“Who Needs a Marvel Superhero When You’ve Got Molly Johnson?”: Country and Maternal Agency in Leah Purcell’s Adaptations of “The Drover’s Wife”

ABSTRACT

This article explores Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri artist Leah Purcell’s recent multigenre project, “The Legend of Molly Johnson”. Beginning as an adaptation of Henry Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife”, the project fundamentally defamiliarises and subverts Lawson’s story from the standpoint of an Aboriginal woman. Evolving across different genres—from play to novel and film—Purcell’s project is a unique case of adaptation, identity-making and transmedia world-building. This article considers Purcell’s adaptations as a form of franchise storytelling, and central to her cultural and political interventions is the figure of Molly Johnson. As an iconic Aboriginal heroine, Molly is empowered by her deep connection with Country and her role as a mother. Central to the narrative is the theme of maternalism, which allows Purcell to weave her personal experiences and family history into the character of Molly, who encapsulates the strength and resilience of generations of Aboriginal women. Purcell’s “Drover’s Wife” project also mounts an intersectional critique of mainstream White feminism through the juxtaposition of Molly and Louisa Clintoff, a character introduced in the novel and film versions.

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal women’s writing
• adaptation
• The Drover’s Wife
• The Legend of Molly Johnson
• motherhood
• Leah Purcell

In 2006, when Leah Purcell was filming Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains, she vowed, at the top of Mount Kosciuszko, that she would come back there one day and “do something”: “I think I’m going to write it, I think I’m going to be in it, and I think it’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’.”¹ Purcell made it happen. In 2014, she wrote the early version of the stage play The Drover’s Wife. Two years later, she played the protagonist in the Belvoir Street Theatre production of the play. In 2019, Purcell published the novel The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson. She then extended the narrative into the film medium, writing, directing and reprising her role as the protagonist. The film The Legend of Molly Johnson debuted in March 2021 and was released in Australian cinemas in May 2022.

Originally published in 1892 in The Bulletin, Henry Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife” is one of the most revisited Australian short stories. It focuses on a bushwoman’s struggle to survive in the outback while caring for four children with her husband away droving for months. The story has inspired a number of reworkings across various genres and forms, “reflec[ting] the way she haunts our collective imagination, ideologically manipulated to rationalise certain fears, cruelties, and erasures”.² While previous rewritings explore the relationship between gender and national identity, they neither challenged nor exposed the drover’s wife’s Whiteness. Reimagining the drover’s wife as an Aboriginal woman, Purcell “positions Indigeneity as one of the foundational elements shaping Australian national identity and its sense of settler belonging”,³ subverting and defamiliarising the so-called national myth—a paradigm with which Lawson’s story has been deeply associated. Interwoven with her personal experiences and family stories, Purcell’s project is a politically charged intervention that writes Indigeneity and women back into Australian history.

This article explores Purcell’s multiplatform adaptation project as a journey across different genres and forms that challenges Western notions of narrative, asserting Aboriginal sovereignty by presenting Aboriginal ways of storytelling. I argue that Purcell’s rewriting of Lawson’s 1892 story reconstructs Molly Johnson as an iconic Aboriginal heroine. Central to Molly’s identity are her bond with Country and her role as a mother. Reimagining the land as sacred and nurturing, Purcell restores Lawson’s fearsome, madness-inducing bush to Country. Motherhood emerges as a source of agency and empowerment for Molly, whose strength and resilience are reflected in the generations of Aboriginal women who came before her. I argue further that Purcell’s juxtaposition of Molly and Louisa Clintoff—a character added in the novel and film versions, and who shares the same first name as Henry Lawson’s mother—offers a compelling intersectional critique of mainstream White feminism.

From “The Drover’s Wife” to “Molly Johnson”: Play, Novel and Film

The 2016 play is Purcell’s first engagement with Lawson’s story. Produced by Belvoir Street Theatre, it had 33 shows between 2016 and 2017.⁴ Set in the Snowy Mountains, it closely follows the original setting: a woman surviving alone with her children, an absent drover and the unforgiving harshness of the outback. One day, the heavily pregnant drover’s wife, Molly Johnson, encounters an injured Aboriginal man, Yadaka, who is on the run from the local police for the wrongful accusation of murder. Reversing the fleeting and derogatory representation of Aboriginal characters in Lawson’s text, Purcell makes Yadaka the hero of her story. After helping Molly with her birth, Yadaka quickly builds a rapport with Molly and her eldest son, Danny. Through storytelling, Yadaka reveals Molly’s Aboriginal identity and suggests she unite with her mother’s people.

Purcell’s reworking starts from a deep personal connection with Lawson’s story, rooted in her childhood experiences. She often recounts in interviews how her mother would read the story to her at bedtime, with Purcell insisting on reciting the boy’s famous last line: “Ma, I won’t never go a droving.”⁵ This early and recurrent engagement left a lasting impression on Purcell, who kept her original tattered copy of Lawson’s short stories, complete with her childhood drawing.⁶ As Fiona Morrison points out, Purcell’s personal bond with the story—formed during childhood through the repeated readings and recitations with her mother—establishes a “call and response pattern”, seamlessly transitioning from “childhood delight” to “adult works of critique”.⁷ This transformation from memory to critique mirrors the “rereading to rewriting” model of storytelling.⁸ Here, the aspect of rereading most relevant to Purcell’s creative process is the repetition of the cherished practice shared between mother and daughter, underscoring the significance of the maternal—an element central to Purcell’s project. Initial encounters with a text, such as Purcell’s reading of Lawson’s story as a child, often remain passive. Marian Rebei notes that this passivity evolves into active rewriting as the reader engages critically with the text, allowing transformative interpretations.⁹ Purcell’s journey from a passive reader to an active critic is marked by her own words: “[Lawson’s story] is not my version of ‘The Drover’s Wife’.” Adopting instead the role of the storyteller, Purcell reimagines the story from an Aboriginal woman’s perspective, actively critiquing and reshaping the story through the lens of her identity and experiences.

