Student: Stefan Cvetković

Professor: Nataša Kampark

Contemporary Australian Prose

December 16, 2014

“THE DROVER’S WIFE” AND ITS PARODIES

INTRODUCTION

Henry Lawson’s sketch story “The Drover’s Wife” is a fine example of Australian 19th century
realism. His straightforward style of writing was praised as well as ridiculed by different literary
critics, but regardless of that, his writings depict the everyday lives of Bushmen, mateship and, in
this story in particular, the position of women living in the wild outback of Australia (in a key
period of the development of national sentiment). But in the 1970’s, more than 70 years after
“The Drover’s Wife” was published, with the development of literary theories and
experimentation with language and style, modern writers started looking back at Australian
literary tradition through the prism of postmodernism. Postmodernists started revisiting and
rewriting traditional Australian literary works, and in this paper we will perceive how “The
Drover’s Wife” by Henry Lawson was rewritten and parodied by Murray Bail and Frank
Moorhouse.

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THE TRADITIONAL REPRESENTATION OF THE BUSH WOMAN

Henry Lawson’s work belongs to the period of national Australian literature and his style is
realistic, with him assuming the role of an observer or a reporter. He doesn’t follow any literary
conventions or theories, but writes about his experience and observations to create the most
realistic picture of the bushman life. That was an important period during which the Australian
national identity was being created and his insistence on truthfulness was closely linked with his
desire to stimulate national conscience. The “Bulletin” (a literary paper where Lawson and his
contemporaries published their work) was there for Australian-born writers to write about their
homeland for their compatriots (defying the Eurocentric perspective), as opposed to British
writers who wrote about Australia for British reader. The writers of the nationalist period are
responsible for creating literary myths, ideals and identity. That is exactly what postmodernism
destroys and rebuilds.

In his sketch story,“The Drover’s Wife” (from his most successful prose collection “While the
Billy Boils”) we have the main character, a nameless woman, living a life without her man deep
in the outback of Australia, in the harsh and oppressive bush. The story shows Lawson’s vision
of “the hardness of things”. The drover leaves his family in isolation for long periods and the
wife has to take the masculine role of the protector of the house and family, so she fights snakes,
crows and eagles, a mad bullock, bushmen in the ‘horrors’, villainous-looking sundowners, a
bush fire:

“Four ragged, dried-up-looking children are playing about the house. Suddenly one of
them yells: “Snake! Mother, here’s a snake!”” (Lawson)

“She has no name, which indicates the universality of the experience. She stands for all the
women in the bush.” (Karanfilović, 125) The woman’s power and the ability to take care of the
household comes from her abandonment. She is the drover’s wife, defined through him, waiting
for him to come back and take the family to live in the city. She depends on him, doesn’t have
her own identity and is independent only because she is abandoned. Both male and female roles
are merged in her, she is both a mother and a father to her children and doesn’t have time to
express sentimentality or to cherish and nurse her tender femininity.

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 “Her husband is an Australian, and so is she. 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.”
(Lawson)

For Lawson, the Australian bush woman represented values that were truly Australian. Drovers
spent a lot of time away from home and developed a more durable connection between
themselves – mateship. At a certain point they couldn’t get along with their women anymore
because of the long separation period. The male bonds were more genuine and firm, so there
seem to be no place for women in the bush, but they were there and they were important, raising
and protecting the family as a nucleus of every society on their own.

There is an absence of direct characterization so we learn about the characters through their
actions, mostly on the Wife, son Tommy and the dog called Alligator. Tommy is the
representation of his father, the drover, and he sees the emptiness in his mother, wants to protect
her by killing the snake and acting heroic. In the very end of the story, Tommy says:

“Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blarst me if I do!” (Lawson)

Bail and Moorhouse made a departure from the realist mode and changed the representation of
women in Australian writing, directly challenging women created by Lawson.

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PARODIES AND THE CLASH OF TRADITIONAL AND MODERN

“The Drovers Wife” – Murray Bail

Murray Bail’s story of the same name was published in 1975. and he based it on the 1945.
painting of the same name by Russel Drysdale. He painted a disproportionately large woman in a
dress and a hat, with a bag in her left hand and a pair of ordinary shoes on her feet. A horse-
drawn carriage with a small figure seeming to feed the horse can be seen far away from the
woman. The woman has a calm, kind of apathetic and lost gaze on her pensive face. The woman
in the painting is a visually represented Lawson’s woman from the story, the painting of the
barren land, the hardship of earning and the helplessness of the Australian women in
that setting. The painting attempts to highlight the difficulties of living among the Australian
Aborigines.

