'In the bushfire incident, the drover's wife experiences, for a few moments, dramatic transformations in her personality that are wonderfully revealing. For a brief time, she becomes a man. she crosses the sex boundary: 'She put on an old pair of her husband's trousers and beat out the flames with a green bough ... The sight of his mother in trousers greatly amused Tommy', her oldest child. This is perhaps the nervous laughter of children when confronted with a disordering of their certainties. Tommy may have been even more nervously amused if his drover father - had he been around - had put on one of his wife's dresses.' (Introduction)