The Drover’s Wife, the Legend of Molly Johnson: Leah Purcell’s Reclaiming of a Colonial Fetish

Abstract

Henry Lawson’s short story, “The Drover’s Wife,” has animated Australian nationalism since its publication in 1892. The story is much-loved, and has been perceived as representing a voice from the margins, the enduring archetype of the Australian frontier bush woman, a figure who is simultaneously vulnerable and stoic. This archetype organises other tropes in Lawson’s story, symptomatic of the national imaginary of the internal frontier–the unrelenting harshness of the Australian land, the resilience of the white frontier individual, and the civilising effects of those individuals’ labor on the landscape, as well as on First Nations people, who are coded as part of “nature,” requiring “civilisation.” It is against this context of white colonial fetishism of both the story and of Lawson himself that Leah Purcell’s version/s–a play (2016), and now a film (2022)–are set. Leah Purcell is a proud Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri woman from Queensland, and one of Australia’s leading writers, directors and actors. In this article, I examine Purcell’s radical reimagining of this foundational Australian text. In the original story, Lawson imagines the key antagonists of the frontier as belonging to the “natural world,” including a bull, a poisonous snake, the isolation and harshness of the environment, and the presence of an “uncivilised” Indigenous man who appears as a stranger in the unnamed drover’s wife’s home. In Purcell’s reworking, she upturns this narrative and its fetishistic tropes, giving a name to the drover’s wife–Molly Johnson–and also truthfully naming the true antagonists the drover’s wife must face on the Australian frontier: the imminent threat of violence and sexual violence against all women, and the violence of the frontier wars against First Nations communities, which was followed by government policies of assimilation and intervention (Watson, 2009). Purcell’s work reveals truths about the violence of the frontier, about forms of state and outlaw violence that not only led to the massacre of First Nations people, but also created a false epistemology: that the land which Indigenous people have inhabited with peace and ease for thousands of years is “harsh,” that First Nations labor is “idleness,” and that the colonist’s work at the frontier is noble, rather than an act of ugly, violent theft. Purcell thereby critiques the role of particular Australian literary works in the creation of national mythology and in the papering-over of violent historical truths. Purcell’s work both reveals and subverts the colonial epistemology of violence, gender, sexuality, and state law’s complicity in these processes, from its foundational refusal to acknowledge First Nations law, to the imposition of a thieving land law and then to the “lawful” removal of First Nations children. This paper will explore the radical implications of this work to both legal and cultural imaginaries.

Keywords:

• Henry Lawson
• The Drover’s Wife
• Leah Purcell
• First Nations sovereignty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Martina Horáková, “‘Kin-Fused’ Revenge: Rewriting the Canon and Settler Belonging in Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife,” Journal of postcolonial writing 58, no. 4 (2022): 511–23.

2 Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 34.

3 A number of these retellings are available in Frank Moorhouse’s edited collection The Drover’s Wife (Sydney: Knopf Australia, 2017).

4 Frank Moorhouse, “Introduction,” in The Drover’s Wife, ed. Frank Moorhouse (Sydney: Knopf Australia, 2017), 4.

5 Ibid.

6 Tony McEvoy, “Introduction,” in Leah Purcell, The Drover’s Wife (Sydney: Currency Press, 2016), 5.

7 Ibid.

8 Leah Purcell, The Drover’s Wife (Melbourne: Penguin, 2019).

9 Leah Purcell, director, The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson, Memento Films International, 2021. 1 hr., 4 min.

10 First Nations people have always carried the knowledge of colonial violence with them, and Australian institutions have recently initiated programs to document these massacres through testimony, scientific evidence and maps. For example, see “Colonial Frontier Massacres, Australia, 1788 to 1930,” https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php, viewed 8 November 2023. For an example of testimonial and narrative evidence, see “Defining Moments: Myall Creek Massacre,” National Museum Australia, https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/myall-creek-massacre, viewed 8 November 2023. For an example of the use of scientific evidence to support First Nations’ testimony of massacres, see Pamela Smith and Keryn Walshe, “Oral Testimony of an Aboriginal Massacre Now Supported by Scientific Evidence,” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/oral-testimony-of-an-aboriginal-massacre-now-supported-by-scientific-evidence-85526, viewed 8 November 2023.

11 Henry Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife (1892),” in While the Billy Boils, ed. Paul Eggert (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013), 65.

