In the s conservative Prime Minister John Howard even attempted to officialise mateship as a national value, by including it in the text of the Australian Constitution Page Henry Lawson was one of the greatest enthusiasts of the concept and became, in Harry Heseltine's words, the leading preacher of the "gospel of mateship" in his fiction Heseltine's analysis of Lawson's stories shows that more than merely reducing mateship to its idealized or political aspects although he famously does that in "Send Round the Hat" , Lawson was able to imprint a wide range of different connotations to the term.
To quote only a few of the most famous stories, mateship can be personal and sentimental, as in the relationship between Joe Wilson and his mate Jack "Joe Wilson's Courtship" ; unwavering, when two bushmen spin a tall tale to hide from their boss's widow the degradation to which he had fallen before his death "Telling Mrs.
Baker" ; clownish in the closeness between a bushman and a corpse "The bush undertaker" ; parodic in the description of the half-hearted efforts of a group of workers to bury the body of a union member unknown to them "The Union Buries its Dead" ; or even ruthless, when mates encourage the schizophrenic break of a bush traveller "Rats". A common feature of the protagonists in the stories above, though, is that they are all male. For nineteenth century Australian women in the bush, Dale Spender maintains, "there were few compensations for the brutal nature of their existence.
Not for them the contentment of the campfire, the opportunity to break bread, tell tales, make mates" xviii. While men could travel in pairs or small groups, driving herds or in search of seasonal work, their wives were left in charge of the family and the farm, usually miles away from any outside assistance or human contact. Indeed, Lawson's fictional bush is "No Place for a Woman" the title of one of his short stories and his female characters go through degrees of hardship and isolation that his bushmen do not usually have to face. In "The Drover's Wife," one of the most frequently anthologized Australian short stories worldwide, Lawson's heroine is an anonymous bushwoman who, in the absence of her husband, spends a whole night guarding the sleep of her children, after a poisonous snake has infiltrated underneath the floor of her house and here the image of the snake as proverbial evil coming from the wilderness is no coincidence.
This is only one more of the domestic challenges she must deal with single-handedly, and the plot is made up of the memories of such dramatic events during her long vigil: The crisis has a bitter-sweet closure: Kay Schaffer concludes that this story. The adoption of women as protagonists was not a mainstream practice among Lawson's contemporaries. In many of the narratives that compose the Australian bush canon, women are either taken for granted as mothers and housewives, and are kept in the background, or are not present at all in the plots.
Good examples of the former tendency are Steele Rudd's famous sketches written from to , later gathered in On Our Selection. The book depicts, in a characteristically Australian self-mocking tone, the strenuous though often amateurish and ineffective toils of a rural family always on the verge of defeat to poverty, famine, plagues, rain, fire, droughts, bankruptcy, in fact an astonishing array of disasters of all sorts.
Although the first chapters make it clear that the settling on the land had "combined male and female forces" 4 , the characters of "Dad" and the sons are always on the forefront, while "Mother" and the daughters receive much less attention from the narrative voice a quick digital search reveals around occurrences of the word "dad", as opposed to little more than of "mother".
Rudd's matriarch works hard to feed the family and make ends meet, but she also has her moments of amusement, encouraging the children to learn to play musical instruments and promoting periodical dances in her own parlour. Even Lawson's "haggard women" can enjoy some small victories over the Australian environment: By contrast, in the stories of Barbara Baynton there is no comic relief for women in the bush: Baynton wrote a novel, Human Toll , but her reputation rests mainly on Bush Studies , a small volume of six well-crafted narratives that can best be described as horror bush tales.
The environment plays an important part in creating the terrifying atmosphere in Baynton's fiction, causing her protagonists in four of the stories they are female to feel lost and abandoned.
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Phillips sees in the stories,. In the nightmarish "A Dreamer", nature itself seems to be the misogynous element, but "Billy Skywonkie", "Squeaker's Mate" and "The Chosen Vessel" all have in common female protagonists that are abused, exploited, abandoned or even raped and murdered by ruthless bushmen. While Lawson has a deterministic approach to the Australian environment, implying that bush life must be stoically endured, for Baynton the victimisation of women is much more a product of society than a battle against nature.
According to Kay Schaffer, far from being merely descriptive of the adverse conditions faced by women, Baynton's narratives imply that women are "appropriated to positions of inferiority within the discourses of religion, politics and mythology; and sacrificed through [the dispersement of these discourses] to the dominant symbolic order" Baynton was mostly ignored by contemporary Australians. Only one of her stories, "The Tramp", was accepted for local publication in , in the Bulletin Magazine, and that only after substantial editing even the original title "The Chosen Vessel" was changed.
Bush Studies and Human Toll were both published in England and attracted some attention on account of the unusualness of the themes and the grotesque details involving colonial life. It was not until , though, that an essay by A. Phillips called attention to the quality of Baynton's writing, and she came to be admitted as part of the Australian tradition, in spite of her unorthodox views of the bush and its people.
