Isolation and Vulnerability Theme Analysis

The bushwoman and her children are constantly made vulnerable to danger for many reasons, chief among them their extreme geographical isolation. Lawson depicts the many ways that isolation can pose a threat to one’s livelihood, health, and general wellbeing, and his illustration of the dangers that the family faces in the bush also underscores the extent to which life in society is full of comforts and resources that are easy to take for granted until one knows their absence. Moreover, Lawson seems to suggest that in the state of nature, represented by the bushwoman and her family, a person is forced to become especially strong because they are constantly close to death and fighting against it; the only way to survive in the face of this, suggests Lawson, is to grow a very thick skin.

The woman and her children live far from the rest of society, “nineteen miles to the nearest sign of civilization—a shanty on the main road.” This means that the bushwoman is forced to deal with most of the problems that arise for her family completely by herself. At times she receives help—she puts out the fire around her house with the help of bushmen, for instance, but this is only because they are there by chance. She is left to fight a flood on her property on her own, which results in her being overwhelmed by it; as Lawson writes, “There are things that a bushwoman cannot do.”

Part of her isolation has to do with mobility. Her husband, the drover, is always on the move, but because she has to take care of her children and has no access to transportation, she is not only located far from the rest of society but is also stuck in the bush with no way to leave. This compounds her vulnerability further still, as she is unable to reliably flee any sort of threats that might overwhelm her in this isolated location.

Such threats are numerous. The bushwoman nearly dies while giving birth, for example, as she is “alone on this occasion, and very weak.” She gets through this experience not because of professional medical help but because of help from an Aboriginal woman, an occurrence the bushwoman frames as luck or as a divine reply to her prayer for “God to send her assistance.” Her survival is framed as largely due to chance, and it is suggested that it could easily have gone quite differently.

Additionally, the bushwoman has to kill many animals to protect her family, and thus her isolation inevitably breeds a certain comfort around or acceptance of death. When a “mad bullock” attacks her house, she is not only able to kill it to save her family, but also “skin[s] him and [gets] seventeen-and-sixpence for the hide.” When she kills the snake and throws it in the fire, she watches it burn quite calmly. In starkest example of her exposure to death, following the death of one of her children, “she rode nineteen miles for assistance, carrying the dead child” as she searched for help—at once underscoring the tragedy of her isolation and the strength she has subsequently developed. She is able to face death stoically because, for her, it is simply a fact of life. She has grown comfortable with death in a way that may be unfamiliar to a city-dweller—suggesting that isolation brings one closer to danger, but also can make one more equipped to survive on their own.

Thus even as the bushwoman and her family are exposed to dangers that would be much easier to deal with if they had access to the standard resources available in a city, her isolation and resulting vulnerability actually ends up making her stronger. Because she cannot rely on others, she has to become someone who can (with the few exceptions of receiving sporadic help from other bushmen and Aboriginal people) rely entirely on herself. Therefore, Lawson suggests that isolation does not only create vulnerability, but also creates strength.