In recent Januaries, Bill @ The Australian Legend has been hosting weeks dedicated to Australian women writers for so long that he finally invited the fellas to have a week too.

My own interest in Australia was initially sparked in the fourth grade when I was assigned the Platypus (of course, I wanted the koala, but everyone wanted the koala).

The platypus is underrated.

That spark was stoked by the 1983 television mini-series The Thorn Birds, back when those things were called events and everybody watched and talked about the same shows and films.

When everyone was concerned about whom Father Ralph de Briscassart loved more: God or Meggie Cleary.

That’s where I learned Everything I Needed to Know about the Australian outback. (Or, so I thought.)

From a series filmed in California, in which only one of the stars was actually Australian (which isn’t out-of-line, as Meggie’s family was Irish originally, though her oldest brother yet resembles a Maōri ancestor), which was far more popular with North Americans than Australians.

This versioning of Australia came to mind when I was reading Frank Moorhouse’s edited volume titled The Drover’s Wife (2017), which presents a variety of interpretations of—and reflections on—a classic story (with the same title) about living in the bush, written by Henry Lawson (1867-1922).

Lawson’s story is notable because it’s set in the outback, and his talent for depicting bush life in detail—prioritising realism—has been much admired and acclaimed.

But it’s also remarkable for its time because it offers a woman’s perspective. It’s not the drover’s story, but the drover’s wife’s story. It’s not another story of “blokey mateship”, but a story about a mother and her children in everyday life.

Lawson’s story was heavily influenced by his feminist mother, Louisa, who drew on her own experiences and outlined her own perspective in an essay (also included in Moorhouse’s volume) titled “The Australian Bush-Woman”. Also a writer, Louisa contributed substantially to the story’s first draft, as his first and trusted reader, although that version of the manuscript no longer exists.

For anyone who enjoys observing the writing process, there is an essay here about various changes made to this story over time. And in the middle section (like a good true crime volume or a celebrity biography, it contains a small chunk of glossy-paged images) is a photograph that reveals some of the last known changes made to the draft in Henry Lawson’s own handwriting.

Moorhouse also writes about his decision to overturn tradition in his printing of the story here, his choice to maintain one of the earlier editorial decisions, although convention holds that the final published version is considered the standard for any literary work (and is what “should” be reproduced). Moorhouse, however, reverts to an earlier version of Lawson’s story, in which Black is capitalised (in the final version, it’s lowercase) and he elects to capitalise it here.

(A change he maintains is evident in the photographed manuscript page, where you can see the original text with a handwritten phrase inserted which transforms the Black woodchopper into a figure of fun, whereas the earlier versions afforded this Aboriginal man a greater degree of dignity or, perhaps even, a hint of justifiable resentment towards the settlers who invaded his people’s homeland.)

But Moorhouse’s volume is not only about Henry Lawson’s (and his mother’s) revisioning of this story. Moorhouse dedicates the volume to Murray Bail who, in 1975, wrote another version of “The Drover’s Wife”, which is also included in this volume (although his inspiration wasn’t only Lawson’s story, but other work also inspired by the story. It’s dizzying, just how many different versions there are of this tale. (And not because they were commissioned for this volume: original publication details, across decades, are included at the end of each piece.)

Certain motifs and phrases repeat, in different eras and rooted in different perspectives, and in the back there’s a list of many other works in an appendix (photographs, films, dances, songs—many online, particularly on YouTube, but also Vimeo) all inspired by and/or recreating this single short story.

Every time I would read one more, I would think the charm would wear off, but I loved seeing how it changed and how it stayed the same—simultaneously. (At first I was reading them very slowly, but when I realised that I had misremembered the dates for this event, I stepped up my pace.)

In Part Three, things take an academic turn. Beginning with a paper presented at an academic conference by a young Italian student named Franco Casamaggiore, in which Franco Casa-Maggiore (just pause a moment to consider those initials or play with an Italian translation) posits that the drover’s wife is actually only a symbolic character and that, in fact, she is a sheep (in women’s clothing).

The clothing matters because there has been so much speculation and discussion about the drover’s wife being a woman who is afforded centre stage in this story only because she behaves in a traditionally masculine way. She even wears her husband’s clothes in the bush (except on Sundays).

She’s required to mimic him in every way while tending to the property in his absence (he is away most of the time, droving) and her role being more masculine lends her that traditional importance. Wearing her husband’s clothes, she is worthy of the main-character role at last. [This reminds me of an older woman in one of Alistair MacLeod’s stories who pulls on her husband’s overshoes on the land in that small fishing community and how quietly significant that detail is.]

Except Franco Casamaggiore takes the whole sheep thing a lot farther than that. (And contemporary use of his sheepskin takes on a life of its own in some literary circles.) Afterwards, there are other (authentic!) academics who offer other interpretations and biographical context, who situate Lawson’s story in Australian literary history.

Towards the end of the volume, there’s a substantial bit on Leah Purcell’s work with the source material, which casts an eye on colonisation and queries the historical treatment of the Aboriginal characters and offers yet another perspective (she had written a play at the time Moorhouse’s book was published, but it’s now also a feature film).

I’m sure that Australian readers would find this volume interesting in a different, and likely more meaningful, way. Many of the references cited are unknown or unfamiliar to me, and this single story is my only experience with Henry Lawson (originally I had requested an InterLibrary Loan of his Collected Stories but the postal strike in November and library closures later December) interfered. And maybe that’s just as well, because I would have read through the collection like any other, and I would have left Frank Moorhouse’s book sit on the library shelves, reserving it in my mind for Australian readers.

But, in fact, this whole process, of how a single version of a story holds prominence is fascinating. How even the original storytellers yearn to revise it over time. How others imagine it to be different or long for it to be different or simply retell it. How some wish that old story simply repeated, as is, forever and forever.

My interest in Australian literature, as opposed to distinct authors or books that have appealed over the years, is recent and relatively formless. If it was a mind map, there would be little clusters of experience in bubbles of varying sizes, but no connecting lines.

But Frank Moorehouse’s The Drover’s Wife has me picking up my pencil again, as I admire the way he has connected Australian storytellers across time and space, and has invited me to piggyback along.

Much as Bill has done by inviting us to consider Australian writers from yet another perspective this January. Thanks for hosting, and for making me even more curious than I was before.

Men’s Week One | Men’s Week Poetry |  Men’s Week Poetry 2 | Bill’s thoughts on The Drover’s Wife