In the subsequent novel and film versions, there seems to be a disconnection from Lawson and his original story, or rather, an increasing focus on Molly. From Lawson’s story, Purcell builds a fictional world revolving around the figure of Molly Johnson. The 2019 novel, a much-expanded version, delves into detailed backstories for both central and peripheral characters, explores the broader sociohistorical background of the 1890s and unfolds extended storylines from a greater variety of perspectives. For example, the novel introduces the busy, smoky town of Everton and a couple arriving from England: the newly appointed lawmaker Nate Clintoff and his wife, Louisa. By detailing the atrocities committed by the Edwards family, the founders of Everton, such as physical and sexual violence against the Ngarigo people, the novel reveals the brutal past of the frontier. The novel also follows the play’s conclusion, in which Molly and Danny embark on a journey of reunion and revenge. The film—the third incarnation of Purcell’s “Drover’s Wife”—has a similar but condensed narrative structure due to limited runtime. As a visual storyteller, Purcell makes use of the cinematic medium by highlighting the vastness of the alpine country, bringing to the audience yet another dimension of Molly’s story and world. The film is interspersed with long panning shots of the land and sky, contrasted against relentless and brutal violence. The costuming and props in the film also help to project the image of resilient Aboriginal womanhood as Molly is always depicted wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying her loyal shotgun in hand. The film poster, for instance, positions Molly in the centre and the low-angle shot makes the solemn-looking woman a dominant figure.

Adaptation and Identity-Making: The “Molly Johnson” Franchise

Purcell’s project is a unique process of identity-making that extends the narrative across multiple media platforms to build a larger “storyworld” through repeated adaptations and reinterpretations.¹⁰ Geoff Rodoreda and Demelza Hall argue that Purcell’s approach challenges conventional genre boundaries to reshape our understanding of adaptation practices because of the difficulty of determining where one text begins and where the other ends.¹¹ They propose to view Purcell’s adaptations as an “amalgam text”,¹² a concept that resonates with Purcell’s own reflections on the interconnectedness of her three adaptations and the blurred boundaries between each. Purcell says, “And what was exciting was, when I was writing the screenplay I’d go, ‘Oh I’ve got to remember to put that in the novel’—and then when I was writing the novel I’d come across this backstory and I’d say, ‘Hang on a minute, that’s a bit of backstory for the character breakdown for the screenplay’ … then I went back and re-read Henry Lawson’s story, I went back to the play and said, ‘I can’t forget that line’. So, I borrowed and stole from each.”¹³ Through the process of revisiting earlier versions in the transposition from play to novel and film, Purcell’s practices of reading and rereading, writing and rewriting repeat themselves and become exchangeable. The adaptation from stage to novel and screen is thus difficult to define. While the final releases of the novel and the film were two years apart, Purcell developed them concurrently. Initiated by her ambition to make a film in the Snowy Mountains,¹⁴ this creative journey has evolved across multiple genres, where the concepts of play, novel and screen are fused.

This fused creative process is most evident in the novel version, notable for its complexity, expansiveness and visual storytelling. For instance, Purcell tends to navigate between third-person perspectives and first-person monologues to recount the same events. This narrative technique applies to multiple characters, including the three Aboriginal characters who are only briefly mentioned for comical effect in Lawson’s text. The novel thus involves frequent shifts in perspective and uses paragraph dividers for transitions. The novel’s style, representing Purcell’s genre-blurring expansion across different media, becomes a form of resistance and an assertion of Aboriginal sovereignty. It challenges the settler-colonial paradigm embedded within traditional narrative structures by disrupting linear and limited perspectives in storytelling and contests settler tropes and archetypes that have historically marginalised Aboriginal voices. In the novel, readers can access each character’s inner thoughts and experience the story in a layered, collective way. Mununjali writer Ellen van Neerven comments that Purcell seems to “us[e] tools straight out of cinema”.¹⁵ This observation was particularly resonant for me after the film’s release. Purcell’s novel, or novelisation—here a case of “internal hybridisation” of the literary and cinematic genres¹⁶—is written for the film. The alternating perspectives and constant jumps to internal dialogue resemble the director’s notes. As a form of world-building, the novel provides substantive details of Molly’s life. Or, more precisely, both the novel and the film foreground the figure of Molly Johnson, and Lawson’s presence almost disappears along the way. In the process of reworking Lawson’s drover’s wife, Purcell is able to develop the character of Molly Johnson.

To better understand the cultural and political significance of this identity-making process, which works to produce Molly Johnson as an iconic Aboriginal heroine, I draw from Rodoreda and Hall’s approach of considering Purcell’s adaptations as a franchise.¹⁷ They borrow Clare Parody’s integration of adaptation and franchise entertainment, which centres around a “brand identity”.¹⁸ Franchise adaptations “generate and give identity to vast quantities of interlinked media products and merchandise, resulting in a prolonged, multitextual, multimedia fictional experience”.¹⁹ Here, I emphasise Purcell’s interlinked creative process, the expansion across multiple genres and her development of the central character. While these commercial terms, such as “franchise” and “brand”, cannot capture the depth of Aboriginal storytelling practices, they offer a way to explore some aspects of Purcell’s approach, such as the strategic dissemination and cultural impact of her adaptations. First, it is the character of Molly, who emerges during Purcell’s reworking of Lawson’s story, that has become the focus of her work and the focus of the franchise, not the drover’s wife of the original. More importantly, Purcell’s project is further complicated by her political intervention as a First Nations artist. Although “brand” and “franchise” usually carry commercial connotations, they can be used, in this instance, to show how Purcell strategically expands Molly’s story across multiple genres, reaching a wider audience and deepening the cultural resonance of her character. There is more to Purcell’s franchise than repurposing a so-called canonical work or “breath[ing] new life into the original”;²⁰ adaptation becomes a means for her to develop Molly Johnson as an iconic character to redefine Aboriginal representations and reclaim Aboriginal narratives in various formats within mainstream media. The franchise’s ongoing consumption and possible future offshoots—a TV show, an opera and even a video game²¹—indicate a successful case of demarginalisation, empowerment and communication of Aboriginal culture.