But in Bail’s story, we actually have independent woman. She is personalized, her name is Hazel
and is the runaway wife of a dentist. The narrator is her husband who looks at the painting and
comments on it. Lawson’s story gives a realistic treatment to the difficult bush life, but in Bail’s
story the narrator imagines the woman in the picture to be his wife:

“There has perhaps been a mistake – but of no great importance – made in the
denomination of this picture. The woman depicted is not ‘The Drover’s Wife’. She is my
wife. We have not seen each other now… it must be getting on thirty years” (Bail)

The key traits of postmodernism and making a parody of a literary work is through revising it,
changing it completely by modifying the readers perception of reality and understanding of what
is real and what is invented and fictional. We have a metafictional frame of reference (by
creating a plot within a plot, story within a story) through which he explores the relationship
between fact and fiction, and also undermines the credibility of the Australian realistic tradition
as represented by Henry Lawson and 19th century realism.

Unlike Lawson’s woman who is left in the wilderness waiting for her husband, in Bail’s story it
is she who leaves her husband. She is given a choice and she makes up her own mind by

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choosing to leave and Bail talks about her life before she became a drover’s wife, while she was
still a dentist’s wife, and about her husband’s attitude towards her departure.

“’I’m just going round the corner,’ she wrote characteristically. Ita was a piece of
butcher’s paper left on the table” (Bail)

He cannot understand why she left him for a drover, a lower-class man. He criticizes her from
the beginning, making comments about her weight and face, assuming that she is sad because
she and the drover probably had a quarrel of some kind, trying to find a reason for leaving him
that doesn’t threat his masculinity. It is impossible for him to tell himself that his wife left him
for a ‘real’ man, and if he is unhappy then she must be unhappy also. He even speaks about the
drover, persuading himself that he is a ‘small character’.

“Hazel looks unhappy. I can see she is having second thoughts. All right, it was soon
after she had left me, but she is standing away, in the foreground, as though they’r not
speaking. See that? Distance = dobuts. They’ve had an argument.” (Bail)

Through his stances we can see that he is conservative when considering male-female
relationship, believing that a woman should be at home, waiting for her husband, making dinner
and taking care of their children, but Bail also shows us that he is a modern man in the way that
he is not in touch with nature unable to have any contact with the bush wilderness. “The picture
gives little away though. It is the outback – but where exactly? South Australia? It could easily
be Queensland, West Australia, the Northern Territory. We don’t know. You could never find
that spot.” (Bail) ). He cannot understand why his wife chose the bush instead of the city. She is
not the same person as he is, she has another side, she has a free spirit and doesn’t want to be
oppressed, which she reveals on their trip to nature. When he speaks of the time spent on Mount
Barker, he says:

“Yet Hazel was in her element, so much so she seemed to take no interest in the
surroundings. She acted as if she were part of it.” (Bail)

She throws snowballs at him, kneels in the snow an acts ‘like a schoolgirl’. Also, her masculine
behavior – chopping wood, killing of the snake, traces of sweat under her armpits – is something
he doesn’t like and finds unattractive. In this story, the notions of wife and husband change

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places. He cannot cope with the idea that a woman can enjoy the man’s way of living. She is free
to do whatever she wants and is not even constrained by emotions for her children, who haven’t
seen her mother in 30 years. “’The why did she scoot?’, ‘Your mother? She had a silly streak.’”
(Bail)

Bail points out the vitality of postmodern fiction that relativizes any stereotypical and nationalist
preoccupations about national identity and its construction. The archetypal portrait of the
traditional concept of a drover’s is wife is destroyed and rebuild as a free, non-oppressed, flirty
and spirited woman who left the moment she saw herself having a better future with a drover.

“The Drovers Wife” – Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse continues Bail’s metafictional streak and goes even further in parodying the
representation of women in Lawson’s realism and puts the reader into a complex web of
connotations. Metafiction is often a parody of a specific work and has a plot-within-plot structure
(double-narrator framework, which applied by Moorhouse in this story). Here he uses
metafictional, intertextual and parody elements to challenge the Australian literary tradition of
realist authors of the 1890’s. The narrator of this story is an Italian student Franco Casamaggiore
who is interested in this part Australian history. He never visited Australia, but as he works in an
Italian hotel, he met several Australians who told him about the “Australian national culture
joke”. As the narrator himself didn’t experience anything first hand, but was told about it, we
have to be suspicious about the credibility of the text (and what are historical facts if not a
subjectively perceived text or a story, written or told by individuals?)

