The Drovers Wives

Introduction

Ryan O’Neill’s The Drover’s Wives: 99 Reinterpretations of Henry Lawson’s Australian Classic is a playful and humorous series of short texts. A combination of adaptations and transformations of Lawson’s iconic short story, it experiments with different textual forms and constrained writing exercises inspired by (but diverging from) the wit and satirical tone of Raymond Queneau (see Key Elements of the Text > Queneau and Literary Variations below). This clever fusion of inspirations ensures that the text is essentially about the acts of reading and writing. Exploring connections between texts, O’Neill plays with different genres and bends the boundaries of genre, producing a work that pays homage to a classic Australian text while often viewing it with a subversive and deconstructive eye.

This unit contains a wide variety of suggested activities. It is not recommended that you explore all 99 reinterpretations (or 100, including the source material) in detail. Rather, you can make selections according to your students’ abilities and the focus of your study.

Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’

Before students read O’Neill’s text, they should read ‘The Drover’s Wife’ by Henry Lawson (conveniently reproduced on pp. xi–xxii of The Drover’s Wives). What do they know about ‘The Drover’s Wife’? They can brainstorm ideas suggested by its title. Why has O’Neill pluralised the title for his book?

Adaptations

‘The Drover’s Wife’ has been the subject of many interpretations. Frank Moorhouse’s The Drover’s Wife: A Collection includes some interesting adaptations, appropriations, and transformations of the original 1892 short story by a range of writers.

Images and other adaptations in popular culture offer different readings and ‘ways in’ to the story, developing students’ understanding of its history and status in the collective mindset of Australians.

It is important to know something about Australia in the 1890s, when Lawson wrote his story: there was a fierce workers’ rights movement, and colonial settlers were beginning to define themselves as ‘Australian’ – hence Lawson’s statement that ‘Her husband is an Australian, and so is she’ (p. xv). Some writers felt that the English language was inadequate to describe the Australian landscape and embraced grim realism as a means of capturing the harsh realities of their time. Lawson’s depiction of the wife’s stoicism in the face of natural disaster and hardship is deliberately unemotional and understated; who can forget the sentence, ‘She rode nineteen miles for assistance, carrying the dead child’ (p. xvi)?

NOTE: The Australian landscape is often depicted as ‘wild’, ‘eerie’, or even ‘gothic’ in settler narratives. At times this has fuelled colonial misrepresentations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within those landscapes as equally ‘wild’ or ‘savage’. For an interesting discussion of these ideas, see this 2024 post on the State Library of Queensland’s blog.

O’Neill’s The Drover’s Wives not only responds to the original text, but demonstrates his appreciation for the rich intertextual tradition surrounding Lawson’s story and its enduring significance as an icon of Australian identity. It is important that students understand the continuing fascination with transformations of this story at different moments in time.

The drover’s wife by Russell Drysdale (1945)

Examine Russell Drysdale’s oil painting. The National Gallery of Australia provides some insights, including this short video.

How does this painting simultaneously explore ideas about the landscape, comment on the conditions of the WWII drought, and represent the harshness of bush life?

‘The Drover’s Wife’ from The Drover’s Wife and Other Stories by Murray Bail (1975)

Murray Bail’s short story draws on ideas about Lawson’s work and responds to Drysdale’s painting from the point of view of a man who sees his estranged wife, Hazel, represented there. The narrator reflects on his relationship with his wife, providing Bail with the opportunity to explore the gaps and silences in the original story. You can read a short extract on the publisher’s website, or in full in Moorhouse’s anthology.

At one point the narrator observes that there are no flies on or near Hazel, which he considers a ‘serious omission’ on Drysdale’s part, and an attempt to make the scene appear better than the reality (see para. 7 of Colette Selle’s 2005 essay).

• What message does Bail convey about the divide between life and art?
• How is he commenting on the gaps and silences that exist in other texts?

‘The Drover’s Wife’ by Barbara Jefferis (1980)

Barbara Jefferis’ short story responds to Bail’s characterisation of Hazel. Jefferis seeks to reclaim the voice of the wife, who argues against her past portrayals, in contrast to Lawson’s third-person omniscient narrative voice.