For Schaffer, irony is a weapon used by Baynton against the very discourse that allowed her to be part of the "legend" in the first place Schaffer By making a direct reference to the ideal of mateship-and challenging it-it works as an ironic counterpoint to so many of the stories that compose the Australian bush canon. The main question raised by Baynton in this "bush study" is: Irony is already present in the title, as it becomes clear from the outset that Squeaker's mate is a woman.
As the drover's wife, Squeaker's mate is not referred to by her name in fact, her name, Mary, is only mentioned once in the last paragraph of the story , but in terms of her standing in relation to a man.
Bush Studies/Squeaker's Mate
In fact, much more than an "appendage" Barret 87 - in semiotic terms the recurrent 's along the text is significant - or a fragile and dependent wife, she is far superior to Squeaker, both in moral and physical aspects. The husband's unflattering nickname is a fitting allusion to his weak and idle personality, as much as to his low intellect and physical appearance. The mates' inverted gender roles are developed in the first paragraphs of the story.
The opening lines already highlight the woman's height and physical "equability" Baynton 13 and describe her leading the way to a routinely chore, the felling of a tree. She is carrying the heavy tools-axe, maul and wedges-, while the man takes the cookware-the typically Australian billy can type of pan used as a kettle and tucker food bags. As the story unfolds, other of her "manly" features become evident: Among the men in the community, Squeaker is often referred to as " 'a nole woman', [ Local men are, thus, impressed by Mary not in terms of her "feminine" attributes, but either in a mock or in a "business" way, as she "had hard-grafted with the best of them for every acre and hoof on that selection" In this story, going against the bulk of traditional bush tales, the selection has been bought with Mary's money although she allows the contract to be signed by her husband.
Squeaker also takes maximum advantage of his wife's industriousness. She's the one who, aside from her domestic chores, looks after the sheep, puts up and repairs fences, goes to town on errands, collects and sell bush honey and so on. Indeed, she has what it would take to be a true bush heroine, if the same standards applied to male heroes in the Australian tradition could be transferred to female characters. A heavy drinker, Squeaker needs to be coaxed into doing any work at all and his response to that is often abusive. How Mary puts up with it is "among the mysteries" 17 to the other men.
Rather than attracting female sympathy, Mary's lack of "leisure for yarning" and, being childless, "uncompromising independence" 17 , make her not only unpopular, but a menace to the other wives, who forbid their husbands to have any kind of relationship with her. Inhabiting this ambiguous location in-between the pre-established gender roles, Squeaker's mate suffers from loneliness, prejudice and misogyny much above the usual levels for fictional bushwomen.
Baynton makes Mary's situation much more complex by, early in the story, compromising her body, thus immersing her even more deeply in alterity. An accident during the felling of the tree leaves the woman paralysed: This can be seen as Australian nature exerting its traditional antagonistic role in creating either heroes or victims.
But still more intimidating is the immediate human response to the accident.
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Through free indirect speech and graphic detail, Baynton's narrative voice makes the most of Squeaker's insensitivity to his mate's ordeal:. The pipe had fallen from her lips; there was blood on the stem. She always ignored trifles, he knew, therefore he passed her silence. He told her that her dress was on fire. She took no heed. He put it out, and looked at the burnt arm, then with intentness at her.
Her eyes were turned unblinkingly to the heavens, her lips were grimly apart, and a strange greyness was upon her face, and the sweat-beads were mixing. Why did she not keep the flies out of her mouth and eyes? She'd have bungy eyes, if she didn't. If she was asleep, why did she not close them? Male and female bodies, to return to De Beauvoir's arguments, far from signifying exclusively gender or sexuality, also point to power and dominance.
In Australia, Wendy Seymour observes, there is a predominant type of physical body image attached to manhood: That would be a "strong, tough, resilient body which could endure heat and deprivation yet be ready to respond to the unpredictabilities of rural life", articulated, as well, to the body image of mateship, in "the hard, strong, emotionless, give-go man working alongside other men in the 'egalitarian' context of the bush. In such male culture, inhabited by strong men, as well as in accordance with nineteenth century dichotomous thought, Seymour goes on, women's bodies would be "weak and fallible", as well as "interior, private and mysterious"; i.
Submitted to an extreme instance of the "unpredictability of rural life" and despite her best efforts to get up and moving again, Squeaker's mate's body does not pass the resilience test and goes from one extreme of the physical ability spectrum to the other. In the second moment of the story-the aftermath of the accident-Mary is committed to bed, having lost the movement of her legs altogether and, thus, the ability to work and to be a "mate", even in parodic terms. As Sally Krimmer and Alan Lawson put it, "[h]er previous strength confounded the difference of her sex, but even she finds that once strength is broken, anatomy is destiny" No longer in control of her body, and, most importantly, no longer productive, "the cripple" is moved to a shed next to the house and substituted by a "new mate", a barmaid Squeaker brings one day from town.
