Clancy Of The Overflow Essay

Henry Lawson uses a variety of language techniques, colourful characters and strong personal voices in his stories ‘the drovers wife’ and ‘in a dry season’ to give off a negative image of the bush life and the gender inequities of the time. Similarly, Banjo Patterson writes about the bush in his poem ‘Clancy of the Overflow’. However, unlike Lawson, Patterson focuses on portraying a positive view of the bush whilst at the same time suggesting a negative view of the city life. Frederick McCubbin also focuses on the positive aspects of the bush through his painting ‘down on his luck’. His painting portrays the beauty of the bush but at the same time displays the negative views of the loneliness it brings.
The drover’s wife is written in third
These inequities are expressed throughout the number of flashback in the story, alternating from past and present, reflecting two different time frames. These flashbacks are told of a drovers wife and mother of four who Lawson describes as a ‘girl wife’ implying that she is only a young girl who has been thrown into grown up life early. Lawson speaks of how she is left alone with the children for extended periods of time ‘once being left home for 18 months before her husband returned’. Lawson speaks of this in order to gain sympathy for the woman from the audience. The first flashback uses powerful descriptive vocabulary such as ‘long, old and sooty’ to give a distinctively visual image of the woman beating out a fire. ‘She put on a pair of her husband’s trousers and beat out the fire’. Through this, Lawson aims to visually describe the woman wearing her husbands trousers, dressed like a man, beating out a fire which is a mans job. This represents how tough the life of a woman was in the 19th century as compared to a man, as Lawson says of the womans husband ‘sometimes he may forget he is married’, implying that he has his way with other women while out droving for