12 Ibid.

13 Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife (1892),” 67.

14 Ibid.

15 Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife (1892),” 68.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife (1892),” 69.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife (1892),” 70.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 For an analysis of the common law’s relationship and adjudication of the harms of the Stolen Generations, see Honni van Rijswijk, and Thalia Anthony. “Can the Common Law Adjudicate Historical Suffering?” Melbourne University Law Review 36, no. 2 (2012): 618–55.

26 For a reading of the Australian western, see Grayson Cooke, “Questioning the Australian Western,” in Australian Genre Film, ed. Kelly McWilliam and Mark David Ryan (New York: Routledge, 2021), 219–39.

27 Gerry Turcotte, “Australian Gothic,” in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 10–19.

28 Ibid.

29 Mark David Ryan, “A Monstrous Landscape Filled with Killer Animals and Madmen: Tropes of Contemporary Australian Horror Movies,” in Australian Genre Film, ed. Kelly McWilliam and Mark David Ryan (New York: Routledge, 2021), 90–109, 99.

30 John Scott and Dean Biron, “Wolf Creek, Rurality and the Australian Gothic,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (2010): 307–22.

31 Mark David Ryan, “A Monstrous Landscape Filled with Killer Animals and Madmen: Tropes of Contemporary Australian Horror Movies,” in Australian Genre Film, ed. Kelly McWilliam and Mark David Ryan (New York: Routledge, 2021), 90–109, 99.

32 Grayson Cooke, “Questioning the Australian Western,” in Australian Genre Film, ed. Kelly McWilliam and Mark David Ryan (New York: Routledge, 2021), 219–40, 225.

33 Robert Foster and Amanda Nettlebeck, Out of the Silence: The History and Memory of South Australia’s Frontier Wars (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2012), 6.

34 For an explanation of the state’s role in the systematic removal of First Nations children, and the ways in which contemporary First Nations writers are reclaiming and interrogating this history, see for example Honni van Rijswijk, “Stories of the Nation’s Continuing Past : Responsibility for Historical Injuries in Australian Law and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria,” University of New South Wales Law Journal 35, no. 2 (2012): 598–624.

35 Leah Purcell, “Drover’s Wife Dreaming” [Interview], Penguin, 19 December, 2022 https://www.penguin.com.au/articles/2506-drovers-wife-dreaming (accessed May 9, 2023).

36 Jessica Gildersleeve, “Contemporary Australian trauma” in The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, ed. C Bloom (London: Springer International Publishing, 2020), 91–104.

37 Nycole Prowse, Jessica Gildersleeve, and Kate Cantrell, “From Stage to Page to Screen: The Traumatic Returns of Leah Purcell’s ‘the Drover’s Wife’,” Social Alternatives 41, no. 3 (2022): 30–6, 31.

38 Ibid.

39 Denise Varney, “Indigenising the Colonial Narrative: Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife,” in Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early Twenty-First Century, ed. P. Farfan and L. Ferris (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 38.

40 Ibid.

41 Ken Gelder, “Australian Gothic,” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London: Routledge, 2007), 115–23, 122).

42 Leah Purcell, “Drover’s Wife Dreaming” [Interview], Penguin, 19 December, 2022 https://www.penguin.com.au/articles/2506-drovers-wife-dreaming (accessed May 9, 2023).

43 Frank Moorhouse, The Drover’s Wife (Sydney: Knopf Australia, 2017), 119.

44 Ibid.

45 Evelyn Araluen, “Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the Ghost Gum,” Sydney Review of Books, February 11, 2019, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/snugglepot-and-cuddlepie-in-the-ghost-gum-evelyn-araluen/

(accessed May 22, 2023) cited in N. Prowse, J. Gildersleeve, and K. Cantrell, “From Stage to Page to Screen: The Traumatic Returns of Leah Purcell’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’,” Social Alternatives 41 no. 3 (2022): 30–6.

46 Ibid.

47 See Povinelli Elizabeth, The Cunning of Recognition: First Nations Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

48 Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v The State of Victoria (2002) HCA 58 para 43 per Gleeson CJ, Gummow and Hayne JJ.

49 Stewart Motha, “The Failure of ‘Postcolonial’ sovereignty in Australia,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 22 (2005): 107, 108.

50 Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1 (‘Mabo’).