If you have access to Moorhouse’s anthology, you can read Jefferis’ story and reflect on the following questions:

• How does Jefferis combine ideas about the wife in her story?
• What does this reading have to say about the original story?
• Why does the author mention biographical details about Lawson?

The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson dir. Leah Purcell (2021)

Consider the trailer for Leah Purcell’s film. The entire film is well worth watching (accessible with a ClickView subscription), though it should be shown with caution due to its depiction of domestic and sexual violence.

• How does this film offer insights about the context of the original story and the harshness of Australian bush life at the time?
• How does Purcell’s identity as a proud Goa, Gunggari, Wakka Wakka Murri woman allow her to reclaim and re-read Lawson’s text, which has often been interpreted as a tale about a white man’s relationship with the land?
• What does it mean to have an Aboriginal woman rethink a classic story by a white male colonial writer?

Of these appropriations/transformations, Purcell’s is the only one that was produced after O’Neill’s 2018 collection. Students may wish to consider how O’Neill might have incorporated the ideas from this film into yet another reinterpretation – perhaps the wife (or Hazel) could review or react to it? ‘Tweets’ (pp. 95–98), ‘Internet Comments’ (pp. 206–209), or ‘An Amazon Book Review’ (pp. 104–105) from The Drover’s Wives may provide a model to guide student’s responses.

Purcell has also adapted The Drover’s Wife into a novel and a play*. She has been interviewed about these renderings on The Garret podcast*.

* Reading Australia title

Critical commentary

Consider this 2021 Artifice article, ‘The Drover’s Wife: Gothic Fiction in an Australian Context’. How does re-reading Lawson’s short story within the framework of the Gothic genre offer opportunities for understanding and interpretation?

Also consider this 2019 Conversation article, ‘Inside the story: 99 versions of the same tale in The Drover’s Wives’. How does the article acknowledge the collection’s theoretical roots?

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Personal response on reading the text

Structure

Students can open The Drover’s Wives and spend 10 minutes reading randomly. Then discuss:

• What is unusual about the book?
• Do we need to read the book chronologically?
• Why do you think Lawson’s short story was chosen as the subject for this book? Why might O’Neill choose a story that has already been appropriated and transformed so many times?

Intertextuality

The collection demonstrates many aspects of intertextuality, and the purposes of the reinterpretations differ. Some will:

• pay homage to the original story, exploring its enduring impact
• subvert aspects of the original story to change its meaning
• experiment with aspects of textual adaptation by changing the form of the original story (particularly the sections where the story becomes an advertisement, an American sitcom script, or a visual text)
• refer to the history of textual adaptation through allusions to other versions of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (particularly the Drysdale painting)

In ‘Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts’ (from 2004’s What Writing Does and How It Does It),  Charles Bazerman suggests that texts may:

Students can read three to five reinterpretations from The Drover’s Wives and discuss as a class:

• What are the relationships between the texts? What similarities and differences do you notice?
• How do the reinterpretations relate to the types of intertextuality identified by Bazerman?
• What is the shared purpose of the reinterpretations ?
• What is your reaction as a reader, and how is this reaction shaped by your prior knowledge of texts?
• How does O’Neill’s choice of textual form influence our reactions to the text?

Students can share their responses on Google Classroom or another common online space to capture a range of thoughts and opinions. They will revisit their initial response as they continue to explore the text, and reflect on shifts in their reactions. Some students may initially experience frustration at the referential nature of The Drover’s Wives; it may be necessary to consider the theoretical background of the text at this point.

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Key elements of the text

Background: the author

In keeping with the spirit of the book, a good question to ask is: who is the author, exactly? Literally it is Ryan O’Neill: a University of Newcastle academic who has previously written works of satire, most notably the biographies of sixteen imagined Australian writers in Their Brilliant Careers (2016), whose title is a nod to the Miles Franklin novel*. As a precursor to The Drover’s Wives, this work indicates O’Neill’s interest in creating meaning through the juxtaposition of short texts, as well as uncovering the comic absurdities in Australian literary history.

* Reading Australia title

Alternatively, is the author of this text Henry Lawson redux, casting his late 19th century gaze on the Australian landscape – a landscape that acts as the antagonist of the story (as symbolised by the snake) and is inhabited by the lone and nameless wife of an absent drover?

