Cirrus@Austlit

'The sexual tension in 'The Drover's Wife' is stark. 

'The girl-wife

'The drover's wife has found herself in the outback, living in relative isolation in a two-room shack, one room with an earthen floor and one with a slab floor. She has four young children and a husband who is away droving for long stretches of of time - he's been gone for six months without any communication, and at one time had been gone for eighteen months. she is virtually a single mother, or a part-time wife, or maybe a semi-abandoned wife. She is used to the loneliness in her life.

'As a girl-wife she hated it, but now she would feel strange away from it.'

'Maybe life was be better without the drover being home?' (Introduction)