“The Drover’s Wife” is set in the late 19th century, toward the tail end of Australia's early British colonial period. The aptly named bushwoman and her family live in the remote Australian "bush," which generally refers to remote, forested areas just outside of the coastal "outback." The story describes the area in which the bushwoman and her family live as being extremely arid, isolated, and thinly populated:
Bush all round. Bush with no horizon, for the country is flat. No ranges in the distance. The bush consists of stunted, rotten native apple trees. No undergrowth. Nothing to relive the eye, save the darker green of a few she-oaks which are sighing above the narrow, almost waterless creek.
Lawson’s repetition of the word “no” here emphasizes the bareness and harshness of the environment, which seems endless and inescapable, as it has “no horizon.” Europeans who settled in Australia often occupied huge swaths of country like this, in dwellings called “stations” alone with their families. In this story, there are “nineteen miles to the next station” from the house the bushwoman lives in. Many settlers made a living, as the bushwoman’s husband does in this story, by “droving,” or herding, harvesting and tending to huge flocks of sheep.
Although the unforgiving bush is overwhelmingly present in the “gaunt, sun-browned” bushwoman’s day-to-day life, about half the story takes place in the ramshackle hut that she and her family live in. It is described as being "on the main road" but is functionally in the middle of nowhere. This shanty, like the family, is held together almost solely by the bushwoman’s hard work and effort. The bushwoman must perform the traditionally gendered labour of keeping the household going, but she must also go beyond her prescribed gender role to perform tasks that her husband would complete, were he present—“fighting bushfires” and floods and driving away dangerous animals, among other difficult challenges.
Henry Lawson is often named in the style of Australian writing called “Bush Poetry,” which romanticizes these uniquely Australian landscapes and makes them a part of national identity. The setting's harshness is presented as conquerable rather than indomitable, reflecting the story's overall attitude that people will inevitably triumph over nature.