The London Magazine describes O’Neill as a ‘whimsical, deeply searching experimental writer’ in this thoughtful interview, which students can read as an introduction to the author.

• How does O’Neill explain the inspirations behind the book?
• O’Neill mentions the work of French writer Raymond Queneau and the OuLiPo group (see below). How has he avoided being merely derivative with The Drover’s Wives? What has he tried to do with his variations?
• O’Neill suggests that his book ‘is, frankly, quite odd’. Why?
• What is interesting about O’Neill’s choice of topic, given his background? How did he find his voice as a writer?
• O’Neill’s ideas about the concept of a ‘postmodern writer’ are thoughtful and reflective. Discuss your reaction to this part of the interview.
• Why does O’Neill mention Orwell’s motivations for writing? How are they related to his own?

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OuLiPo

The Drover’s Wives involves textual games played in the style of the OuLiPo (an acronym for ‘Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle’, or ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’). This was a group of writers and mathematicians who wrote texts in constrained writing styles as a type of experimentation. Many of the texts in The Drover’s Wives (e.g. ‘Lipogram’, pp. 28–29; ‘Yoked Sentences’, pp. 70–72; ‘Cliches’, pp. 92–94; ‘Tweets’, pp. 95–98; ‘Pangram’, p. 121; ‘Monosyllabic’, pp. 161–162) experiment with these styles.

See EBSCO Research Starters or Poets.org for more information and examples.

Queneau and literary variations

Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) was a prominent French writer who, in Exercises in Style (1947), composed 99 retellings of the same anecdote in different forms as a way of experimenting with language. Exercises in Style itself owes a literary debt to a much earlier text: Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (1512) by Dutch philosopher and theologian Desiderius Erasmus. De Copia was intended as a textbook on style, a manual on rewriting existing texts and giving variety to both speech and writing.

Queneau cofounded the OuLiPo school with mathematician François Le Lionnais. As mentioned above, this group was interested in self-restrictive writing; one of their most famous techniques is called N+7, which involves replacing every noun in a text with the noun that appears seven entries later in the dictionary. OuLiPo writers were interested in the work of surrealists, artists who depicted illogical or uncanny scenes as a means of exploring psychological tensions. Unlike the surrealists, however, OuLiPo writers were systematic and deliberate in their approach, exploring creativity in a methodical and mathematical manner. Although they took different approaches to achieve their aims, the surrealists’ concerns aligned with OuLiPo’s fascination with products of the mind and the author’s thoughts and memories, both conscious and unconscious. Lewis Carroll (who engaged in wordplay) and James Joyce (who O’Neill commemorates with ‘Finnegans Wife’, a reference to Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake) were further influences on the group.

Exercises in Style has often been used as a model for creative writing students, and constrained writing is a way of practising one’s craft under restrictive conditions. Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story (2005), consisting of a series of single-page comics that tell the same simple story in different ways, is another approach to this technique.

Given its French influences, what makes The Drover’s Wife an interesting contribution to Australian literature?

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Fictocriticism

The Drover’s Wives contains elements of fictocriticism, a hybrid style of writing that is both fictional and critical (Cholewa, 2023). Fictocritical writing involves numerous voices that can be in unison, in contrast, or in discord with one another (Gibbs, 2005).

The Drover’s Wives presents a series of parallel voices and texts that rely on a common source for inspiration, exploring and commenting on elements of the original plot in different contexts and styles. At times presenting interpretations that may be subversive or deliberately erroneous, O’Neill parodies elements of Lawson’s work to comment on the role of reader bias in various misreadings.

Several reinterpretations blend fictional devices with critical commentary on the original story, or rely on particular theories (e.g. ‘Freudian’, p. 30) or authorial styles (e.g. ‘Hemingwayesque’, pp. 3–6; ‘Elizabethan’, pp. 43–47; ‘Lovecraftian’, p. 199–201; ‘Finnegans Wife’, p. 212–213) for effect. O’Neill resists a single interpretation of the story and instead plays with language.

