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Elements of the Australian Bush Examined in The Loaded Dog

Mateship – The unbreakable bond between those who reside in the bush • Resilience – The cheerful and humorous attitude maintained against all hardships • The cyclic nature of life – Each day bush people are presented with new difficulties and different shenanigans

Task

• • • • Now choose three of the vivid scenes – one from each element you have identified. For each go back to the text and reread the scene. Then answer: What is distinctively visual here? Draw up a STEE to record your findings

The Loaded Dog

• The order in which events are revealed add to the suspense of the story. Lawson only reveals elements of the story as it is necessary to create humour. • This can be seen in the fact that the reader isn’t introduced to the dog until after the cartridge is made. At this point we can see his purpose in the story and accept him as the silly pup he is described as.

The Loaded Dog

• A third person narrator is used to tell the story. This is important to the telling of the story. • The narrator is a detached observer and is not involved in the story. • Unlike, ‘In a Dry Season’, this story does not use comments or asides to the audience. Lawson wants the reader to accept the story as it is presented

The Loaded Dog

• Lawson is not trying to present a point of view or paint a depressing picture of life in the bush as he does in ‘In a Dry Season’ and ‘The Drover’s Wife’. • The purpose of ‘The Loaded Dog’ is purely entertainment. It is the type of ‘yarn’ told around a campfire. The reader is not asked to believe it but just to accept the unusual event and laugh at it

Mateship

The Loaded Dog explores that particularly Australian sense of mateship that existed between bush men. The three men, Jim, Dave and Andy have a strong bond with one another. This is not directly stated in the story but is shown in the their actions, particularly the way that Andy and Dave work together to create the cartridge. Lawson showed this strong sense of mateship in his stories and particularly in relation to bush characters.

Mateship

The mateship that exists between man and animal is emphasised to an even greater extent in this story. Tommy, the retriever, is portrayed as having human like qualities. Tommy is silly, mischievous and really quite a nuisance yet the bond remains between the men and Tommy. There is no suggestion that Tommy’s deeds with the cartridge are punished at all. Tommy is a loyal companion to the men and they try to treat him as a mate. The strong bond between humans and animals can also be examined in The Drover’s Wife.