The land shapes us
The land, too, Henry Lawson would suggest shapes personalities over time. The hostile environment makes exacting demands upon the mother in The Drover’s Wife. It shapes her personality as well as her relationships and changes her through dire necessity. The wife gives scant emotional support to her children because she is so preoccupied battling the adverse challenges of the bush including floods, fires, snakes and the “gallow-faced swagman”. As Lawson states, “she loves her children but has no time to show it.” Suppressing her “womanly” side she becomes cunning, resilient and harsh. Oddly, though, she soon realizes she would be “strange” away from her environment, so accustomed has she become to the loneliness of place. Most importantly for Lawson, those individuals who do adapt to the bush, acquire a sense of the ridiculous that shields them from despair. It is a way of holding the strangeness at bay
(a poem on henry Lawson// Patterson)
We change the land
Just as the land changes us, so, too, do we change the land – often for practical, other times for spiritual, purposes. As David Malouf points out even the indigenous shaped and changed the landscape over thousands of years owing to their practical lifestyle needs. By using fire sticks the aborigines created open forests for grazing and easy hunting. He concludes, “it is now widely acknowledged that they changed the form of the continent’s vegetation”. (Boyer Lectures, 1998).
And of course man-made climate change.
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