The characters in "The Drover's Wife" speak Australian English, which differs from other regional dialects of English in content, idiom, colloquialism, and structure. The story represents Australian vernacular speech in a way that provides color and context for the reader, as when the bushwoman's son Tommy warns his brother, Jacky, about the snake that has just entered their house:
"If yer bit", said Tommy with a pause, "you'll swell up, an' smell, an' turn red an' green an' blue all over till you bust."
Here, Tommy's accent helps establish the story's setting: his pronunciation of words like "your" and "and" implies that he's been raised in a rural environment rather than an urban one. Moreover, his graphic and rather crude description of the snakebite ("you'll [...] turn red an' green an' blue all over till you bust") suggests that such dangerous encounters with nature are commonplace for him. Indeed, he goes after the snake with a stick rather than hiding from it. Altogether, then, Tommy's manner of speech helps set the scene in a subtle but important way: these characters live in the remote wilderness, and they're used to living in close proximity to some of Australia's deadliest creatures (like poisonous snakes). As such, reader begins to understand that life in the Australian bushland is high-stakes.
This use of dialect is characteristic of the author, Henry Lawson's, writing in general. Lawson’s short story “The Bush Undertaker,” for instance, is also set in the outback, and it's mostly made up of exchanges between characters in Australian English. In this story and in “The Drover’s Wife,” these conversations contrast sharply with the very proper and restrained language of the third-person narrator. This juxtaposition emphasizes how isolated from the outside world the characters are, as their way of understanding the world and communicating is uniquely tied to the environment they live in.
