Australian Short Stories Consolidation
The four stories are short enough to reread, but revision is not just rereading. Rebuild the map of voice, setting, ending and context, then test it against a specific passage.
Rights note. The four stories are public domain and are linked from the stories and authors page. This packet does not reproduce them.
The four stories
| Story | Writer | Voice | Setting | Ending | What to revise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| "The Drover's Wife" | Henry Lawson | Third-person, spare and sympathetic | A small bush house, a yard and the surrounding bush | Unresolved endurance; the snake is killed but the life continues | Isolation, labour, motherhood and the bush as threat. |
| "The Union Buries Its Dead" | Henry Lawson | First-person plural and communal | A Darling River town, a pub, a dusty road and a cemetery | Ironic anticlimax; the funeral is remembered for its lack of feeling | Ritual, community, alcohol and colonial attitudes. |
| "The Loaded Dog" | Henry Lawson | Third-person comic narrator | A goldfield camp at Stony Creek, a creek and a shanty | Farcical chase; the men's plan backfires | Comedy, improvisation, male camaraderie and the bush myth. |
| "The Chosen Vessel" | Barbara Baynton | Third-person, Gothic | An isolated bush hut | A violent intrusion; the story refuses consolation | Vulnerability, landscape as menace, gender and colonial isolation. |
Context to use carefully
- Lawson's stories were collected in While the Billy Boils (1896); Baynton's "The Chosen Vessel" was collected in Bush Studies (1902).
- The 1890s bush myth, the Bulletin and the figure of the digger or drover.
- Colonial settlement, isolation, poverty and gendered labour.
- Attitudes to Aboriginal people and to women in colonial writing.
- The difference between a story's historical setting and its narrative attitude.
Use context to explain a detail, not to decorate a paragraph. Ask: what does this detail reveal about the story's values or its blind spots?
Patterns across the four
| Pattern | What to compare |
|---|---|
| The bush as workplace and threat | How labour, distance and weather shape what characters can do. |
| Who gets a voice | Which characters speak, which are spoken for, and which are absent. |
| Endings that refuse comfort | How each ending withholds resolution, consolation or justice. |
| Comedy and violence | How humour and danger sit beside each other, sometimes in the same story. |
| Community and isolation | Whether other people are a support, a threat or simply absent. |
Comparative questions
- How does Lawson's comedy change the way the bush is imagined?
- What does Baynton's Gothic ending reveal that Lawson's endings do not?
- Who is excluded from the community in each story, and why?
- How does setting shape the plot in "The Drover's Wife" and "The Chosen Vessel"?
- What does the narrator's attitude to death reveal in "The Union Buries Its Dead"?
- Which story most strongly challenges the bush myth, and how?
Common errors
- Treating the stories as documentary records of a place.
- Assuming the narrator is the author.
- Ignoring humour because the subject is serious.
- Quoting from memory without checking the text.
- Retelling the plot instead of explaining how the ending works.
Read the narrative voice, landscape and setting and endings and ambiguity pages for more detail.