The Song of Tracks that Wind back
by Cavan Brown
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 63
Autumn 1999

Part 1

The last article in Zadok's series, on the spirituality of the Australian land, reflects on the track of Henry Lawson's Drover's Wife

Cavan Brown
Cavan Brown is the minister of Geraldton Baptist Church, WA, and is the author of Pilgrim

Through Barren Land, Albatross, 1991, and the forthcoming The Blackfellas' Friend: a life of John Gribble (Access Press, 1999).

THERE IS A WOMAN living in a flat land. No towering mountains or deep valleys, just "bush all round: bush with no horizon . . . nothing to relieve the eye". Her home is ordinary-a two-room house made from bush timber and stringybark. The kitchen floor is earthen while the rest of the house has a rough slab floor on stumps which is more comfortable but the mice and snakes are attracted to the dark, cool space under the floor.

She is alone. Her husband has gone droving. He is a good man. A hard worker with plenty of courage and a dream of making enough money on the farm to buy a house on the beach. But the dream was shattered by a series of droughts. A drought is no respecter of goodness or courage, nor an honest rewarder for hard work. He managed to hold his stock for one year but the second year was too much. He could have gone bankrupt and walked off the farm like the others but he was too proud to accept defeat. Instead, he sold most of the stock at dirt-prices and went droving, hoping to earn enough money to keep the family and farm together.

She hasn't heard from him for six months but, as she says, "It's no use frettin, I'm used to being alone." She was by herself for 18 months at another time.

Now, she has her children for company. Four "ragged, dried up children" that have been raised on the breast of barrenness. They are so much like the landscape.

She loves them but can't show it. She says her surroundings are not favourable to the development of "the womanly or sentimental side of nature". At night, when they could sit together and share some forms of tenderness, she is flooded out by waves of tiredness that break over her. Her emotions have become as blunt and as flat as the land that surrounds the farm. Whenever any moments of emotion well from within, she feels embarrassed and cannot express what she feels for the children. She has chosen, instead, to show her love by giving her life totally to their welfare.