Activity

After exploring some of the Adaptations of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (see above), students can complete a writing exercise inspired by Hazel (the wife as she is known in Bail and Jefferis’ stories):

How would Hazel, in the present day, react to the ways she has been depicted by Ryan O’Neill? Choose THREE texts from The Drover’s Wives and respond in dual voices as Hazel and a literary critic. Your critic should comment on the story in dialogue with Hazel as they each explore their objective and subjective viewpoints.

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Synthesising task

Reflection

It is important that students have an understanding of Lawson’s short story before they engage in analysis of O’Neill’s work. This task is intended to allow students to consider their first impressions of the story, as well as how these will shape their reaction to The Drover’s Wives.

After reading the ‘The Drover’s Wife’, but before reading the 99 reinterpretations in detail, students will consider their personal relationship to the original text and discuss this in pairs or small groups.

Questions could include:

• What is my prior knowledge of the context (i.e. 1890s Australia)? What assumptions do I have about the lives of people at the time?
• What is my knowledge of the geographical location of the story (i.e. a remote inland rural area?)
• What images do the words ‘Australian outback’ conjure up for me? What people do I assume live in this area?
• What assumptions have I made about the text based on its presentation as an ‘iconic Australian story’?
• What are my attitudes towards some of the situations in the story, such as:
  • The dangers posed by the snake (‘a black brute, five feet long’, p. xxi) – does it make a difference if it is venomous (e.g. red-bellied black snake) or non-venomous?
  • The reference to Alligator’s inevitable death (‘he will be bitten some day and die; most snake-dogs end that way’, p. xvi) – what is your reaction to the unemotional manner in which the narrative discusses death?
  • The wife’s abandonment while the husband is away for work – do we see him as a good husband supporting his family, a foolish man who has lost all his money, someone who is struggling to provide for his dependents, or in another light?

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The writer’s craft

Intertextuality

We live at a time when texts are considered in relation to one another. It’s the era of adaptation: film versions of books, allusions to classic literature in pop songs, etc. No story exists by itself – they are all potential base texts for new stories. Textual and cultural references assume common knowledge; parodies make us laugh; fairytales that are hundreds of years old are reimagined with contemporary values and attitudes. Shakespeare can be transported to California, Jane Austen can be read with a postcolonial lens in film, and – as we know – Henry Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ is rife for reinterpretation.

All texts emerge within the context of literary tradition and the broader context of cultural production and reception. It matters that ‘The Drover’s Wife’ first appeared in The Bulletin, a periodical that helped developed a uniquely Australian style of writing, but was also known for its controversial content (more information is available from the National Museum of Australia).

Once published, texts are considered in relation to the reader’s expectations (in Lawson’s case, a readership that was only just beginning to develop a sense of Australian identity that was separate from its British roots). The form and style of each text is either socially saturated by mainstream culture, OR challenges/subverts the dominant discourses.

Literally, ‘intertextuality’ comes from the Latin intertexo, meaning ‘to interweave’. Thus, texts that appropriate or transform other texts weave aspects of the source material with their own content. Some texts read as a pastiche: a mosaic of references that are threaded through the new text to create the effect of a literary collage.

Where do we place The Drover’s Wives on the spectrum of intertextuality? Ask students if they think:

• O’Neill simply uses ‘The Drover’s Wife’ to provide a theme for his textual games and experiments; OR
• O’Neill pays tribute to ‘The Drover’s Wife’ through his often satirical reinterpretations of the story, which explore issues related to context and Australian identity.

The 99 reinterpretations play with the conventions of textual form. Consider:

• Who is the intended audience of the collection?
• The work is dedicated to Henry Lawson and Raymond Queneau. To whom does it owe more: the author of the source material, or the pioneer of the textual games?
• What makes these ‘reinterpretations’ interesting models for writing?
• How does O’Neill rely on our textual expectations as readers?

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Text and meaning

The following activities focus on both appreciating the texts in The Drover’s Wives, and using them as a guide for writing. O’Neill plays with form, mode, and medium as well as language. Grouping the texts under different modes and styles will allow students to more easily explore similar aims, forms, and/or messages.