The ongoing and open-ended nature of franchise adaptation and production means that it often extends into peripheral materials such as interviews.²² Purcell has participated in many interviews for all three adaptations as an effective way of promoting her work and communicating Aboriginal culture. These interviews are in print, television, online videos and podcasts and appear on a variety of platforms, from large news outlets like ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald to popular podcast programs such as The Garret. More interestingly, the extensive body of interviews and reports about Purcell and her project circulate and reiterate certain key details vital to understanding the motivations behind her work and development of her characters. One example is Purcell’s childhood memory of reading the Lawson story with her mother. Purcell’s own origin stories can be conceived as forms of paratextual information that have become part of the Molly Johnson franchise, facilitating Purcell’s world-building around Molly and attracting public interest. The Molly Johnson franchise has also produced many other by-products since the initial 2016 stage production, including audiobooks, news reports, reviews and critical interpretations. These secondary materials extend the franchise’s reach and impact and reinforce the cultural significance and personal backstory of Purcell’s multigenre adaptations, deepening audience engagement with the story and the Molly Johnson character.

The intermediality of Purcell’s Molly Johnson franchise and the commercial aspects of her project, especially regarding the cinematic release, invite broader considerations. Purcell’s reworking of Lawson’s story ultimately decolonises a White settler character created in line with the nationalist, masculinist ethos of the 1890s and transforms her into an iconic Aboriginal heroine with unprecedented presence in Australian popular culture and the entertainment industry. As one interviewer from the ABC says, “People are saying who needs a Marvel superhero when you’ve got Molly Johnson?”²³ The Molly Johnson franchise is part of the ongoing cultural and political interventions and self-representation by Aboriginal artists in mainstream media, including the growing industry of Aboriginal filmmaking. Works such as Radiance (1998), Samson and Delilah (2009), Redfern Now (2012–2013), Sweet Country (2017) and many others represent a significant shift in Australian media, where Aboriginal artists are actively redefining and reclaiming space for their voices and stories.

From Bush to Country: Reimagining the Land

In her versions of “The Drover’s Wife”, Purcell critically rewrites the representation of land. In Lawson’s version, nature is cast as the enemy and a threat to the drover’s wife and her children. The bush is to blame for most of her sufferings. She fights against fire, thunderstorm, drought, wild animals and feelings of loneliness and displacement. She is occasionally threatened by a passing swagman, but the real threat of the story is the snake. Consequently, the environment is gloomy and alienating: “Bush all round—bush with no horizon, for the country is flat.”²⁴ In the Molly Johnson franchise, Purcell’s land is never threatening ­but nurturing and beautiful. As Goenpul academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson writes, “Our ontological relationship to land, the ways that country is constitutive of us, and therefore the inalienable nature of our relation to land, marks a radical, indeed incommensurable, difference between us and the non-Indigenous.”²⁵ While the land is often the site of violence, witnessing acts of rape, beating and lynching, it is simultaneously a soothing presence that bears the connection to Molly’s identity as an Aboriginal woman. Purcell restores Lawson’s intimidating, maddening bush to Country, recasting the land as integral to and reflective of Aboriginal identity and sovereignty. Purcell fundamentally inverts Lawson’s narrative, offering a vision of the bush that criticises the typical White settler-invader attitudes toward the land, which prioritise conquest, ownership and exploitation.

The forms of theatre, fiction and cinema allow Purcell to explore the representation of land, space and connections to Country in various ways. The play version invokes the sense of the place and space through stage directions and dialogue. In addition to the light earth covering the stage and dirty costumes indicating hardship, the lighting and sound produce a physical sense of the land.²⁶ In the novel version, Purcell broadens the exploration of the storyworld by adding extensive information about the township, frontier violence and descriptions of the alpine ranges, allowing readers to understand Molly’s intimate connections with the land. For instance, while Lawson’s character faces the “everlasting, maddening sameness” of her Sunday walks, Molly marvels at the beauty of nature on her walk with the children: “The ghost white and silver of the tree trunks, the olive green of the shrubs beneath and the many autumn colours in the dried foliage—a rainbow of red, brown and orange litters the ground. Just beautiful. Never ceases to amaze me.”²⁷ Purcell replaces the unrelenting monotony of the bush with different kinds of trees and a variety of colours, disrupting the depressing, changeless bush of Lawson.

In addition, Molly enjoys the remoteness of her hut, which offers solace instead of causing distress. A hot spring near Molly’s home represents a site of comfort and rejuvenation in the novel. The hot spring, which is “hers, and hers alone”,²⁸ becomes Molly’s personal space, signifying her intimate bond with nature and, in turn, giving her strength. These positive, endearing depictions signal a fundamentally different attitude towards the land to that of the White settler—the land is not viewed as property or an opposing force. As Yorta Yorta writer Bryan Andy says, Purcell’s representation of Country isn’t one of threat.²⁹ In Purcell’s reworkings, the true source of Molly’s oppression is not the bush but White men. These characters are often depicted as agents of violence and disruption, in contrast with the nurturance and protection provided by the land. From the swagman trying to assault her while she is heavily pregnant to her abusive, alcoholic husband and his two friends who violently kill Yadaka and rape Molly, almost every White male character is presented as the embodiment of colonial invasion and patriarchal violence. Drawing strength and resilience from her connections with Country, Molly is ultimately empowered to confront her abusers and take matters into her own hands.

