The mood of "The Drover's Wife" is defined by the bushwoman and her family's difficult living living situation in the Australian wilderness. At many points, the story describes the bushwoman's lack of joy and resignation to mere survival, as the reader learns that the bushwoman has had to face dangerous and traumatic challenges over the years.
The reader is made to feel the hopelessness and the precarity of the bushwoman’s situation. The story's use of the frame narrative—of an evening in an endless series of evenings where she sits alone and contemplates her life—quickly begins to feel almost as unpleasant for the reader as it might for the bushwoman herself. The story makes the reader feel her despair and numbness through many unsentimental descriptions of the bushwoman:
She seems contented with her lot. She loves her children, but has no time to show it. She seems harsh to them. Her surroundings are not favourable to the “womanly” or sentimental side of nature.
Importantly here, the narrator says the bushwoman “seems” contented—this is not the same thing as being contented. Under the veneer of “harshness” her children experience and the emotional numbness she has developed, she is deeply discontented. This, however, is only revealed to the reader through descriptions of her more emotionally open past self in the story’s flashbacks, when she still cried and laughed openly.