Possible ways of categorising O’Neill’s texts include:

Genre-based and literary texts will be explored in more depth in the Significance section of this resource. This is because the associated activities focus on the significance of The Drover’s Wives as a work that is self-consciously metafictional, subverting the reader’s expectations of genre and bending or fusing genre conventions. These aspects of O’Neill’s work make it an important and noteworthy contribution to Australian literature.

Visual texts, context-based texts, and texts involving language games are explored in the following worksheets:

• Visual texts (PDF, 66KB)
• Context-based texts (PDF, 83KB)
• Language games and forms (PDF, 114KB)

Students can work through a selection of these activities. They include many suggestions for analytical and imaginative responses and are concerned with both analysis AND guiding students to compose their own texts in response to O’Neill’s reinterpretations.

Of course, some texts span multiple categories and these are not intended to be absolute – that’s the pleasure of reading texts that experiment with language and ideas. All 99 reinterpretations present the reader with different textual forms that can be used as a model for writing. The collection is full of ideas and teachers will need to decide which texts to focus on. Giving students some choice about which texts to respond to is also possible, provided this supports your learning objectives.

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Synthesising task

Multimodal task

The following activities require students to compare and contrast O’Neill’s texts while demonstrating their understanding of the overall purpose of The Drover’s Wives. The activities can be differentiated and used for classes with students of varying abilities and diverse learning styles.

1. An exhibition website

Students will imagine that they have been chosen to collate an online art exhibition for fans of The Drover’s Wives. They will do so using a free website builder like Wix. Another option is to present the exhibition in Google Slides, using hyperlinks to structure the central page and encourage a reading path for the audience.

Students may complete this activity in pairs. They should NOT attempt to include all 99 reinterpretations in their exhibition, but should focus on SIX TO EIGHT key texts and explain why these represent a significant contribution to the textual history of ‘The Drover’s Wife’. For each text, students should locate TWO TO THREE artworks and write a brief blurb justifying their choices and explaining the relationship between the visual text and O’Neill’s work.

The purpose of the website is to demonstrate an understanding of O’Neill’s texts and to explore intertextuality.

2. Change the form

Consider some other ways of exploring ‘The Drover’s Wife’:

• the story as narrated by a herpetologist (a scientist who studies reptiles and amphibians, including snakes)
• a Pinterest profile for the wife
• the story as a persuasive text for prospective drovers (‘Why NOT to leave your wife alone!’)
• an advice column for women engaged to drovers (‘The Drover Wants a Wife: What to Expect’)

3. Change the point of view

Consider an archaeologist’s visit to the wife’s home. What is located there? Where are the fingerprints? What is the layout of the place? Are there indications of the wife’s past woes? Find clues from the original story and rewrite it from the point of view of the archaeologist.

4. Play with language

Practice the constrained writing technique of erasure: taking words out of a text and turning the remaining words into a poem. Can you apply this technique to one of O’Neill’s texts to shift the meaning?

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Ways of reading the text

Readers and readings: how do the texts offer different readings?

Beliefs about the reader’s role in making meaning have shifted over time. It is now accepted that the reader actively makes meaning and reads based on their individual perspective, experiences, and opinions. Our race, social class, and gender influence the way we read texts and form opinions about them. For example, a zoologist might be preoccupied with the details of the snake in ‘The Drover’s Wife’, while a reader with a strong commitment to feminism might focus on the gender inequalities that shape the wife’s circumstances. Our readings are rarely simple and we may read the same text differently at different points in our life.

The idea that a text acquires meaning only through the reader (or ‘interpretive community’) emerged in the 1960s and is linked to poststructuralism. In poststructuralism, the reader is central and truth is not singular, definitive, or fixed. Rather, there are many truths that change based on social and political realities. Within reader-response theory, the reader arrives at their own truth.