The visuality of the film format, especially the extensive shots of land and sky, further strengthens the emphasis on land and Country. The film frequently uses panning shots of the vast dry land and endless skylines. The time-lapse sequences capture the changing elements of nature, inviting the audience to experience the passing of time and the rhythm of the land. Purcell explains that the land becomes another protagonist in the film,³⁰ an essential, active and living part of the narrative instead of a passive backdrop. While Purcell directly engages with the harsh and unforgiving reality of colonial Australia, the deep, wide and beautiful shots of the land, mountains and skylines—from the opening’s heavy mist slowing clearing up to the snowy trail leading Molly’s children to safety and her mother’s tribe—provide a gentle, soothing relief as well as enduring strength, contrasting sharply with acts of violence and invasion. The visualisation of the land accentuates the deep, dynamic spiritual and cultural interconnections between land and Aboriginal people,³¹ signalling how this specific format can be useful as a powerful expression and demonstration of their sovereignty.³²

Writing, performing and directing from an Aboriginal feminist perspective, Purcell liberates the land from the confines and projections of Lawson and other settler writers. Writing and rewriting become sovereign acts of resistance and reclamation. Molly’s journey of self-discovery, in which she comes to embrace her Aboriginal identity, takes place through her bond with Country, making the land an integral part of the narrative. It is, then, against the land that Purcell creates the character of Molly Johnson as an iconic Aboriginal heroine.

“Please, My Children!”: Molly Johnson and Maternal Agency

In My Bundjalung People, Ruby Langford Ginibi writes: “We come from the earth and will always have close links to it. The land which looks after us is our mother, is central to our spirituality, culture and survival.”³³ In Purcell’s work, metaphors of motherhood and the land are intertwined in her construction of Molly. A site of empowerment and resistance, the maternal is a key element through which Molly embraces her Aboriginal identity. As a multiplied, layered concept in Purcell’s writing, maternalism bridges Purcell’s personal life and family history with her fictional heroine. It is through the matrilineal line, the character of Black Mary, that Purcell (re)installs Molly’s Aboriginal identity. Morrison notes that “the beloved maternal figure” is an essential part of the “creative origin” of Purcell’s play in addition to the dramatic re-enactments and intertextual interaction with the original text,³⁴ and the “maternal palimpsest” remains an important element throughout her project.³⁵ The maternal relationship in Purcell’s fiction references her own connection with her mother and the cherished memory of reading and reciting Lawson’s story with her. Responding to whether she always envisioned herself in the role, Purcell says, “The reason I put myself in it is because I went through the journey in the play. Molly Johnson is me. It’s my mother, it’s my grandmother, it’s my auntie, and they all influenced me.”³⁶

Purcell’s strong emphasis and powerful meditation on motherhood contrast sharply with settler rewritings,³⁷ which tend to render the maternal a site of ambivalence and struggle. The maternal thus becomes a contested space where a woman’s desire for independence clashes with her duty to her children. For instance, Murray Bail’s character in his fictional adaptation of “The Drover’s Wife” is accused of deserting her children in leaving her self-absorbed, misogynist spouse.³⁸ In a different version written by White feminist writer Barbara Jefferis, the drover’s wife insists that it is “his children” and not her own that she abandons;³⁹ Mandy Sayer’s protagonist, though she acknowledges her longing for her children, does not regret her decision to leave them for the life she desires.⁴⁰ These feminist reimaginings focus on giving the long-silenced drover’s wife a voice, indicating an urgency and ambivalence for the female protagonist to negotiate her identity as mother and wife. This dilemma aligns with the mainstream White feminist movement in Australia, especially from the mid- to late 20th century, reflecting the complex tension between women’s liberation and motherhood.

This does not apply to Purcell’s Molly Johnson. While settler writers reimagine the drover’s wife abandoning her children, Purcell writes the intergenerational trauma of the forced removal of First Nations children into Molly’s family history and collective memory. Contrary to the ambivalence settler women’s protagonists feel towards motherhood, Molly’s identity as a mother is self-affirming rather than self-negating. Motherhood is the cornerstone of her character. It is through the maternal role that Molly embraces her identity as an Aboriginal woman. In this feminist reworking of the tale, Molly’s reproductive power ensures Aboriginal survival within the White colony. Molly’s primary concern revolves around the safety of her children. In the play’s opening scene, she twice demands of the swagman, “What do you know about my children!”⁴¹ Molly’s determination to protect her children remains a constant throughout the story. Molly murders her abusive husband when he threatens to kill her as it would mean her children would be left motherless and unprotected. When later questioned by trooper Spencer Leslie about her husband’s location, Molly reacts by fatally shooting him, the same way she kills her abusive husband. The desperate measure stems from Molly’s maternal love. It is not the revelation of the drover’s death but the fear of abandoning her children that frightens her the most.

In the transition from stage to novel and film, Purcell consolidates and expands upon the maternal theme. Readers and audiences see that everything Molly does is for her children; behind every decision, her children are her principal consideration. Unlike previous wives reconfigured by White feminist writers, Molly affirms, “I’ve done my job, found my place in this world as a mother. Found my peace, I have, because of my children.”⁴² Having grown up motherless, Molly longs for the bond between mother and child. She endures years of abuse and rape by her husband because she “knew it would bring [her] children”.⁴³ Assured of her children’s safety with the Ngarigo people, Molly willingly accepts execution without revealing their whereabouts.

This emphasis on the necessity of maternity to cultural survival sets Molly apart from her settler counterparts in the tradition of rewriting Lawson’s short story. Molly’s strong connection with her children and her unwavering love for them stem from the specific histories and identities of Aboriginal women and their divergence from White women’s political agendas. White feminists’ pursuit of liberation from the domestic sphere and what it entails does not speak for Aboriginal women, who not only follow different cultural beliefs on family and mothering but also, more significantly, have lived through and suffered the removal of their children and the sterilisation of their bodies consequent to colonisation. Eualeyai/Kamilaroi writer and legal scholar Larissa Behrendt asserts,

In 1919 the Aborigines Protection Board had its powers changed to allow the Board to remove Aboriginal children from their families. There did not have to be neglect of a child for the power to operate. Children who were removed were institutionalised and then used as a pool of unskilled, slave labour. Aboriginal women have been and continue to be sterilised without their consent. Aboriginal women were losing their right to be mothers; the right to be a mother was not an issue for white women who at this time were concerned with right to choose whether or not to be a mother at all by agitating for access to safe contraception and securing safe abortions.⁴⁴

For Molly, there is no ambivalence towards motherhood. The concept of liberation from the maternal role is irrelevant, as the right to be a mother was once forcibly stripped from Aboriginal women. Aboriginal children were removed from their mothers to be assimilated into White society, their language forgotten and their culture peeled away. Generations of Aboriginal women, men and children have been exploited for the “prosperity” of White settlers. Molly’s life story as an Aboriginal mother with a desperate need to be with her children speaks directly to the brutal truth of the child-removal policy and the painful experiences of the “Stolen Generations”, which continue to impact Aboriginal people today. Purcell thus challenges previous White feminist rewritings of “The Drover’s Wife” and the racialised discourse that informs them.

