Lawson’s story begins at sunset when the drover’s wife, who lives alone with her four children in an isolated, inhospitable environment, sees a snake slipping under the house. While she sees the snake as a danger at the same time she calmly sets about securing the safety of her children and prepares to spend the night awake in the company of her dog Alligator, in case the snake reappears. During her vigil she remembers other threatening situations she has faced without her husband – flood, drought, bovine pleuro, a menacing swagman – and survived.
Nevertheless this resolute woman still takes pleasure in reading the Young Ladies Journal.
Lawson’s own contemporary Barbara Baynton reacted strongly against Lawson’s perspective in her short story The Chosen Vessel. Her central character, a shearer’s wife, lives with her child in the bush, and is alone for long periods of time. While she doesn’t like the bush it is not the desolate land that presents a threat to her survival, but rather how she is perceived by the males with whom she has contact.
When the story opens she, like the drover’s wife, is dreading what the night may bring. A swagman is camped not far from her home and is waiting for the dark to attack her. She thinks of going to her husband but he would only dismiss her trepidation with contempt. When her fears eventuate she flees into the night but her appeal for help from a passing horseman is ignored as the young man thinks he is having a vision of the Virgin and her child. Her femininity not only makes her vulnerable but also brings about her destruction.
Several other later stories recycle the image of the drover’s wife, each one exploring the threat posed to the female by male assumptions about a woman’s role. In particular, the stories all entitled The Drover’s Wife by Murray Bail, Barbara Jefferis and Mandy Sayer emphasise the strength and capability of woman, and the inability of the male to reconcile female needs and desires with their “standard” of womanhood.
In Bail’s story, the middle-class townie narrator who has been deserted by his wife for a drover and bush life reflects on, and condemns, changes in his wife’s conduct. Hazel began to do “unfeminine” things like chop wood (and sweat!) and he is completely traumatised when she kills a snake at the beach. Mandy Sayer’s story gives Hazel’s perspective on events. In this version, Hazel’s husband leaves her after she displays an unseemly passion that does not accord with his “standards” of feminine behaviour. Jefferis’s story is critical of Lawson’s story, as the female narrator sees the anonymity of the wife as objectifying the woman. She wants her readers to know “about how women have a history too”.
Leah Purcell’s staged version of The Drover’s Wife wants her audience to know that Aboriginal women also have a history. While Purcell’s re-imagining reprises many of the details from Lawson’s story – the death of a child, the gallows-faced swagman, a stray Aboriginal, the mad bullock, the protective son – they are reworked in a radically different context.
In some ways Purcell’s story is closer to Baynton’s version. Her drover’s wife, one heavily pregnant and fearful Molly Johnson, lives alone in the outback with her eldest son, her other children away as birth is imminent. She is subjected to abuse by an array of conniving or brutal white males despite the single shot Martini Henry rifle she relies on for protection. Like Lawson’s wife, Molly tries to bluff strangers into believing that her husband will be back soon, a pretense that underscores a woman’s vulnerability.
However, it is later revealed that Molly has killed her husband in self-defence and buried him under the woodheap. This circumstance causes us to reconfigure Molly’s fearfulness as more than a fear of passing males but rather the fear that Joe’s disappearance will be noted, and have consequences. The ever-present and ominous axe poised in the chopping block references her terrified state, which proves justified by the sexual vengeance wreaked upon her female body by Joe’s mate.
Purcell’s version also begins with a siege. However, the perceived threat, an injured Aboriginal man, proves to be not her enemy but her salvation. Black, as she calls him, as she shares the colonial prejudice against Aborigines, reveals to Molly that her mother was Aboriginal. At first, she slaps him but eventually his revelation brings a new understanding of herself, and of her husband’s brutal treatment of both her and his children. This knowledge gives her the strength to endure the loss of children stolen by the state and faith in her ability to get them back. Leaving the white world, she takes the path described to her by Yadaka, Black’s real name, and which will lead “to the cave, supplies and in the spring … (our) people”.
We might feel comforted by the vision of this woman, resurrected by the knowledge of her Aboriginality, but for the closing passage. Embracing her son in a reversal of the Lawsonian conclusion, and clutching her rifle, she says “And when ya’re old enough … I’ll introduce you to Robert Parsen and John McPharlen”. It seems that Molly is dedicating her son, and the future, to exacting vengeance for her rape and thereby perpetuating white masculine violence.
There are yet other versions of Lawson’s story than those discussed, for instance, Anne Gambling’s The Drover’s De Facto, and another by Frank Moorhouse, and more may still lie ahead. Far from being “old hat” the drover’s wife seems to be a figure upon whom Australian writers choose to inscribe socio-cultural conflict over inclusivity.
