Movie Review The Drover’s Wife The Legend Of Molly Johnson

Leah Purcell writes, stars, and directs in The Drover’s Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson, a re-interpretation of a re-imagining of Henry Lawson’s 1892 short story The Drover’s Wife. If that weren’t enough to signal it as a uniquely Australian story, then I don’t know what is.

Like Lawson’s story itself, Purcell’s adaptation has its own storied history – one which sees it reinterpret the great Australian writer’s work for a new era, but whilst maintaining its thematic heart.

At the age of five, Purcell – a First Nation’s actress, playwright, novelist and now director, who’s been much a part of Australian cinema’s greatest hurrahs of the past two decades – was read the nine-page, seminal Australian fiction work of Henry Lawson’s as a bedtime story by her mother. It’s a story that has “been with me for 45 years,” Purcell says.

It’s a link to her past, and a long forgotten Australian one, that she’s retold now in three different mediums: a play, in 2016, and a novel in 2019 - both loosely based on Lawson’s classic – and now her debut film outing as a director.

"The essence of the Henry Lawson short story and his underlining themes of racism, the frontier violence and gender violence are [in my story],” she says.

But Purcell’s Drover’s Wife – unlike Lawson’s - has a name: Molly Johnson.

Set in 1893, on an isolated property, a heavily pregnant Molly Johnson (Purcell) and her children struggle to survive the harsh Australian landscape; her husband is gone, droving sheep in the high country.

Molly finds herself confronted by – instead of the black snake in Lawson’s original story – a black man. The shackled Aboriginal fugitive Yadaka (played by Rob Collins), and an unlikely bond begins to form between him and Molly.

It turns the outback back to front, focusing on women. And, while occasionally lilting with modern sensibilities, Purcell’s debut is a deft dissection of theme and modern Australia, by looking at the past through a First Nations and female lens.

The Drover’s Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson is showing at the Bowen Summergarden Cinema from Saturday, August 27.

Leah Purcell’s debut is startlingly modern in its sensibilities, while starkly harsh in its old Australian display of nature and the pioneer

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