The plural expression of the title The Drover’s Wives implies many variations of the same story, with an archetypal character shifting and being re-read across textual forms. O’Neill changes contexts and forms to produce texts that both complement and contradict each other, often viewing the original text through a particular lens. He sometimes imitates the voices of other authors (e.g. ‘Hemingwayesque’, pp. 3–6; ‘Lovecraftian’, p. 199–201; ‘Finnegans Wife’, p. 212–213) or deliberately plays around with ideological standpoints or ways of thinking (e.g. ‘Freudian’, p. 30). Other reinterpretations focus on language games (e.g. ‘Cliches’, pp. 92–94; ‘Onomatopoeia’, pp. 133–134; ‘Monosyllabic’, pp. 161–162), or use the conventions of different genres or textual forms to reinterpret the original story (e.g. ‘Epic’, pp. 145–147’; ‘A Self-Help Book’, pp. 175–176; ‘An Absurdist Play’, pp. 183–186). Some of the readings are deliberately presentist, interpreting the past through the lens of modern ideas and values (e.g. ‘An Agony Aunt Column’, pp. 18–19). As a work of satire, these readings achieve humor and encourage us to consider how we read classic works of fiction.

Readings can be dominant or resistant. Dominant readings are mainstream, accepted, and generally stay close to the details of the text. Resistant readings diverge from the usual or accepted interpretation; they may contradict or oppose the dominant reading or provide a subversive reinterpretation of the story. Some of the readings in The Drover’s Wives offer a satirical or deliberately misleading vision of the original story; some deliberately provide a partial reading that emphasises a specific aspect of the story; others seek to re-read Lawson’s story with a contemporary eye.

It is important to note that O’Neill himself resists the label of ‘postmodern writer’, despite the fragmented and experimental nature of his work. Instead, he views himself as someone who uses the best tools at his disposal, employing a variety of narrative strategies and exploring the boundaries of language in his writing. The tone of The Drover’s Wives is far from pompous or theoretical; readers can be amused by the satirical and farcical nature of many of the texts.

Consider these questions:

• What is the relationship between textual form and re-reading a story?
• Is The Drover’s Wives about intertextuality and deconstructing/paying homage to a seminal text? Or is it about playing games with language itself?

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Why is this text significant?

The Drover’s Wives is a rich resource for study. By exploring O’Neill’s 99 reinterpretations, students can understand how different genres and text types shape the adaptation of a key text. Although O’Neill’s work is significant due to its proximity to Lawson’s original story, it is also a notable work in its own right. Shaped by the OuLiPo tradition of language games, The Drover’s Wives explores the act of writing and the importance of context in shaping textual representations of ideas, settings, and events. While Lawson explores a settler’s view of the inhospitable Australian landscape, many of O’Neill’s texts play with different readings of people and places. Some of the texts also explore shifting beliefs about gender roles, reshaping the wife to examine the harsh conditions of her life and the challenges posed by 19^th century social attitudes.

The Drover’s Wives can be examined as a complete work, and the texts should be considered in relation to each other. Although this unit has suggested separate activities for each text, it is important that students reflect on the purpose of the entire collection. Questions that can shape analytical extended responses include:

• How does O’Neill attempt to explore values and ways of thinking through his work? Consider the representation of contemporary values in THREE of his adaptations and compare this to the values explored in Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’.
• How do O’Neill’s efforts to transform the context of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ assist readers to reflect on its enduring cultural significance? Refer to THREE reinterpretations that use a modern context for their setting.
• How does O’Neill shape the representation of ideas and experiences in The Drover’s Wives through different textual forms, genres, and language games? Choose THREE reinterpretations and comment on how O’Neill’s use of different writing styles shapes the message of each text.

Comparison with other texts

Literary texts

O’Neill’s work is particularly complex as it seeks not only to adapt and appropriate Lawson’s short story, but also explore the style, theme, and structure of other literary works. Reinterpreting ‘The Drover’s Wife’ in the style of a Shakespearean play requires experimentation with language; imitating the voice of Ernest Hemingway assumes that the reader has prior knowledge of the classic novella The Old Man and the Sea. Other texts seek to either satirise or commemorate the literary canon. Reinterpreting these works through an Australian lens makes The Drover’s Wives highly innovative in its approach, and provides students with a rich array of references that they can explore. Questions that students can use to compare the texts in an analytical manner include:

• How is The Drover’s Wives original in its approach, despite basing its reinterpretations on a classic Australian short story?
• What makes the collection unique?
• How does The Drover’s Wives explore aspects of different movements in literature and imitate the work of classic authors?
• What is the purpose of these imitations and why are they significant? Compare TWO texts that imitate the voice of an author or literary style.
• How does O’Neill comment on the value of literature through the use of allusions in his texts? Compare THREE texts and discuss the purpose of their intertextual references.
• How does the collection respond to ideas about writing and language through its imitation of other authors and text types? Choose TWO of the literary texts and explain how O’Neill has been innovative in his approach.