In her version of the story, Purcell introduces the White character Miss Shirley, wife of the local minister, as a contrast for Molly’s different maternal experiences and perspectives as an Aboriginal woman. Miss Shirley’s actions reflect a broader settler maternalism prevalent among White women of the time, especially those aligned with religious organisations. They often facilitated the removal of Aboriginal children from their families to White institutions and homes. Unlike other colonial practices executed by White men, these policies signal the disruption and invasion of the intimate spaces of Aboriginal communities and families.⁴⁵ Miss Shirley plays a central part in the removal of Molly’s children. Although she does not issue the removal directly, Miss Shirley reveals Molly’s heritage to the authorities. As the local minister’s wife and Molly’s only maternal figure during her childhood, Miss Shirley has a significant impact on her life, providing assistance and education to both Molly and her children.

Yet this attitude of “saving” Aboriginal children is built upon the presumption of White women’s superiority over Aboriginal women and accordant racial privileges. White women’s benevolence and assistance operate under the guise of erasing “Blackness” from Aboriginal children and women by imposing White European perspectives and social constructions upon them. Once these attempts fail, the pretence of benevolence drops. Miss Shirley, fully aware from the outset that Molly’s mother is “Black Mary”, ignores the advice of other White women to send Molly away. Instead, she tries to “cleans[e] … the filth that courses through [Molly’s] veins” with proper clothing, education and etiquette.⁴⁶ She also attempts to instruct Molly on womanhood, such as how to be a dutiful wife and serve her husband,⁴⁷ thus imposing upon her “the subservient role of women within European society”, a White settler construction of gender fundamentally different to Aboriginal views of gender relations and family structures.⁴⁸ Upon discovering Molly’s involvement with a Black fugitive, Miss Shirley abandons her mission to save her, immediately suggesting instead the removal of her children “for their own good”.

Contrary to the drover’s wives in Lawson’s original story and previous rewritings, Molly’s maternal role is not restrictive but empowering and liberating. Emphasising the bushwoman’s struggle to survive in the harsh environment, Lawson depicts his protagonist as a responsible yet stoic mother: “She loves her children, but has no time to show it. She seems harsh to them.”⁴⁹ Delys Bird argues that although the drover’s wife embodies the idealised mother of the 19th century, “her situation dramatises the immobilising effects for women of a restrictive ideal of family life”.⁵⁰ Relying on men in her life, Lawson’s protagonist is physically unable to leave her home, much less break free from the roles prescribed by the patriarchal order. Contemporary feminist rewritings portray her with greater mobility and autonomy, often embodied in her decision to leave her partner and pursue her own aspirations.

For Molly Johnson, the discovery of her Aboriginal identity and her maternal role empower her, enable her mobility and equip her with a means of resistance. She is tough and resilient but by no means harsh to her children. At the end of Purcell’s stage performance, Molly sweeps open the curtain representing her hut. As it opens, the hut—the representation of the domestic sphere, of colonisation, settler foundation and White invasion—disappears. All that remains is the land and Molly’s Country. The ending sees her leaving home with Danny, choosing to unite with her clan and rescue the rest of her children. Danny, wielding the spear Yadaka makes for him, refuses his father’s boots and embraces an Aboriginal way of life.

The play concludes with a promise for revenge and a hopeful note for the future represented by the children. In the novel and film versions, Purcell extends the ending by presenting Molly’s revenge in detail, landing on a much darker yet no less hopeful tone. For instance, she confronts Miss Shirley and successfully retrieves her other children: “Damn ya to hell for thinkin’ ya know what is best for my children!”⁵¹ With their hands tied and their mouths gagged, Miss Shirley and Father McGuinness are now the ones who lose control over their bodies and the ability to speak for themselves. Molly’s actions represent an Aboriginal woman’s resistance to White colonists’ mistreatment and dispossession of Aboriginal people. Upon reuniting with her removed children, Molly decides to seek refuge with her mother’s people, the Ngarigo. During their flight from the town, she encounters her rapist and stays behind to confront the perpetrator: “You may have hurt me, had your way with me, but you will not hurt or scare me or have your way with me ever again.”⁵²

Her words and act of retribution—the castration and killing of her rapist—serve as a potent response from Aboriginal women to the White men who have exploited them and to the cumulative harms White settlers have inflicted upon Aboriginal peoples, their lands and their culture. Sergeant Clintoff, who has witnessed the scene, has no choice but to imprison her. Molly is subsequently sentenced to death for the murders of three men. Her final act before the hanging is a glance towards the cave through which her children have escaped. Compared with the more open-ended final scene of the play, this new ending emphasises Molly’s maternal agency as an Aboriginal woman, through which she embraces her Aboriginal identity and asserts her sovereignty. In the cinematic rendition, Purcell returns the audience to the land and the image of Molly’s children reaching the cave of the Ngarigo people, reinforcing the connection with Country and evoking a sense of hope built on kinship and the future. Similar to the maternal body in Purcell’s writing, the land is simultaneously vulnerable and powerful, both a site of violence and a place of hope, witnessing brutality and revenge yet holding a link to family and kinship. At the same time, Molly’s incarceration in this new ending denotes another harsh reality Aboriginal women face. Despite representing only 2 per cent of Australia’s total population, First Nations women constitute 37 per cent of the female prison population,⁵³ and more than 80 per cent of those incarcerated are mothers.⁵⁴ By writing Molly’s imprisonment into the story, Purcell invites a closer examination of the intricate and troubling connection between domestic violence, sexual assault and the incarceration of Aboriginal women.⁵⁵

