This concluding tableau of mother and son is not designed to wring further pathos out of the situation, but to give it a symbolic dimension. The boy’s attempt to comfort his mother – ‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blast me if I do!’ – brings into focus feelings that inhere in the predicament of the drover’s wife. The boy is dependent for his survival on the mother he tries to comfort; he cannot replace the absent father and husband; his ‘manly’ promise to his mother, with its implication that his father was weak in submitting to necessity and leaving the family, reveals his child’s vulnerability and helplessness. If ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is susceptible to a sentimental interpretation, it is partly because the central image of mother and son – I should emphasise that I see the final scene as aiming at something more complex and more subtle than is achieved in the supposed climax of the killing of the snake – is perilously close to cliché in its conception, and throughout the sketch Lawson’s notion of the woman is too close to the stereotype of the bush heroine.

Yet ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is an impressive work to come from a young inexperienced writer. Along with ‘The Bush Undertaker’, it can be accommodated by the conventional view of Lawson as the sympathetic chronicler of bush life, but such an approach does not do justice to either story. In both Lawson is attempting – not wholly successfully – to create images which will define and express feelings he would have been incapable of analysing or explaining. The old hatter muttering ‘I am the rassaraction’ over the grave is cut off from all consolation, all hope that existence has some meaning. Uncharacteristically, in the final paragraph, Lawson distances himself from the grotesque figure he has portrayed, in sharp contrast to his identification with the ‘hollow men’ of ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’, which was written a year or so later, when he was working in the Bourke district.

The trip to Bourke and Hungerford – arranged by Archibald who was concerned by Lawson’s heavy drinking – brought a new energy and toughness to his writing, as ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’ bears witness. He went up-country with no illusions about what he would find. A month or so earlier he had been told by ‘Banjo’ Paterson in the pages of the Bulletin:

You had better stick to Sydney and make merry with the ‘push’,

For the bush will never suit you, and you’ll never suit the bush.

The two writers had engaged in a verse controversy, in which Lawson attacked the account Southern poets gave of the inland, and Paterson had written ‘In Defence of the Bush’. Arriving in Bourke in a dry season, Lawson wrote to his aunt: ‘The bush between here and Bathurst is horrible. I was right and Banjo wrong’. In the same letter he told her ‘I got a lot of good points for copy on the way up’, and ‘Took notes all the way up’. Out of the journey came ‘In a Dry Season’, which, like ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’ and probably ‘Hungerford’, was written close to the event. These three sketches included in this volume are ‘good in every line’, and repay the close attention which they may not seem to invite. Written as newspaper sketches (the form of which, I suppose, had descended from the periodical essays of the previous century), they assume a local audience, alert to local references (to Tyson in ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’, and to Clancy in ‘Hungerford’, for instance). These sketches display a remarkable sureness and economy of treatment, and give the impression of a man writing out of an intensity of feeling untroubled by doubts about form.

It is relevant to note here that a numbr of commentators have been inclined to suggest that Lawson spoiled a good story when he included the passage beginning ‘I have left out the wattle …’ in ‘The Union Buries Its Dead’. Such criticism assumes that Lawson’s purpose was to tell a story, and that he intruded himself to draw attention to his avoidance of the stock conventions. But this ‘Sketch from Life’, as it was subtitled when first published, was not thought of by Lawson as a work of fiction: it was a personal impression, and the passage simply emphasised the writer’s fidelity to fact in writing up his ‘copy’. (That the stock emotive devices he disdains here appealed to him is plain enough from weaker stories in which he falls back upon such consoling falsities.) Placed as it is, following the painfully detailed description of the actual burial, in which the narrator, insisting that ‘It doesn’t matter much – nothing does’, has shown how much he feels it does matter, the comment restores the unemotional reporting tone, which the narrator adopts as the representative of the union. The verbal ironies which accumulate through the sketch (more accurately sketch-story) make it a powerful revelation of what Lawson perceived as ‘the Out Back Hell’ (as he calls it elsewhere).

‘Hungerford’ is another expression of Lawson’s bleak vision. On the surface a mere ‘newspaper sketch’, it illustrates superbly his ability to charge detail with emotional significance while leaving the meaning of the whole to emerge through implication. In this instance, the experience of going to Hungerford becomes an experience of human absurdity and futility. As a town, a centre of ‘civilisation’, Hungerford is a ludicrous and horrifying negation of all meaning in human endeavour. The road stops short of the town; there is a rabbit-proof fence with rabbits on both sides of it; the river on the banks of which the town is sited flows only when it floods; and, most absurd of all, the colonial border divides the town in two. And the surrounding landscape is an image of desolation which appalls the onlooker. The humour of the sketch is in the tradition of bush leg-pulling, but the effect is intentionally the reverse of comic.

Much of what Lawson wrote in the next few years was under the stimulus of the Bourke experience, though nothing else approached the direct personal intensity of these early sketches. The work, collected in While the Billy Boils, while uneven, contains some fine examples of sketch-stories with Mitchell as the narrator within the story framework. The economy and poise of such sketch-stories as ‘On the Edge of a Plain’, ‘Some Day’, and ‘Our Pipes’ is very impressive. One thinks of Chekhov’s remark in a letter to Gorki: ‘When a man spends the least possible number of movements over some definite action, that is grace’.