What Role Does the Landscape Play in Contributing to Three Australian

In this essay I will consider the roles of city and country in three short stories; Water Them Geraniums by Henry Lawson, Short-Shift Saturday by Gavin Casey, and Trees Can Speak by Alan Marshall. I will argue through contributing to character development, they provide insight into the construction of contemporary

Australian identity. In Water Them Geraniums the outback is shown to be an emasculating force, particularly for women, that strips away their humanity until they function in a mechanical way to survive off the land. In Short-Shift Saturday the narrator is a product of an inherited colonial culture and imagines that it is the alien landscape and culture in which he lives that is the agent of his suffering. In reality, the countryside is used as a device to allow pathetic fallacy, reflecting the emotional state of the main protagonist. In Trees Can Speak the main character is the personification of the land and demonstrates the desirable state of being in harmony with the bush. I will put forward that across these three stories, the relationship between the characters and their environment is used to chart a period of progression from English myths and ideals onto the emergence of an Australian identity.

At the start of Water Them Geraniums, Joe Wilson and his wife Mary are in the process of moving out to land near Lahey’s Creek, where they intend to take up a selection. The path they are riding along is ‘a dreary, hopeless track’ with ‘no horizon’ and ‘gnarled and stunted trees in every direction ’.This track is a metaphor for the path their life together has taken. It is ‘the dry season’ of their marriage. The couple have ‘got out of the habit of talking to each other’ and no longer have any plans for the future. Something that is emphasized as important to characters who live in the bush and stay sane, is having something to look forward to. As Joe says:

Shepherds and boundary riders, who are alone for months, must have their periodical spree, at the nearest shanty, else they’d go raving mad…the yearly or half-yearly spree is the only thing they’ve got to look forward to: it keeps their minds fixed on something definite ahead.

The fact that the horizon Joe and Mary are riding toward has nothing on it, is a bad omen for their mental, emotional and physical health. It indicates that it is the lack of anything to look forward to in the ‘changeless miles’ of the outback, that is responsible for the misery, and in some cases early death, the characters will suffer. This is particularly true for the female characters. Mary and Mrs Spicer, whose family is the Wilson’s only neighbour, both die pre-maturely. As Mary says, she ‘can’t stand’ life in the outback, which she says will ‘kill her.’

Mrs Spicer is a ‘gaunt’ and ‘flat-chested’ woman whose face has been ‘burnt to a brick’. She is ‘a little wild-looking at times ’ and when working she wears clothes like “an old coat of her husband’s”, to do what would have traditionally been considered male tasks such as fixing a leak in the roof. When she helps Mary lay the table, the way she handles the crockery and napkins convinces Mary that she had been ‘fairly well brought up’.

Mrs Spicer is the incarnation of Mary’s destiny if she continues to live in the bush. She is a woman whose femininity has been ground down by a hard working and poverty stricken life providing for herself and her many children and whom at the end of the story, dies at a comparatively young age. In order to survive in country which is ‘no place for a woman’, she has had to become a man. Poverty has stripped her of any luxuries and what possessions she has are worn. The story puts forward that women treasure attractive or stylish objects because they are the hallmarks of civilisation. Both the main female characters in this story display this tendency such as when Mary becomes disheartened as she and Joe share a cup of tea in her new kitchen which has functional furniture which contrasts with their own, more elegant pieces that ‘Mary was rather proud of’. When she is ‘outside of her daily life’, Mrs Spicer speaks in a ‘lost groping-in-the-dark kind of voice’, is ashamed that Mary witness her poverty. At times she becomes depressed. Isolation from society and the hard realities of life in the bush have desensitized some of her feminine impulses. For instance, unlike Mary, she is unfazed by the idea that a suicidal man be left to almost die so that he gets ‘a good bellyful of it’. Life in the bush has made her practical and at times more unfeeling than an ordinary female.

The company of another woman re-awakens Mrs Spicer’s social awareness. The story suggests that women are particularly social creatures that belong around others. Joe gets women to come