Molly and Louisa: Intersectionality and Aboriginal Feminism

The term “intersectionality” was first coined by American legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s. Using an analogy of traffic intersection, Crenshaw argues that feminism needs to account for the interlocking systems of oppression experienced by Black women, who suffer racial and sex discrimination contemporaneously, not one to the exclusion of the other. Consequently, a “single-axis” framework of gender oppression that neglects race applies to a relatively privileged, racially unmarked group of women.⁵⁶ Although the idea of “intersectionality” had been discussed by Black feminists long before Crenshaw’s conceptualisation,⁵⁷ she put forward a new analytical framework to examine the ways various political systems of power and social constructions of identity—such as race, gender, class, ability and sexuality—interact to produce various forms of overlapping discrimination and oppression. Crenshaw points out that by excluding race discrimination, the concept of sex discrimination implicitly privileges White women in assuming that all members of the group (of women) are equally disadvantaged.⁵⁸ Because mainstream feminist theories tend to come from a universal White positionality,⁵⁹ they fail to accommodate women of colour, who do not face the same oppressions, making it difficult for the latter to address their experiences.

Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, shifts can be observed in Australian feminist movements and scholarship: from striving for gender equality for a universalised (White) female subject to recognising the diverse experiences and challenges faced by women from backgrounds and positionalities that are marginalised in mainstream feminist discourse. In her seminal work Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, Moreton-Robinson points out that Australian feminism has always been “a white middle-class women’s movement”, emphasising the irreducible differences between White and Indigenous women as the latter are often treated as “the other” within Australian mainstream feminism.⁶⁰

Reading Purcell’s three adaptations together, I argue that the construction of Molly Johnson as an iconic Aboriginal heroine critiques the mainstream feminist discourse through its juxtaposition of Molly and Louisa Clintoff, a new character introduced in the novel and film versions. The name Louisa immediately brings to mind Henry Lawson’s mother, Louisa Lawson. Purcell confirmed that she did indeed base the character on Louisa Lawson because of her activist advocacy of women’s rights and the suffrage movement.⁶¹ Originally from Britain, Louisa Clintoff arrives in Australia with her husband, Nate, who has taken a job as a law enforcer in the fictional town of Everton. After a flood that forces them to seek shelter with Molly, the Clintoffs learn that she lives alone with her children in the mountains. They offer to take her children to Miss Shirley while Molly prepares for childbirth. While not directly involved in the women’s suffrage movement like her mother, Dawn (the name of Louisa Lawson’s feminist journal in history), Louisa remains a devoted feminist activist. Having lost a sister to domestic violence, she is determined to continue her advocacy for battered wives through her women’s journal in Australia and “give them a voice”.⁶²

Louisa Clintoff thus represents a younger and more naive version of Lawson’s mother. Unlike Louisa Lawson, who emerged from the bush, Purcell’s character is from a middle-class family, ignorant of the harsh reality of the outback. Described as a sickly, pale woman, Louisa never needs to worry about survival. She hopes to bring the same mode of activism, such as publishing a women’s journal and holding a women’s group, to the unfamiliar environment. She embodies the typical White, middle-class, educated feminist eager to find a voice for all women but oblivious to her own privileged positionality and the individual experiences that come from women’s diverse backgrounds and standpoints in life.

The irreducible differences between Molly and Louisa are signalled from their first encounter. Despite having been caught in a flood, Louisa appears to be “ladylike”, “her hair soft and shiny, her skin clear and smooth”.⁶³ She is gentle and naive, ready to share her life and eager to take on the challenges of the bush. In contrast, Molly is tough, tired and wary of the strange couple: “She knows she doesn’t have a ladylike bone in her body or the lifestyle to be as cared for and kept as Louisa Clintoff.”⁶⁴ Having endured enough pain and hardships, both from the mountain life and an abusive husband, Molly feels uncomfortable about the intimate exchanges between Louisa and Nate: “What the hell do I know about affection? she thinks. A husband’s love? Companionship?”⁶⁵ The film version reinforces this juxtaposition between the two women by closely following the Clintoffs’ life, almost creating a parallel narrative. As both of their stories unfold, the distance between Louisa and Molly continues to grow. Jan Larbalestier notes, “Between the idea of common sisterhood and the goals of liberation fall shades of cultural diversity and inequality. All women do not share the same conditions of existence.”⁶⁶ Their different experiences as women make it impossible for Molly to believe in the feminist agendas Louisa wishes to promote.

Indeed, Purcell introduces the character of Louisa to problematise the issue of violence against women, which is one of the focal points of the play. This addition also reflects a critique of mainstream Australian feminism. Purcell, on the one hand, recognises what feminist movements try to achieve for “all women”; on the other, more implicitly, via the Aboriginal identity of Molly, Purcell challenges the White woman’s universalised subject position. As Moreton-Robinson explains, “The exercising of white race privilege is not interrogated as being problematic, nor is it understood as part of the power that whiteness confers; instead it is normalised within feminist texts and practice.”⁶⁷ Molly’s identity is not disclosed until near the end of the narratives, but her position as an Aboriginal woman powerfully articulates the experiences of First Nation women and exposes the invisible, centralised status of Whiteness within Australian feminist discourse.

