Humankind vs. Nature Theme Analysis

The central problem facing the main characters in Australian Henry Lawson's 1892 short story “The Drover's Wife” is the presence of a snake in the floorboards of their shack in the Australian outback. The story begins when the snake first enters the house and ends when the mother of the family, a “bushwoman,” finally kills the snake with the help of her dog, Alligator, thereby preventing it from hurting her four young children. With the bushwoman's final killing and disposal of the snake, Lawson illustrates the tenacity of white settlers when confronted with natural hazards in the Australian outback. By stretching the struggle with the snake out to the span of the entire story, as well as interrupting the narrative with stories of other difficult struggles against nature that the bushwoman has faced, he illustrates how all-consuming the fight against the forces of nature was for early white settlers in the Australian outback (the story is notably devoid of meaningful discussion of indigenous peoples). Even as Lawson details the power of nature, the bushwoman’s victory suggests an ultimate assertion of humankind’s inevitable dominion over the natural world.

The struggle to protect her family against constant threats to their lives takes up the majority of the bushwoman's time. Lawson recounts several stories that illustrate the ways that the woman has fought against nature: she has beaten a bush-fire, disease, a bull, and vicious birds. All of these short accounts involve a terrible struggle, but the bushwoman always wins in the end through a combination of wit and willpower. Though she does have an old shot-gun, her greatest weapon is often her “cunning”—which she employs, for instance, to scare crows away from her chickens. By asserting that crows may be cunning “but a woman’s cunning is greater,” Lawson implicitly raises human beings above other inhabitants of natural world by virtue of their intelligence.

Importantly, however, Lawson also partially attributes the success of the bushwoman—and thus to settlers writ large—in beating nature's threats to her ability to be in harmony with and make careful use of elements of nature. In the end, she is able to kill the snake only with the help of Alligator, who is described without sentimentality: Lawson says that Alligator “hates snakes and has killed many, but he will be bitten some day and die; most snake-dogs end that way.” Although Alligator is depicted as just one among many snake-dogs, significant only in that he is useful, it is only through allying herself with this non-human creature that the bushwoman is able to protect her family. The bushwoman also notably shelters her children on a wooden “man-made table” beyond the snake’s reach and at one point must go to gather more firewood, further illustrating her reliance on certain aspects of the natural world to survive. Together these details reveal that the bushwoman has not segregated herself from nature but rather sublimated elements of nature to suit her own needs—again suggesting a certain primacy of humankind.

Of course, Lawson is not suggesting that the fight against nature in the outback consists of constant victories. “There are things that a bushwoman cannot do,” Lawson writes, noting how she was unable to prevent a flood from destroying a dam that had taken her husband, the drover, “years of labour” to construct. Following this failure in the face of nature’s wrath, the bushwoman cried. Lawson includes this anecdote not to diminish humankind’s power, but rather to underscore the immense power they are up against in establishing lives in the outback. This, in turn, makes human beings’ eventual success all the more impressive, and again speaks to what the story perceives as the natural dominance of humanity.

The bushwoman's struggle to protect her family from the snake symbolizes the struggle of early white settlers in the Australian outback against nature. Lawson makes clear that spending their lives beating nature comes at a dear cost to the drover and his wife; at the same time, Lawson suggests that through their sacrifices, they are laying the groundwork so that the next generation can live more comfortably. This is reflected in the fact that both the drover and his wife are never given names, though their two older sons are named frequently (“Tommy” and “Jacky”). Though the generation of the drover's wife is likely doomed to live in obscurity, their work in the outback will create a on which the next generation of colonists will build—ensuring the continued dominance of humankind over the natural world.