The Drover's Wife

The Drover’s Wife

Written assignment

My story of the painting:

“Bye, Emma! I will be home soon. Take care, darling”, my dear husband says, as he is kissing my cheek and grabs the lunch I have made for him. “Bye bye father!” our little boy shouts. He is running about in the garden. Letting his imagination go wild, he climbs up the apple tree to his look-out. As I sit out in the garden, enjoying the sight of him, my mind starts daydreaming about the time in the outback. The hardship and loneliness in the Australian bushes. Those two years felt like a nightmare, and I still remember them like it was yesterday. How the heat from the sun was intensifying my feeling of anger and emptiness inside. All alone. Only with the empty sky above me, the dry earth below me and the lonely, withered trees beside me. Not a single leaf was hanging on the branches. “Bye, Emma. It won’t be late. I shall be home at sunset”, he said as he sat down at the front seat and motioned the horses to set off. “Sure”, I thought with an ironic tone of voice in my mind. He always said that.The sound of trotting horses was fading away and the same was my husband. It was hard being a drover’s wife. I had lots work to do in our decayed, old house. But even though I did all my duties, the boredom and irritation drug me down into black hole, where giving up was the only possibility. So I did. One day when he came home very late, I refused to cook him dinner, wash his clothes and I told him, that if he didn’t quit way of living in the outback, I would leave him. After he was being upset by my sudden objection, he suddenly realized that women are also able to make the right choices, because that day, I made the best choice of our lives.