Louisa and Molly do not cross paths again until the very end of the story. When they do meet, Molly is incarcerated for the murders of three men: her husband, a trooper and her rapist. Their final conversation takes place in Molly’s jail cell, where she awaits execution. The first issue of Louisa’s women’s journal, headlined “Battered Wives: Is It Purely a Husband’s Right?”, lies beside Molly on her bed. “You write from the outside,” Molly explains to Louisa, who is “taken aback”, for she “prides herself on her ability as a writer to get inside her subject’s mind”. Louisa responds that “I was trying to give voice to an issue that has been kept silent for far too long … Trying to give women a voice”. Molly retorts, “I could only hear—you.”⁶⁸ This conversation about Louisa’s journal and its theme of domestic violence captures the misalignment between the lives and political priorities of Aboriginal and White women. In the film version, the physical barrier of the jail cell accentuates this sense of “inside vs outside” that characterises the divide between the convicted Molly and the free Louisa. Despite Louisa’s pride in her work against domestic violence—a reflection and an extension of White feminists’ achievements—the “voice” she strives to find is a White one. It fails to represent the unique experiences and oppressions of Aboriginal women like Molly, who have long been marginalised and whose sufferings result from interlocking systems of power. The White feminist Louisa’s ability to voice her concerns is a privilege derived from “liv[ing] and profit[ing] on the land stolen violently from Aboriginal women”, who “are oppressed by white people, male and female”.⁶⁹

Onward: Storytelling and (Re)empowerment

Aiming to “knock Ned Kelly off his pedestal”,⁷⁰ Purcell’s Molly Johnson franchise disrupts the settler-colonial and masculinist construction of the national identity by creating a counter-image. Standing at the heart of Purcell’s cultural and political interventions is the character of Molly, whose identity as an Aboriginal woman is shaped by her deep connection with Country and her maternal agency. Through this iconic character of strength and resilience, Purcell also signals the harsh realities and interlocking systems of oppression faced by Aboriginal women by recognising “the irreducible differences and incommensurabilities” between White women and Aboriginal women.⁷¹ However, against this sombre backdrop, the rest of Louisa and Molly’s conversation also points to the power of storytelling, which proves to be an effective means of initiating communication:

“Can I hear you? Your story, Missus Johnson?”

“Molly … my name is Molly.”

“Can I hear your story, Molly?”

Taking a deep breath, and for the first time in a long time, Molly smiles. A smile weighted with much sorrow. “For my children. Let not my sin overshadow my children knowin’ my love for them.”⁷²

Across Purcell’s multigenre narratives, storytelling emerges as a powerful tool for resistance, reclamation and communication. Murri academic Bronwyn Fredericks notes, “The telling of our stories provides a sense of our individual and collective experiences in the naming of all that was and is and all that has been distorted, erased, and altered to suit the needs of the colonizer.”⁷³ The interplay of play, novel and film amplifies and diversifies the power of storytelling as well as the voices of characters such as Molly. Louisa’s question to Molly marks a turning point in their interaction, signifying a willingness to engage respectfully and a desire to understand Molly’s experiences. Molly’s telling of her story becomes a conscious act of resistance and re-empowerment. At the very end of the film, Louisa and a small group of women protest at Molly’s hanging. The protesters’ presence, though seemingly insubstantial against the larger, disapproving crowd of White men, sends a strong political message of solidarity. Upon seeing the group of women, Molly calls out Louisa’s name, to which she responds: “I’m here.”⁷⁴ The final scene indicates the emergence of mutual understanding: despite the vast divide between Louisa and Molly, there remains the possibility of meaningful interchange through the power of storytelling.

Acknowledgements

This article emerged from a chapter of my PhD thesis, “Gender, Reception and ‘The Drover’s Wife’ Phenomenon”. I am grateful to my supervisor, Associate Professor Julieanne Lamond, for her invaluable guidance and unwavering support. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose constructive and comprehensive comments have enriched this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiang Li

Xiang Li is a Lecturer at Nanjing University of Finance and Economics and a Visiting Fellow at the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the Australian National University. She completed her PhD in literary and cultural studies at the Australian National University in 2023. Her thesis examines the many rewritings of Henry Lawson’s short story “The Drover’s Wife”, especially the way they reflect the changing conceptualisation of gender roles and relations in Australian culture.

Notes

1 Astrid Edwards and Leah Purcell, “Leah Purcell on ‘The Drover’s Wife’”, The Garret, 2 April 2020, https://thegarretpodcast.com/leah-purcell-on-the-drovers-wife/.

2 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): 31.

3 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): 513.

4 Demelza Hall, “Woodheaps and Chopping Blocks: Talking to Leah Purcell, Leticia Cáceres and Stephen Curtis about The Drover’s Wife”, Overland, 28 October 2019, https://overland.org.au/2019/10/woodheaps-and-chopping-blocks-talking-to-leah-purcell-leticia-caceres-stephen-curtis-about-the-drovers-wife/.

5 Edwards and Purcell, “Leah Purcell”.

6 Leah Purcell, The Drover’s Wife (Sydney: Currency Press, 2017), 3.

7 Fiona Morrison, “The Antiphonal Time of Violence in Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife”, Southerly 78, no. 3 (2018): 177–78.

8 Marian Rebei, “A Different Kind of Circularity: From Writing and Reading to Rereading and Rewriting”, Revue LISA/LISA e-Journal 2, no. 5 (2004): 47.

9 Rebei, “Different Kind”, 59.

10 Clare Parody, “Franchising/Adaptation”, Adaptation 4, no. 2 (2011): 211.

11 Geoff Rodoreda and Demelza Hall, “Limits of Adaptation: Leah Purcell’s Drover’s Wives” (paper presented at Texts and their Limits: Australia’s Triennial Literary Studies Convention, Online, 21 July 2021).

12 Rodoreda and Hall, “Limits of Adaptation”.

13 Paul Daley, “Leah Purcell on Reinventing The Drover’s Wife Three Times: ‘I Borrowed and Stole from Each’”, Guardian, 21 December 2019, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/22/leah-purcell-on-reinventing-the-drovers-wife-three-times-i-borrowed-and-stole-from-each, emphasis added.

14 Purcell, The Drover’s Wife, 6.

15 Ellen van Neerven, “The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson by Leah Purcell”, Australian Book Review 419 (March 2020): http://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2020/march-2020-no-419/734-march-2020-no-419/6253-ellen-van-neerven-reviews-the-drover-s-wife-the-legend-of-molly-johnson-by-leah-purcell.

