The Ute Symbol Analysis

In The Dry, utes symbolize rural Australian identity. A ute is a type of utility vehicle similar to a pickup truck that is mostly only sold in Australia and New Zealand. Utes have a cargo bed that’s useful for farm work, making them popular among farmers for practical as well as cultural reasons. Even though the protagonist Falk grew up in Kiewarra, he moved to Melbourne, an urban area, many years ago and so doesn’t drive a ute, as he doesn’t need a vehicle with a cargo bed for his work.  Thus, Falk’s not having a ute establishes him as a literal and cultural outsider among the residents of rural Kiewarra, where most people work in agriculture. . Conversely, the abundance of utes among farmers in Kiewarra symbolize how the land (and more specifically, the availability of natural resources) shapes life in Kiewarra and in rural Australia in general.

The most noteworthy ute in the story is Luke’s silver ute, since it is where the search party discovers Luke’s dead body. Falk can easily identify Luke’s ute in security footage, and so looking at the movement of utes on traffic surveillance footage becomes an important way to track people’s movements on the day of the murder. While Luke’s specific ute becomes important to the plot’s central mystery and gets at Luke’s deep connection to his farm work, the abundance of utes in town also represents how their connection to the land gives them a collective identity. The people who own utes in Kiewarra are likely to be farmers, and farmers are the ones who are most likely to be struggling from the drought. Thus, utes symbolize much the residents of Kiewarra depend on farming and the availability of natural resources. In this way, then, utes also the drought’s disruption to life in the rural town, making farm work difficult or impossible and threatening the very identity of farming communities like Kiewarra.