51 Motha, above, 108.

52 Ibid.

53 Alexander Reilly, “How Mabo Helps Us Forget,” Macquarie Law Journal 6 (2006): 25, 26.

54 Ibid.

55 Ben Golder, ‘Law, History, Colonialism: An Orientalist Reading of Australian Native Title Law’ [2004] 9 (1) Deakin Law Review 41.

56 Irene Watson, “Aboriginal Laws and Colonial Foundation,” Griffith Law Review 26, no. 4 (2017): 469–79, 476.

57 Shane Chalmers, “Metaphoric Sovereignty and the Australian Settler Colonial State,” Law Text Culture 26 (2022): 36–57, 38.

58 Yarmirr, 136 cited in Shane Chalmers, “Metaphoric Sovereignty and the Australian Settler Colonial State,” Law Text Culture 26 (2022): 36–57, 43.

59 Shane Chalmers, “Metaphoric Sovereignty and the Australian Settler Colonial State,” Law Text Culture 26 (2022): 36–57, 44.

60 Ibid.

61 Christine Black, “Maturing Australia through Australian Aboriginal Narrative Law,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 110, no. 2 (2011): 347–62, 348.

62 Christine Black above, 358.

63 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), ix.

64 Ibid, xix.

65 Banjo Patterson, “The Man from Snowy River,” (Angus & Robertson, 1895), lines 33, 40. For the role of the poem in the national mythology, see Garrie Hutchinson, True Blue (Melbourne: Viking, 2002) And John Perkins and Jack Thompson, “The Stockman, the Shepherd and the Creation of an Australian Identity in the 19th Century,” in Australian Identities, ed. J. Borenzstahn (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007), 15–25.

66 Astrid Edwards, “Leah Purcell: On ‘The Drover’s Wife.’” thegarretpodcast.com, https://th

egarretpodcast.com/leah-purcell-on-the-drovers-wife/ (accessed April 2, 2023).

67 Romaine Morton, “Indigenous Research Principles,” Australian Indigenous Film and Television Knowledge Sharing Platform, http://aiftv-research.net/Home/About, viewed 22 May 2023.

68 See Anne Brewster, Aboriginal Women's Autobiography (Sydney: Oxford University Press in association with Sydney University Press, 1996).

69 Romaine Moreton and Therese Davis, “Australian Indigenous Film-Making Beyond Mabo: The Emergence of Indigenous Australian Visual Sovereignty,” in Mabo’s Cultural Legacy, ed. Geoff Rodoreda and Eva Bischoff (Anthem Press, 2021), 100–21, 101 and 87 respectively; see also Felicity Collins and Therese Davis, Australian Cinema After Mabo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Therese Davis, “Australian Indigenous Screen in the 2000s: Crossing into the Mainstream,” in Australian Screen in the 2000s, ed. Ben Goldsmith and Mark Ryan (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan), 231–59.

70 Moreton and Davis, n 66, 101.

71 See Geoff Rodoreda, The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2018).

72 See n 66, 233.

73 See n 66, 5.

74 See n 66, 5.

75 Alison Ravenscroft, "Dreaming of Others: Carpentaria and its Critics," Cultural Studies Review 16, no. 2 (2010): 197–219.

76 Motha, above n 65, 109 (emphasis in original).

77 (1992) 175 CLR 1 at 41-2; Motha, above n 65, 110.

78 Larissa Behrendt, Achieving Social Justice: First Nations Rights and Australia's Future (Annandale, NSW: Federation Press, 2003), 95.

79 Ibid., 96.

80 Christine Black, “A Timely Jurisprudence for a Changing World,” International Journal of Semiotic Law 22 (2009): 197–208, 202.

81 Irene Watson, “Re-centring First Nations Knowledge and Places in a Terra Nullius Space,” AlterNative 10, no. 5 (2014): 508–20, 513.

82 Irene Watson, “Aboriginal Laws and Colonial Foundation,” Griffith Law Review 26, no. 4 (2017): 469–79, 474. 

83 Irene Watson, “There is No Hope in a Voice to Parliament,” Pearls and Irritations, October 29, 2022. https://johnmenadue.com/there-is-no-hope-in-a-voice-to-parliament/ viewed 13 May 2023.

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Honni van Rijswijk

Dr Honni van Rijswijk is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney and researches at the intersections of law, literature and critical theory.