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The essay aims to show the cultural, aesthetic and identificatory displacements at work in the successive revisions and reinterpretations of Henry Lawson's "drover's wife" figure who became a national icon right away. It is quite interesting to note the surprising abstract and bare nature of both the figure and the bush, even in Lawson's original short story. They seem to crystallize national character precisely because they leave it rather unspecified and open to interpretation, except as a struggle to cope with one's adopted land and the acceptance of possible failure.
"The Drover's Wife" is both a household classic in Australian literature and an archetypal figure in the Australian canon of representative national types. As such, a close scrutiny of both the original short story by one of the founding fathers of Australian literature, namely Henry Lawson, and its successive rewritings or adaptations, is very illuminating with regard to the importance of the figure itself and its problematic nature as a national icon.
This essay will focus on three successive versions of the national figure which all share a highly visual impact: Henry Lawson's Hemingway-like behaviourist tale was published in 1892, Russell Drysdale's dream-like painting was produced in 1945 and Murray Bail's grotesque rewriting of the original short story, with its obsessive search for a flesh-and-blood drover's wife, came out in 1975. With each new version, there is a reappraisal of both the character of the drover's wife and the idea of a national type exemplifying courage, endurance and self-sacrifice. The three works are centered on national myth-making as a matter of imagination, in other words as a process of producing images, whether an allegory for Lawson, surrealist symbols for Drysdale or a wild goose chase after the original for Bail.
In all three works, the notion of point of view and horizon is central to the reader's own vision and interpretation of the drover's wife. The ultimate demystification of the myth is offered by a short story inspired by the other three works, namely Moorhouse's ludicrous mock-academic paper in which the archetype of the "drover's wife" suffers a last fatal blow as it is turned into a national joke.
The reason why the original short story has been so often adapted and readapted from...