Baynton's use of free indirect speech again proves skillful, as the narrator probes into the women's appraisal of each other. The new mate is intimidated by the old one: She would rather have abuse. The thick hair that fell from the brow of the woman on the bunk was white now.
Bush Studies/Squeaker's Mate - Wikisource, the free online library
Back-broken, white-haired, barren, isolated, Mary is now part of a perverse "love" triangle and subjected to even further humiliation by having to watch, in voyeuristic angry silence, from the cracks on the walls of the shed, the comings and goings of her rival in her own house. Anger is what is left from Mary's former admirable fittingness for bush life.
This overwhelming feeling leads to the psychologic tension and explicit violence of the ending of "Squeaker's Mate", elements also present in the other stories of the volume. That certainly contributed for her earlier critics, such as A. Stephens, the editor of the Bulletin Magazine , to consider Baynton "too outspoken for an Australian audience" Stephens apud Schaffer At a time when women writers in general did not leave the comfort zone of romance, and most of the Australian legend enthusiasts favoured patriotic themes, Barbara Baynton wrote what can be considered anti-romance Goldsworthy , exposing, in graphic detail, the disagreeable facts of domestic abuse and hatred against women, as well as the exploitation of women's labour power and bodies in the Australian backlands.
In Squeaker's mate's world, comradeship, loyalty and cooperation are a sad parody, an impossibility between men and women, or even among women, either in times of fortune or adversity. What prevails in "Squeaker's Mate" can best be described as "anti-mateship. In , historian Miriam Dixson published The Real Matilda , exploring the causes of what she found to be the lower status of women in Australia when compared to other western countries. Dixson was one of the most resonant voices to challenge the adoption of mateship as a national value, on the grounds that it excluded women, but also because of its misogynist character.
Dixson observed in s Australia a social trend in which women. Notwithstanding these valiant efforts, there is some gut sense in which a woman is not wanted. Back off, don't crowd me, love. Her husband denies her sexual identity: Taken individually there is nothing original in these visions of woman but their accumulation is surprising and ought to lead the reader to consider what place is left for a woman as a person.
This sentence is perhaps one of the best examples of the way the implicit works in Baynton's stories. The presupposition, at the time widely accepted, is that horsemen and swagmen are different. Explicitly asserting the contrary would have been immediately challenged and Baynton never takes this risk. Only with the story's denouement does the reader become aware that the presupposition is false, that both horsemen and swagmen are to be feared.
According to Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni: Readers of Bush Studies have all too often identified only the substitution, not the deviance. Most readers have seen this as a simple, almost superfluous statement, whose only aim is to underline the parallel between man and dog: Schaffer on the other hand sees here a reference to the first paragraph: According to Schaffer's reading: The Virgin Mary exists only to provide God with his Son, a wife is there to ensure the transmission of power and property from father to son. If one reads through the contradictions, woman is not guilty at all — she is wholly absent.
She takes no part in the actions of the story except to represent male desire as either Virgin or whore … She has been named, captured, controlled, appropriated, violated, raped and murdered, and then reverenced through the signifying practices of the text.
And these contradictory practices through which the 'woman' is dispersed in the text are possible by her very absence from the symbolic order except by reference to her phallic repossession by Man. Nor are sheep seen to be entirely passive: The old man claims that this is the third lamb that he has had to poddy. What is being challenged is not her motherhood but her apparent lack of maternal instinct.
Once the shepherd is dead, the ewe is capable of teaching her lamb to drink suggesting that it is in fact the man who prevents the maternal from developing. This would seem to be confirmed by the repeated remark that men insist on cows and calves being penned separately. Thus apparently hackneyed images are in fact used in a deviant way so as to undermine traditional bush values. Although never explicitly stated, this seems to suggest that it is not the land itself which is hostile but the activities of men which make it so.
It is perhaps not surprising that this story should be the most complex in its use of language. These passages deliberately flout what Grice describes as the maxims of relevance and manner — they seem neither to advance the plot nor to add to the reader's understanding of the characters. Consequently they pay insufficient attention to individual sentences. As Jean Jacques Weber points out, the natural tendency is to challenge what the sentence asserts rather than what it presupposes This is clearly illustrated by the opening sentence: Readers may object that they know of occasions when a good horse was loaned to an inexperienced rider but few realise that the assertion in fact negates the presupposition.
Baynton is not talking here about the loan of a horse but is challenging one of the fundamental myths of life in the bush — that there is such a thing as bush hospitality. Lawson's anonymous narrator says of the Drover's wife: Although semantically their meaning is similar, pragmatically they could not be more different.
The same is true of her short stories. Hergenhan queries the success of a strategy of such extreme obliqueness: The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge University Press, Bush Studies, other stories, Human Toll, verse, essays and letters. University of Queensland Press, Brown, Gillian and George Yule. An Affinity with Pain. Images of Woman in Australian Fiction.
Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard University Press, Krimmer Sally and Alan Lawson.