The Drover’s Wife Themes

The central problem facing the main characters in Australian Henry Lawson's 1892 short story “The Drover's Wife” is the presence of a snake in the floorboards of their shack in the Australian outback. The story begins when the snake first enters the house and ends when the mother of the family, a “bushwoman,” finally kills the snake with the help of her dog, Alligator, thereby preventing it from hurting her four young…

As a woman taking care of her household in the unforgiving outback while her husband, the drover, is away, the bushwoman is left in a strange position. She tries to maintain certain aspects of femininity that only have real importance in a societal context, like getting dressed up to push a perambulator through the outback every Sunday and reading the Young Ladies’ Journal. At the same time, she is often forced to take…

The bushwoman and her children are constantly made vulnerable to danger for many reasons, chief among them their extreme geographical isolation. Lawson depicts the many ways that isolation can pose a threat to one’s livelihood, health, and general wellbeing, and his illustration of the dangers that the family faces in the bush also underscores the extent to which life in society is full of comforts and resources that are easy to take for granted until…

As a young woman, the bushwoman dreamed of living a comfortable and exciting life. Lawson says that “as a girl she built the usual castles in the air.” Now, however, “all her girlish hopes and aspirations have long been dead.” Having been through countless hardships in the bush, she has become used to a life devoid of the dreams of her youth, and has accepted the difficulty and instability of an existence so far…