"The Drover's Wife," as with author Henry Lawson's other writing, belongs to the genre of Australian colonial literature. It is one of Lawson’s most beloved and anthologized stories and is often considered one of the first accurate depictions of late 19th-century colonial life in Australia. It is also an example of realist fiction, as it attempts to faithfully depict the experiences of the kind of people its stoic characters represent. Lawson’s descriptions of the life of poor, white Australian settlers in the bush are often uncompromisingly realistic:
Four ragged, dried-up-looking children are playing about the house. Suddenly one of them yells: ‘Snake! Mother, here’s a snake!’ The gaunt, sun-browned bushwoman dashes from the kitchen, snatches her baby from the ground, holds it on her left hip, and reaches for a stick. ‘Where is it?”
Rather than romanticizing the appearance of the children and the bushwoman, the narrator describes them as “ragged” and “dried-up”, while their mother is “gaunt” and “sun-browned”. Lawson wrote primarily about the experiences of poor settlers like these in Australia, whose struggles against an unfamiliar and harsh environment came to represent a facet of Australian national identity both inside and outside this genre.
This genre of literature—written by settlers on indigenous land—also often portrays Aboriginal Australian using racist language and stereotypes. (The bush was the home of many Aboriginal Australians, whose lands were taken away by colonizers given “land grants” by the British government in the late 1700s.) “The Drover’s Wife” presents the Aboriginal Australians who help the bushwoman with her childbirth and her chores in this way. These stereotypes are characteristic of Australian colonial literature, in which settlers are often glorified as heroic figures and Aboriginal Australians portrayed as subhuman nuisances. In "The Drover's Wife," for instance, King Jimmy is characterized as a “stray blackfellow" who cheats the settler “although he was the last of his tribe, and a King."
Meanwhile, the white characters in “The Drover’s Wife” embody attitudes conventional to Australian colonial literature: toughness, perseverance, and optimism. Even the bushwoman, in spite of all her troubles, has "a keen sense of the ridiculous." Lawson unifies these qualities symbolically in the first description of the bushwoman and her husband (the drover), as the bushwoman’s “husband is an Australian, and so is she." To be a bushman or bushwoman, in Lawson’s brand of this genre of literature, is to exemplify all of these characteristics.
