Gender Theme Analysis

As a woman taking care of her household in the unforgiving outback while her husband, the drover, is away, the bushwoman is left in a strange position. She tries to maintain certain aspects of femininity that only have real importance in a societal context, like getting dressed up to push a perambulator through the outback every Sunday and reading the Young Ladies’ Journal. At the same time, she is often forced to take on the role of a man to care for her family. Her circumstances push her into a much more ambiguous gender role than she would regularly occupy, as “her surroundings,” Lawson tells the reader, “are not favourable to the development of the 'womanly' or sentimental side of nature.” By depicting the traditionally masculine endeavors the bushwoman handily undertakes, Lawson implicitly rejects rigid stereotypes that would underestimate his protagonist on the basis of gender.

Because she lives in a harsh natural setting, the bushwoman must constantly do things that are not in line with traditional gender roles. When her house catches fire, for instance, she is forced to put on her husband’s pants to fight it properly. The “sight of his mother in trousers greatly amused Tommy,” Lawson writes, “who worked like a little hero by her side, but the terrified baby howled lustily for his ‘mummy.’” The children’s reactions highlight how the drover’s wife must ironically become nearly unrecognizable as a woman in order to be a good mother and protect her family. Though “she loves her children,” she also “has no time to show” tenderness towards them. This suggests that beyond donning the outward trappings of masculinity, she is forced to reject stereotypically feminine sentimentality because of the harshness of her surroundings. Simply surviving takes priority over behaving in a way that society would deem proper for a woman.

Even as the ways that the bushwoman deviates from traditional female gender roles, however, Lawson emphasizes the power of such roles by showing how strongly people cling to them even when far removed from society. One of the bushwoman’s “few pleasures” consists of dressing up herself and her children to take long walks with a stroller every Sunday, taking as “much care to make herself and the children look smart as she would if she were going to do the block in the city.” This implicitly presents gender as a performance, one that entails putting on a costume of sorts and flaunting it before an audience. Even without “a soul to meet” in the wilderness, the bushwoman seeks to remind herself of her femininity. This, coupled with the fact that the bushwoman occasionally cries after particularly draining experiences trying to protect her family, complicates the story’s rejection of gender roles by suggesting that there perhaps is something innate about femininity or masculinity; on the other hand, the complicated character of the bushwoman might suggest that neither role in rigid isolation can entirely encompass the human experience.

Ultimately Lawson highlights the artificial nature of gender roles while also making clear that, however socially constructed, gender stereotypes still have the power to shape behavior—and can have concrete consequences for women. Despite the clear absurdity of adhering to gender expectations in the outback, the bushwoman is still limited in certain ways as to what she can do and what she can expect from her life because she is a woman. While her husband goes off for months at a time and “may forget sometimes that he is married,” she is stuck in the house with the children—because of her sex, her freedom is automatically restricted. She also faces certain dangers because of her gender that women face regardless of whether they live in cities or in complete isolation: sometimes a dangerous man will come by her house and, to protect herself from potential intrusion or assault, she has to lie that “that her husband and two sons are at work below the dam.”

Lawson's portrayal of gender is complex, as he makes clear that life in the Australian outback forced early white European settlers into situations that they would never encounter in towns or cities. By showing how the bushwoman defies traditional gender expectations, as well as depicting how out of place certain performative practices of gender seem in the outback, Lawson illustrates the socially constructed nature of gender and highlights women’s potential when freed from restrictive stereotypes. At the same time, the bushwoman's interest in the Young Ladies' Journal, her Sunday walks, and relative sentimentality suggest her interest in maintaining femininity. Her tears at the end of the story could suggest the stress of being forced into a more masculine role; that Tommy, upon seeing his mother cry, promises never to be a drover could also suggest the importance of moving to a more equitable distribution of labor regardless of gender in the future.