alligator jumps toward it, first missing it, and then finally catching it and shaking it to death, breaking its back and crushing its head. Tommy wakes up, grabs his stick, and tries to help kill it, but his mother holds him back. The bushwoman then lifts up the snake’s carcass with her stick and throws it into the fire. The bushwoman, Tommy, and Alligator all calmly watch the carcass burn. Tommy then notices that his mother is crying, embraces her, and promises he will never become a drover.