The Plain
First and foremost in the story devoted to its symbolic status, “On the Edge of a Plain,” the plain is symbolic of the life lived by many of the male characters that dominate Lawson’s fiction. The plain is harsh, hot, unforgiving and stands in stark contrast to even the relative comfort of domesticity in the bush. It is the living embodiment of individual strength and necessity for male bonding that marks the lives of his protagonists.
Gum Trees
Australia's native gum trees prove to be one of the most powerful symbols within the logic of the narrative of any Lawson story. In “His Country, After All” a man who has been in self-exile from his homeland for some time and has managed to see a good deal of the rest of the world goes off on a tangent while visiting New Zealand about the worthlessness of it all until his nose manages to capture the scent of young gum trees imported for planting across the channel. The bouquet has the effect of melting down all his pent-up rejection of his Australian and leaves him almost wallowing in nostalgia to head across the water and see his home again.
The Bush
The bush is for the majority of those outside Australia synonymous with the country. (However, since the latter quarter of the 20th century, most Americans, at least, have confused the bush with the Outback; technical, the Outback is a much more remote section within the larger confines of the bush.) Although Sydney is one of the most modern metropolitan cities in the world, most media representations of Australian tend to focus on the more primitive, wild and untamed sections outside its urban areas; which coincidentally happens to be the basic definition of the bush. The legacy of this identification of the Australian national character not with its cities (five of which today feature a population in excess of a million citizens) but the more rugged, unsparing bush traces back in no small way to Lawson’s purposeful engagement of it as a symbol of that very thing.
The Drover
If the bush is the symbol of Australia’s national character, then the job most closely associated with it is the symbolic center of the kind of man needed to transform such untamed wilderness into a proper nation. Writing coincident with Australia making the leap from British colony to independent nation, Lawson made the drover—essentially the Aussie version of the authentic American cowboy (not the mythic movie version)—the symbol of how that transformation was going to take place. It is the drover who drives (hence, the name) herds of livestock across the unforgiving long distances of the plain from bush to bush so that those living in the cities will have the resources needed for urban progress.
Swag
Swag is an Aussie term for a bedroll that an itinerant traveler carries with him as he makes his way by foot. The swag is the central symbol in Lawson’s literature to identify his conceptualization of the iconic figure representing its national character. “The Romance of the Swag” is an entire story devoted to the extolling the vital significance of this element and Lawson’s passionate embrace of swag as symbol is impossible to separate from his love of country:
“The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land—of the Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat; the land of Self-reliance, and Never-give-in, and Help-your-mate.”
The true importance of the swag to Lawson's literature is reflected in the sheer number of stories that take the form of a tale told by characters around a campfire.