Students can work through a selection of activities based on the literary texts (PDF, 113KB).

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Genre-based texts

Students should compare and contrast THREE TO FOUR genre-based texts and, as a class, discuss what they have learnt about O’Neill’s interest in exploring and questioning genre conventions. Questions to encourage reflection and analysis are:

• How has O’Neill used aspects of Lawson’s short story within his chosen genres?
• What gaps and silences from the original text remain, and how are these related to O’Neill’s choice of genre? NOTE: The ‘gaps and silences’ are aspects of the original short story that have been ignored or manipulated.
• How does adaptation of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ into different genres add to the rich textual history of an iconic Australian short story?
• Why has O’Neill deliberately chosen genres that are associated with different historical and literary contexts? How does this enable him to communicate ideas and images to the reader?

Students can work through a selection of activities based on the genre-based texts (PDF, 75KB).

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Evaluation of the text

What makes this significant?

One of the challenges of The Drover’s Wives is that it defies our expectations of a conventional work of fiction. Different ways of reading the text include considering it as:

• an anthology of adaptations of ‘The Drover’s Wife’
• a collection of experimental texts based around a single source text
• a series of textual games informed by the OuLiPo school
• a work of satire that alternately mocks and commemorates ‘The Drover’s Wife’ and its place in Australian culture

O’Neill’s willingness to self-consciously question the writing process and include a variety of allusions, pastiches, and intertextual references gives his work an enduring significance – both as a response to a text that already has a rich history of textual adaptation, and as an experiment in writing. For a work that intends to be derivative (as all 99 texts reinterpret a single story), it is often remarkably original in its transformation of context and perspectives.

Different reader responses

The next activity requires students to evaluate The Drover’s Wives according to different standpoints, and through the eyes of different readers. O’Neill explores the creation of voice and the reaction of readers to Lawson’s original story. In particular, ‘A Year 8 English Essay’ (pp. 8–10), ‘Freudian’ (p. 30), ‘Lecture Slides’ (pp. 48–53), ‘A Question Asked by an Audience Member at a Writer’s Festival’ (pp. 99–101), and ‘Academese’ (pp. 221–224) represent particular perspectives and readings. Students can examine these texts and discuss how voice is created within them. How do word choices communicate a message about the writer? How do these texts represent a particular viewpoint, level of understanding, and/or reaction towards the story?

Students will then compose a review of The Drover’s Wives in the voice of a particular author. You may assign the author OR allow students to choose from the following list of suggestions:

• an elderly woman who is suspicious of postmodern affectations
• the president of the Henry Lawson Society
• the mother of the Year 8 English student whose essay features in The Drover’s Wives (pp. 8–10)
• a resident of an outback town in NSW
• a student who has found the study of The Drover’s Wives to be challenging
• a scriptwriter who is keen to produce a film based on some of the reinterpretations

Students will imagine that they are submitting their review to a magazine. They can make up the title and audience according to their chosen author (as they will clearly write for different readerships). The review will discuss the author’s reaction to The Drover’s Wives, with close reference to at least THREE of the reinterpretations. Students can choose which texts they will discuss, keeping in mind that some will be affirmed or rejected by the author they are giving voice to in their review.

ACELR029   ACELR034

Rich assessment tasks

Experiment with some textual games

Many of the texts in The Drover’s Wives experiment and play with language. In addition to reviewing information about OuLiPo (see Initial Response > Key Elements of the Text > OuLiPo), students can read about the different constraints OuLiPo members would have placed upon their writing.

Of course, anyone can play these textual games and see what happens! Some are listed below for interest, but they can also be used as short activities in class or for homework tasks (you can find more ideas from Puzzlewocky and the Franco-American Centre). Students could share their work using a collaborative platform like Google Classroom and comment on the results of their peers’ experiments.

