A Poetic Creep
The character of Thomas McNealy is one of the play’s new additions to Henry Lawson’s story of the drover’s wife. He is a swagman who seems to be either a bounty hunter or part of a posse. In the end, he reveals himself as simply a creep. But even a creep can possess a poetic sensibility in this wild strange world:
“Rape, strangulation, the boys sodomized, and the girl drowned…Life slipping away from piercing sapphire blue eyes.”
The Serpents
Lawson’s original story is another of his famous examples of creating an entire world of a story in a ridiculously efficient number of words. The focus of his story is the drover’s wife battle against a deadly snake. That part of the tale becomes an anecdote told by the wife in this adaptation. The snakes here are purely metaphorical and they are the white men who regularly make their way to the isolated home of an seemingly single mother who can only hold out the threat that her husband is due home any minute. Take special note: it is only the white men who arrive with poison in their hearts.
This Wild Strange World
Life in the Australian bush is not for the weak of heart, mind, or body. American readers might want to picture the American west even where even Deadwood or Tombstone was at least a week’s ride away by horse:
“It’s the way of life out here. Everything’s a gamble.”
The Poetry of Love
At the center of this reinterpretation of Lawson’s story is the arrival of an Aboriginal man with a prisoner’s collar around his neck. And that isn’t even half the backstory he has to tell, which includes running off with a circus and more than a few insights into the backstory of the drover’s wife himself. And, like all good backstories, a tragic romance:
“Then one night I saw this beautiful woman…her skin oiled with the Bogong moth fat, shining like a full moon…and when she danced…smooth like shallow runnin’ water over river rocks.”
“Ma, I won’t never go a-drovin’.”
Both Lawson’s short story and the play move incessantly and inexorably toward the promise made by the young son of the drover’s wife. The words are not exactly the same, but the sentiment is identical, and the meaning of the sentiment goes well beyond the restriction of the literal meaning. The promise by the son not to go droving is a promise not to follow in the father’s footsteps beyond mere occupation. It is an affirmation of generation change, an oath to provide security instead of mere protection, a forswearing of a profound psychological shift in modernization of a changing world.
