In "The Drover's Wife" by Henry Lawson, describe the shack in which the drover's wife lives with her four children.

"The Drover's Wife" is an Australian short story by Henry Lawson that tells the tale of a bushwoman who must defend her children from a snake while her husband is away.

The hut where the drover's wife lives is remote and primitive, with rough construction. It is described as a two-roomed house, built of "round timbers, slabs, and stringy bark." In the United States, we might think of this kind of structure as a log...

"The Drover's Wife" is an Australian short story by Henry Lawson that tells the tale of a bushwoman who must defend her children from a snake while her husband is away.

The hut where the drover's wife lives is remote and primitive, with rough construction. It is described as a two-roomed house, built of "round timbers, slabs, and stringy bark." In the United States, we might think of this kind of structure as a log cabin. The floor in the main part of the house is made of "rough, split slabs," while the floor of the kitchen is an earthen "ground floor." In the kitchen, there is a large, roughly made table in the center of the room. The kitchen is large and separated from the rest of the house by a slab partition--it is larger than the rest of the house. 

The house has a split-slab wooden floor that is laid such that there are spaces between the slabs. These cracks are wide enough to make the drover's wife worry that the snake will come up into the house through them. Because of this, the woman sets up a bed for the children on the kitchen table, keeping watch over the cracks in the partition. By the end of the story, we know that the snake did come up from under the house through one of these cracks, confirming the drover's wife's theory and also letting us know that the cracks in the floor are very wide. The snake is five feet long—a sizable snake. For a snake of that size to fit through a floor crack, the crack has to be fairly wide. 

There is a fireplace of some sort in the kitchen, and the drover's wife tends the fire throughout the night as she stays up and awaits the snake. Beside her, the woman has a dresser and her sewing basket with her while she keeps watch. 

Outside the hut, the landscape is flat with "bush all around, bush with no horizon" (the "bush" in Australia is an uninhabited and often densely vegetated area). The hut is nineteen miles away from the next sign of civilization. On the night of the story, there is a thunderstorm outside, and the cracks in the hut's timber walls are big enough that the drover's wife can see flashes of lightning.