The following suggestions are inspired by O’Neill’s many variations on a single story. It is important to note that O’Neill moves well beyond constrained writing in The Drover’s Wives, though this forms a significant part of the text. These next exercises involve appropriation and transformation.

1. Focus on a single image from a single reinterpretation. Respond to the image in a particular poetic form (such as an Ezra Pound couplet, featuring two lines of similar length that create a comparison or metaphor, e.g. ‘In a Station of the Metro’).
2. Choose ONE of the textual forms in the collection and try writing the first paragraph of a text in this form. Ensure that the topic is entirely different.
3. Experiment with magnetic poetry by rearranging TEN words from one of the reinterpretations. Try to do so in a way that shifts the meaning of the text, and experiment with the space on the page and enjambment.

Of course, The Drover’s Wives is a collection of fragments and reinterpretations that achieves a cultural significance beyond its experiments. It is the combination of constrained writing tasks; textual games; and texts that rethink the context, purpose, and form of the original story that make O’Neill’s work stylistically unique and significant.

The book is far from a simple collection of games. While it owes much to Raymond Queneau’s experiments with language, it also achieves cultural significance through its re-reading of Lawson’s work. Students can compose a piece of reflective writing that explores how playing different textual games has enabled them to appreciate The Drover’s Wives and understand the challenges of constrained writing.

ACELR032   ACELR033   ACELR035

Synthesising core ideas

The Drover’s Wives is essentially a text about the process of writing. Through textual games, literary allusions, and a series of reinterpretations that explore the importance of genre convention, O’Neill asks readers to actively engage with ideas about writing (as well as explore their own understanding).

This next activity requires students to engage in some of the processes that O’Neill uses in The Drover’s Wives, and to reflect on the process of composition.

Review the categories outlined in the Close Study section of this unit (under Text and Meaning). Students will select ONE text each from the context-based, genre-based, and literary categories to use as inspiration for a portfolio containing THREE entirely new short texts. They will then select a classic story (nothing under 100 years old!) to appropriate, using O’Neill’s reinterpretations of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ as inspiration.

Each appropriated text should follow the style or form of the chosen texts from The Drover’s Wives, and be 300–500 words long (this may represent the beginning of a longer text). For each text, students will write 100–150 words explaining:

• the relationship between the new text, the text from The Drover’s Wives, and the classic story
• specific aspects of O’Neill’s writing that inspired their work
• their writing process, including how they used the conventions of the textual form to adhere to or subvert the reader’s expectations

A list of texts from each category has been provided for your convenience (PDF, 76KB).

ACELR033   ACELR034   ACELR035

Rich assessment task

A film pitch

Students will compose a film pitch – a persuasive text exploring ideas for a short film based on ‘The Drover’s Wife’ – using ONE TO TWO of O’Neill’s texts as inspiration. The purpose is to show potential producers what the film could involve, and to persuade them that it is a worthy project.

Students should decide on a target audience for their film and shape their response to appeal to this audience. This requires an understanding of how O’Neill uses a variety of textual forms and styles.

While the pitch is primarily intended to persuade, it should also include a plot outline or summarise the film. Additionally, as a multimodal text, it should contain suggestions for a series of shots that will be used within the film, similar to a trailer. This will be presented as a storyboard, although the written pitch remains the focus of this assessment.

The pitch should be based on a particular reading of ‘The Drover’s Wife’ and appeal to an audience who supports these beliefs. The reading could be based on a theoretical standpoint, or it might represent a particular perspective. Ideas include (but are not limited to):

Students will be assessed on their ability to respond to The Drover’s Wives in another creative way, and apply a particular reading to the original story.

NOTE: This task responds to O’Neill’s ‘Freudian’ (p. 30) and ‘Academese’ (pp. 221–224) texts, which students should read carefully before they begin. Remind them to consider how a reader might respond to ‘The Drover’s Wife’ from a particular point of view, and that this may be biased or imperfect.

If students are not familiar with film pitches, it might be helpful to give them an outline from a website like Backstage or Slide Genius. These include more detail than the pitches students need to compose, but still provide a useful point of reference.

ACELR020   ACELR024   ACELR029   ACELR031   ACELR035   ACELR036