Two Wolves

One of the more important contexts that informs Two Wolves is geography. The novel takes place in Australia with most of the novel occurring near a remote cabin in the wilderness. Bancks refers to this wilderness as the “bush,” which simultaneously refers to small rural towns outside of the densely populated coastal regions and the sparsely populated wilderness. Generally, the bush refers to greener forested regions, while the Australian Outback evokes images of dry, red deserts. While the outback in particular has a mythologized reputation as no man’s land, Aboriginal peoples have lived in the bush and the outback for tens of thousands of years, foraging and hunting the flora and fauna native to the region, known as bushfood. As noted by Ben in Two Wolves, these foods are vastly different than the cultivated vegetables of his sister’s vegetable patch, and he’s not sure he knows how to survive on bushfood.

Bancks uses the varied bush landscape to highlight the danger of the family’s situation. The cabin is situated on a hill with steep slopes down to a river and many eucalyptus trees, and the family members frequently become sick or exhausted traversing this landscape. Another connotation evoked by this setting is remoteness—the family’s cell phones don’t have a signal at the cabin, and Ben realizes when escaping the police that he won’t be able to go to any neighbors for help. When Ben and Olive become stuck in the wilderness, the remoteness of the location increases the danger and the story’s tension. This reinforces the isolation and disconnection that Ben and Olive increasingly feel from their parents. At one point, Ben’s father mentions the possibility of fleeing from the bush into the desert, representing an additional layer of danger. At the end of the story, Ben and Olive reach their grandmother’s house in Sydney, and the mood becomes one of relief. Unlike the remote cabin, Ben and Olive have access to resources in Sydney and decide to surrender to the police instead of fleeing out of panic. The proximity of other people in Two Wolves is correlated with safety; at the end of the novel, Ben’s father manages to hide in the wilderness by the cabin for more than a year, but his isolation makes him even more aggressive than before.

This setting also ties Two Wolves to Australian historical and literary contexts. In the late 18th century, British convicts who were shipped to Australian penal colonies sometimes escaped into the bush, preferring the risks of living in the wild to being incarcerated. These escapees were called bushrangers and are romanticized and considered folk heroes by many—one can see parallels between the bushrangers’ escape into the wilderness and Ray Silver’s decision to flee the police into the Australian bush. This reputation has led to bushrangers and the bush inspiring literary characters and settings. In the late 19th century, for example, E. W. Hornung, Hume Nisbet, and Rolf Boldrewood wrote popular novels set in the bush. Outback thrillers, contemporary crime novels set in the outback, are a popular genre today.