Casamaggiore claims that the drover’s wife did not connote a human being at all, but a sheep.
When Europeans settled the Australian continent, there weren’t any women there for a whole
century, and when women started coming, the drover’s were seldom at home, so there was no
place for the traditional concept of wife. On their long journeys, drovers would develop a strong
relationship between themselves (which was the real but under-the-cover meaning of the
Australian nationalistic concept of ‘mateship’). Also, due to days and weeks of loneliness, while
in need for consolation and warmth, drovers would get emotionally and sexually attached to an

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animal (in this case a sheep; this is what Casamaggiore calls ‘interspecies reciprocity’). “…but
this remains unacknowledged by historians for reason of national shame, but is widely
acknowledged by the folk culture of Australia.” Moorhouse is more extreme than Bail in trying
to say, when creating a picture of men being emotionally and sexually attached to sheep, that
bush women were more masculine, unlike sheep which are more feminine, having a maternal
bulk with their nice wool, large soft eyes and comforting bleat.

“The long journey and shared hardship, shared shelter, and kilometres of companionship,
daily took them close to the tragic conclusion with the inevitable death of the loved one
through the workings of capitalist market forces. But also the return of the drover’s
natural drives to his own species as he re-entered the world of people.” (Moorhouse)

Cassamagiore explicitly and directly analyzes Henry Lawson’s story, saying that the woman in
his story wasn’t named, just as people do not give sheep names, unlike domestic pet animals or
cows. Lawson’s woman’s life is being equated with the life of a sheep, saying that their lives
routine is the same. He makes a remark about the Drysdale painting, saying that there are no
sheep there and “…then we realize that it is as if they have been swept up into a single image
overwhelming the foreground – the second drover’s wife.” He makes another reference, this time
to Murray Bail’s story and comes to a really comic conclusion: the woman’s husband is a dentist
– teeth are a symbol of death (because we eat sheep by using our teeth to chew the meat – the
drover takes the sheep from inland to the teeth of a hungry city – on the other hand, Bail’s
woman goes from the arms of her natural predator (dentist) into the arms of her natural protector
– thus, we have a reversed tragedy that becomes a romantic comedy.

What Casamagiore repeats a few times in the story is the fact that his country would not fund his
trip to Australia and pay him to conduct a research on this topic. ”If the authorities would
provide more funds for education in this country, maybe Italia would regain its rightful place at
the forefront of world culture.” Here he ridicules his country’s anti-Eurocentrism attitude and the
academic and High Art world with their nationalist preoccupations.

“The unimaginative reaction of the educational authorities for research funding for this
project indicts our whole system of education in this country.” (Moorhouse)

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In the end of the story, Moorhouse takes away the narration from Casamaggiore and addresses
us, the readers, by carefully deconstructing the story that we have just read. He gives us an
explanation of parodying and making jokes, “the joking is a form of truth telling, a way of
confession.” The spirit of those old and more primitive days when people were closer to nature
then they are today is still present. He identifies mowing the lawn as an urban hay-making ritual;
the sheep skin with wool is often used as a seat cover in automobiles. Moorhouse writes that
people should not be ashamed “of that which is bizarre” and that other, older cultures also have
their myths and national jokes (the same or worse than interspecies reciprocity) and there we can
find the beginnings of their own mythology. He advocates a fresh exploration of the Australian
history from a Eurocentric perspective and mocks the nationalist preoccupation with an
Australian literary tradition as an isolated country proud of its bush culture and heritage of
endurance.

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CONCLUSION

These postmodern stories are not only a parodic re-examination of the Australian bush myth and
the representation of bush women (as well as men), but they are also parodies of the academic
obsession with re-interpretation, quasi intellectualism, and the formation of a stereotypical image
of particular national identities. We can clearly see the clash between traditional and modern
Australian literary forms and theories, the destruction and rebuilding of the same myths, and
reassessing them, trying to make them fit in the 20th century.

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REFERENCES:

1. Bail, Murray. (1984). ‘The Drover’s Wife’ in The Drover’s Wife and Other Stories. St.
Lucia: Queensland University Press.
2. Karanfilović, Nataša. “From the Drover’s Wife to Independent Creativity: Images of Women
in Australian Writing”. Godišnjak Filozofskog fakulteta u Novom Sadu. (Novi Sad), 2008.
123-130. Print.
3. Lawson, Henry.(1892). ‘The Drover’s Wife’ in The Sidney Bulletin, 1892.
4. Moorhouse, Frank. (1980) ‘The Drover’s Wife’ in The Bulletin, 29 Jan 1980:160-162

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