The Drover’s Wife

Some might pro­pose that the his­to­ry of war, racism, colo­nial­ism and sex­u­al vio­lence is a sto­ry teth­ered to the plight of men rather than women. A sys­tem that has always tilt­ed in favour of the patri­ar­chal mind­set is also a cold store for the dirty receipts detail­ing untold episodes of suf­fer­ing and humil­i­a­tion, and Leah Purcell’s pas­sion­ate and often bru­tal Out­back west­ern, The Drover’s Wife: The Leg­end of Mol­ly John­son, seeks to out those receipts for display.

Pur­cell writes, directs and stars as John­son, a har­ried yet flinty Bush­woman who is left alone on the fam­i­ly farm­stead to look after the kids while her hus­band has gone away on work. As a char­ac­ter, Pur­cell moulds John­son as a kind of rough-hewn pow­der-keg of right­eous anger, with a mys­te­ri­ous episode from her past caus­ing her to expe­ri­ence ran­dom bouts of vio­lent para­noia where she believes that every­one is out to mas­sacre her brood.

Yet John­son is some­one who is, unlike the major­i­ty of the leer­ing white male char­ac­ters in the film, method­i­cal and open to the dif­fi­cult polit­i­cal real­i­ties of the age: she is able to see past the endem­ic big­otry which pow­ers the actions of most. She befriends an indige­nous wan­der­er named​Yaka­da (Rob Collins), anoth­er social out­cast who helps to raise her feisty young son Dan­ny (Malachi Dow­er-Roberts) while her hus­band is away.

The film is a rework­ing of a short sto­ry by Hen­ry Law­son, and is the third occa­sion that Pur­cell has grap­pled with this mate­r­i­al, hav­ing already writ­ten a book and staged a play around it. It’s evi­dent in the pas­sion and pre­ci­sion with which the sto­ry threads are pulled togeth­er that the film­mak­er is deeply invest­ed in the mate­r­i­al, not least the pos­si­bil­i­ties it affords to con­front Australia’s ques­tion­able treat­ment of indige­nous peo­ple, as well as its womenfolk.

Visu­al­ly, the high con­trast cin­e­matog­ra­phy and arid ter­rains cap­ture the inhos­pi­tal­i­ty and des­o­la­tion of the Out­back, and there’s always a keen sense of Molly’s fear that any­one could pop over that hori­zon at any moment. It’s why she’s sel­dom seen with­out her rifle, a tool that even­tu­al­ly com­pounds her lev­els of stress and tor­ment. The score, by Sal­liana Sev­en Camp­bell, is a tad on the gener­ic side, and it does over-stress some of the film’s subtleties.

Occa­sion­al­ly, the film does lack ambi­gu­i­ty, and there are a num­ber of char­ac­ters who, just through the cast­ing, make-up and dress, come across as one-dimen­sion­al extremes of ​“good­ies” and ​“bad­dies”. Yet Mol­ly her­self, and the seem­ing­ly end­less string of phys­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal tri­als she endures (which includes giv­ing birth to a still­born child on the dirt patch in front of their house), makes for a sat­is­fy­ing emo­tion­al core. Despite her many hard­ships, we empathise with rather than pity Mol­ly – she’s the type of prac­ti­cal, no-fuss home­keep­er who would not stand for such mollycoddling.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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