The tone of "The Drover's Wife," particularly in the flashbacks contained within the frame story, reflects the bushwoman's attitude to her situation in life. The third-person narrator presents the bushwoman's experiences and her feelings in a flat, unadorned way, which fills the prose with a sense of exasperation. The narrator seems sympathetic to the bushwoman’s plight while also echoing her own restraint:
Now and then the bushwoman lays down her work, and watches, and listens, and thinks. She thinks of things in her own life, for there is little else to think about.
The narrator's flat, pessimistic tone in this passage mirrors the bushwoman's own quiet sadness and resignation to her circumstances. Having experienced a great deal of loneliness (since her husband works far away from home) and trauma (such as the death of a child) throughout her life in the Australian wilderness, the bushwoman is hopeful for a better future but knows that it is unlikely.
At certain points in the story, though, the narrator's tone abruptly becomes more dramatic. Once such shift happens when Alligator (the bushwoman's dog) spots the snake that has come into the house:
The hair on the back of his neck begins to bristle, and the battle-light is in his yellow eyes. She knows what this means, and lays her hand on the stick.
In this instance, the narrator describes Alligator—previously described as a dog who “sometimes makes friends with strangers"—as an animal with “battle-light in his yellow eyes" and a “bristling” neck. While this tonal shift communicates how dangerous the situation with the snake is, such shifts are fleeting, as the narrator quickly switches back to a more reserved and unemotional tone. All in all, then, the story's tone is both sympathetic to and detached from the bushwoman's struggle to live in her harsh environment, which serves to emphasize how the challenges in her life—though immense and emotionally taxing—have become normalized. She must quietly bear them in order to survive.
