Cowles & Dunn shotgun

The Cowles & Dunn shotgun is Molly Johnson’s principal firearm and one of the novel’s most consequential recurring objects. It makes the power of a woman living in isolation materially visible: Molly can use it to defend her home and children, but its presence also draws her into the lethal conflicts shaped by racial persecution, gendered violence, and colonial law. Its appearances move from warning and improvised defense to a gunshot whose consequences cannot be recalled.

Identity and Use

The Cowles & Dunn shotgun belongs to Molly’s everyday world of self-protection. When she reaches her shanty and finds an injured Aboriginal man lying near it, she cocks the gun and takes aim. The gesture establishes her as alert to danger and prepared to defend herself, even as a contraction interrupts her attention and reminds the reader that she is in late pregnancy. The gun therefore enters the scene not as an abstract emblem but as a practical tool in a precarious household where Molly has to judge threats for herself.

That judgment is shaped by experience. Molly knows that itinerant swagmen may exploit a woman’s isolation, and when Thomas McNealy appears, she keeps the shotgun aimed at him and demands to know his business. She is not willing to accept the stranger’s appeal to charity at face value. The weapon lets her challenge a man who assumes he can approach and pressure the woman of the house; at the same time, the encounter unfolds while she is pregnant and alone, conditions that limit how securely she can control the situation.

A Weapon in a Chaotic Encounter

The shotgun’s authority proves fragile when McNealy seizes it. During the ensuing struggle, the wounded man takes up Molly’s axe, McNealy drops the gun, and it misfires without hitting anyone. The moment disrupts the apparent simplicity of armed control: possession changes hands, the firearm does not behave as intended, and Molly cannot depend on it to settle the danger. As the men struggle and her contractions intensify, she tries to reload but drops the bullet and cannot complete the task.

When the stranger offers help as Molly faces childbirth, she confronts the racial prohibitions surrounding contact between a white woman and an Aboriginal man. She uses the shotgun not to fire but as a blunt instrument, swinging it like a bat and knocking him unconscious. This act is a desperate, immediate choice within a scene where she has no easy or safe option. The gun has shifted from a means of keeping distance to an improvised means of stopping the person who has offered assistance, underscoring how fear and racist convention constrain Molly’s agency even when she holds the weapon.

Threat, Race, and the Limits of Protection

The later scenes place Molly’s private reliance on the shotgun against the public machinery of racial control. Yadaka tells her that his only crime is existing while black; Molly understands the conditions behind his words, including the unofficial permission for white people to shoot Aboriginal people on sight. Her weapon exists within that same violent frontier order. It can protect Molly from immediate danger, but it cannot make her household safe from the authorities or from the assumptions that treat Aboriginal people as legitimate targets and mixed-heritage children as objects of removal.

When Molly learns that officials have authorized the removal of her children, she takes up the shotgun again and orders Yadaka off her land for telling her about her Aboriginal family. She is frightened by the implications of the story and reacts by turning the gun on the person who has brought it to her, even though he insists that he means no disrespect and that the story belongs to their shared lore. The shotgun gives force to Molly’s refusal in the moment, but it cannot erase the knowledge or the legal threat that has provoked it. Its role in the scene is therefore double: it is a defense of personal boundaries and a sign of how little security those boundaries provide.

The Gunshot and Its Consequences

The shotgun’s most consequential discharge comes during a confrontation with a trooper. Yadaka recognizes Molly’s tension and tries to intervene, hoping to prevent another death. A shot rings out, and the two men fall together; Molly initially cannot tell who fired. She then realizes that she pulled the trigger of the Cowles & Dunn shotgun. Yadaka rises, leaving her to face the immediate horror and uncertainty of what the gun has done.

This moment changes the weapon’s meaning. Earlier, the shotgun could still function as warning, failed protection, or an instrument used without firing. Here it becomes the means of a shooting whose outcome carries forward into Molly’s legal ordeal. The novel links her desperate actions to a justice system that will judge her through racialized assumptions and an all-male jury, while the only witness able to speak to her truth, Danny, is absent. The firearm does not explain or resolve that injustice; it makes visible the perilous point at which private defense becomes a public crime.

Narrative Significance

The shotgun’s repeated changes of use give the object a practical as well as symbolic continuity. Molly aims it at an unknown danger, loses control of it in a struggle, uses it to knock out a man when childbirth leaves her desperate, raises it again while resisting disclosure, and finally fires during a confrontation that contributes to her prosecution. Each occurrence binds domestic survival to the broader violence of the frontier without suggesting that the weapon can overcome the structures surrounding her.

Its significance also lies in the limits of individual protection. Molly is isolated, pregnant, vulnerable to men who exploit that isolation, and threatened by authorities who can turn racial classification into a claim on her children. The shotgun permits acts of resistance, but it cannot supply trustworthy witnesses, fair treatment, or lasting safety. By making the same object recur across these circumstances, the novel traces how a tool chosen for defense can become implicated in the dangers it was meant to hold back.