Henry Lawson Short Story

Question: Interesting views on society are conveyed by the distinctively visual. Explore how this is achieved in prescribed texts and one other related text of your choice:

Society can be defined as a group of people who live within a certain environment (social or geographical)or who share a similar culture. Henry Lawson, in his texts, ‘The drover’s wife’ and ‘in a dry season’ portrays the bush society (characters and its environment) from his own interesting perspective through the use of the distinctively visual. Lawson uses language techniques, theme, setting and characterisations in his stories to portray the bush environment in a harsh, monotonous and draconian way and also to develop his idea of the bush personality, being one of simplicity, hardship, and stoicism. In Contrast, the painting by Tom Roberts known as “shearing the rams” places a positive light through the use of colour, emotions on the characters in the painting and a sense of spartan like hard work of the country men of Australia which all provide a positive distinctively visual image of the farm/bush society in the 19th century.

Throughout the text, ‘In a Dry Season’, lawson’s view on the NSW bush is very dull and tedious. The short story is told in first person. One imagines that this first person is Lawson travelling on a train through NSW. He describes the whole landscape of the large region in one sentence, “draw a wire fence and a few ragged gums, and add some scattered sheep running away from the train” this invitation to the reader to picture the environment being described along with the first person writing style is a way Lawson portrays his view on the Bush society to the reader through the distinctively visual. Lawson continues with his monotonous view of the bush through describing all of the towns along the railway as just, ‘the railway town’ implying to the reader that he only needs to describe one of these towns to describe them all. This generalisation adds to Lawson’s...