What do you understand by the term aborigines? How is their point of view represented in Australian literature?

The strange twists of fate that occur because of Ursula’s fevered love for the little child seem almost to happen in the realm of madness. The rescue of the child and the flight into the Bush is also a flight into hysteria and delirium. When alone, tired and thirsty with the stiffening child, she cannot even make herself steal one egg from an emu’s nest. She imagines that “the robbed bird was standing disconsolately over … its nest” and she restores the egg. The meaning of her life is bound to Andrew’s baby and its death makes her lose her hold on reality until Andrew and an Aborigine save her. Interestingly the drama of her hysteria, in a stream of consciousness mode, happens in the space of the Bush where ‘nature was frankly brutal”. Baynton’s carries the idea of maternity further by delineating it as an instinct that may transcend even natural laws. The maternal instinct may rise as in Ursula’s case “like the spring sap in a young tree” even for a child that is not her own.