16 Jan Baetens, “From Screen to Text: Novelization, the Hidden Continent”, in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 237.

17 Rodoreda and Hall, “Limits of Adaptation”.

18 Parody, “Franchising/Adaptation”, 214.

19 Parody, “Franchising/Adaptation”, 211.

20 Denise Varney, “Indigenizing the Colonial Narrative: Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife”, in Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Plays by Women: The Early 21st Century, ed. Penny Farfan and Lesley Ferris (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 44.

21 Susan Chenery and Vanessa Gorman, “Leah Purcell Weaves Her Indigenous Songlines into New Film the Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson”, ABC News, 13 June 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-13/leah-purcell-songlines-in-drovers-wife-the-legend-molly-johnson/100631508.

22 Parody, “Franchising/Adaptation”, 212.

23 Mawunyo Gbogbo, “The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson Is a Compelling Story Weaving in Present and Historical Truths”, ABC News, 2 May 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-03/the-drovers-wife-the-legend-of-molly-johnson-leah-purcell/101032364.

24 Henry Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife”, in The Drover’s Wife, ed. Frank Moorhouse (North Sydney: Penguin Random House Australia, 2017), 11.

25 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 11.

26 Hall, “Woodheaps and Chopping Blocks”.

27 Leah Purcell, The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson (Camberwell: Hamish Hamilton, 2019), 21.

28 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 50.

29 Bryan Andy, “Leah Purcell on Reclaiming the Drover’s Wife with the Legend of Molly Johnson”, ACMI, 1 May 2022, https://www.acmi.net.au/stories-and-ideas/leah-purcell-on-reclaiming-the-drovers-wife-with-the-legend-of-molly-johnson/.

30 Caris Bizzaca, “Podcast—Writer/Director Leah Purcell on Her Feature Film Debut”, Screen Australia, 21 April 2022, https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen-news/2022/04-21-podcast-leah-purcell.

31 See Bawaka Country et al., “Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a Relational Understanding of Place/Space”, Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 4 (2016): 455–75.

32 See Romaine Moreton and Therese Davis, “Australian Indigenous Filmmaking beyond Mabo”, in Mabo’s Cultural Legacy, ed. Geoff Rodoreda and Eva Bischoff (London: Anthem Press, 2020), 77–92.

33 Ruby Langford Ginibi, My Bundjalung People (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994), 50.

34 Morrison, “Antiphonal Time”, 177–78.

35 Prowse, Gildersleeve and Cantrell, “From Stage to Page”, 33.

36 Jennie Kermode, “The Bearer of Stories”, Eye for Film, 19 March 2021, https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/feature/2021-03-18-interview-with-leah-purcell-about-the-drovers-wife-the-legend-of-molly-johnson-feature-story-by-jennie-kermode.

37 See Xiang Li, “Gender, Reception and ‘The Drover’s Wife’ Phenomenon” (PhD diss., Australian National University, 2023).

38 Murray Bail, “The Drover’s Wife”, in Moorhouse, The Drover’s Wife, 199.

39 Barbara Jefferis, “The Drover’s Wife”, in Moorhouse, The Drover’s Wife, 245.

40 Mandy Sayer, “The Drover’s Wife”, in Moorhouse, The Drover’s Wife, 253–62.

41 Purcell, Drover’s Wife, 16.

42 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 18.

43 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 23.

44 Larissa Behrendt, “Aboriginal Women and the White Lies of the Feminist Movement: Implications for Aboriginal Women in Rights Discourse”, Australian Feminist Law Journal 1, no. 1 (1993): 32.

45 Margaret D. Jacobs, “Maternal Colonialism: White Women and Indigenous Child Removal in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940”, Western Historical Quarterly 36, no. 4 (2005): 455–56.

46 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 206.

47 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 22.

48 Behrendt, “Aboriginal Women”, 29. Here, I do not intend to generalise the diverse and complex Aboriginal perspectives on gender and family but to underscore their contrast with White settler norms, which Purcell critiques.

49 Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife”, 16.

50 Delys Bird, “‘Mother, I Won’t Never Go Drovin’: Motherhood in Australian Narrative”, Westerly 34, no. 4 (1989): 42.

51 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 210.

52 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 210.

53 Chay Brown and Deirdre Howard-Wagner, “Increased Incarceration of First Nations Women Is Interwoven with the Experience of Violence and Trauma”, The Conversation, 6 August 2021, http://theconversation.com/increased-incarceration-of-first-nations-women-is-interwoven-with-the-experience-of-violence-and-trauma-164773.

54 Eileen Baldry et al., “Aboriginal Mothers Are Incarcerated at Alarming Rates—and Their Mental and Physical Health Suffers”, The Conversation, 21 May 2019, http://theconversation.com/aboriginal-mothers-are-incarcerated-at-alarming-rates-and-their-mental-and-physical-health-suffers-116827.

55 Brown and Howard-Wagner, “Increased Incarceration”.

56 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–40, 149.

57 Brittney Cooper, “Intersectionality”, in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 387.

58 Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection”, 151.

59 Stephanie A. Shields, “Gender: An Intersectionality Perspective”, Sex Roles 59, no. 5 (2008): 301.

60 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and White Feminism (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000), 104, 110, 162.

61 Edwards and Purcell, “Leah Purcell”.

62 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 29.

63 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 92.

64 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 92.

65 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 94.

66 Jan Larbalestier, “The Politics of Representation: Australian Aboriginal Women and Feminism”, Anthropological Forum 6, no. 2 (1990): 144.

67 Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up, 123.

68 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 221–22, emphasis in original.

69 Behrendt, “Aboriginal Women”, 29, 38.

70 Gbogbo, “The Drover’s Wife”.

71 Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up, 178.

72 Purcell, Legend of Molly Johnson, 220, emphasis added.

73 Bronwyn Fredericks, “Reempowering Ourselves: Australian Aboriginal Women”, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35, no. 3 (2010): 548.

74 The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson, directed by Leah Purcell (Sydney: Bunya Productions; Oombarra Productions, 2022).