Youth and Growing Up
Since the main characters are all individuals who are still young and in their primes, the journey of maturing and growing up runs throughout the story and is highlighted through many incidents in the novel.
A group of four friends, Nancy, Olive, Roo and Barney are the main characters of the story in which they are shown to be going through the various obstacles that are present in the process of growing up and become responsible and getting individual agency of their own in a world that never seems to stop working and never lets anyone stop working.
Their youthfulness becomes very apparent by their attachment to certain things that were more prominent in their younger years, such as the dolls for Olive or the entire concept of the layoff season for both Roo and Barney. They have a hard time letting go of these specific things because theses symbolise their youth and childlike innocence and naivety and freedom, something that decreases over time as one grows up more and more and has to force themselves to abide by the rules of the grown-up Adult World.
We see the four of them, plus Pearl who arrives later as a sort of replacement for Nancy in their little group, struggling to come to terms with the fact that they're slowly passing that stage of 'youthfulness' which they relate to the most. Their traditions, expectations, views of the world are all things that go under a drastic change the more they grow older. This seems to be a hard concept for them to grasp.
Gender Norms
Throughout the story, we see how gender biases and stereotypes shape and mould the viewpoints of the characters and how they view their own and others lifestyle solely on the basis of certain prejudices around the gender roles.
The biggest, and the one that often comes up in the story, conflict around gender is the way their jobs are gendered and picked apart. The four friends view only the work that requires more hard labour as "masculine" and the jobs of "real men" while viewing anything that could be considered less hard or more lighter as "feminine" and not real work. This is why they consider the men working in the bush cutting sugarcane as "real men" while the ones working in the city are seen as "soft men". Such a view is not only shared by both men and women in the story but also encouraged even further by women, much like Nancy and Pearl and Olive do, who consider themselves as just as an extension to the men around them who work and do labour as jobs.
In this way not only is work being gendered in the story but so is the locations and places of jobs being valued on the basis of distorted gendered views.
Friendship and Relationship
The four friends, Olive, Roo, Barney and Nancy (and later Pearl), form the group of friends who stick by each other in every situation and grew up together throughout the story.
Their friendship, however, is not so simple and straightforward. Each of them holds high and unrealistic expectations from others and view each other through the old, unchanging lens of their youth without taking in the fact that all of them have changed and grown into people who were not the same as they were before as young people.
This becomes a problem when they grow up and realize things and people cannot always stay the same as they want them to be just to have something to hold onto their youth. Roo and Barney fight over similar issues when Barney comes to admit to himself that Roo is no longer the "masculine tough man" he always viewed him to be. Roo as well comes to find himself in a mental crisis when he provokes a younger co-worker to a fight and promptly loses in it, forcing him to come to terms with the fact that he has in fact gotten old. This is particularly difficult for him to come to terms with because being old means he can no longer work as efficiently and hardly in the bush as he used to and that makes him "less of a man" in his own distorted views of gender norms.
