“Kin-fused” revenge: Rewriting the canon and settler belonging in Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife

ABSTRACT

One of the many rewritings of Australian Henry Lawson’s iconic 1892 short story “The Drover’s Wife” is the 2016 play The Drover’s Wife, written by Aboriginal actor, writer, and director Leah Purcell. Purcell’s rewriting evidences a much more significant presence of Indigeneity. The play not only introduces Yadaka, an Aboriginal fugitive, as a key character, but the drover’s wife herself is revealed to have Indigenous origins. This powerful twist offers several implications: a tour de force of frontier violence with disturbing and haunting images of racism, rape, lynching, and murder, the play confronts the foundations of the literary canon and of settler belonging, providing an alternative to both. Borrowing Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s term “kin-fused”, this close reading of the play’s text argues that its resolution implies a critique of Indigenous–settler reconciliation, pointing to a lingering desire to redress colonial violence, desire embodied in the play by a “kin-fused” revenge.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian literature
• postcolonial Australia
• Australian plays
• Leah Purcell
• The Drover’s Wife
• settler belonging

Introduction: “The Drover’s Wife” as national legend

While it may seem that only a few new things can be added to the extensive scholarship around Henry Lawson’s ([1892] 1980) iconic short story “The Drover’s Wife”, its significance for the national literary canon as well as the multiple rewritings still resonate on the contemporary Australian literary scene. Centred on the isolated life of a woman who is left alone with her children in the middle of the bush by her droving husband to survive and sustain a particular way of life, the story became a literary centrepiece in the nationalistic movement, which culminated in the 1890s and strove to invent a unique national identity for the soon-to-be Australian Federation (established in 1901), one that was distinct from that of Great Britain. This movement found an expression in the systematic work of an important group of intellectuals, including writers, artists, journalists, and historians, who regularly published in the equally iconic magazine The Bulletin. Henry Lawson was a prominent member of this circle, which among other things established what turned out to be a determining relationship between Australianness and the bush ethos that featured alongside other “national” traits such as egalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, mateship, and hard work, as well as the celebration of pastoralism and frontier life. The “Australian Legend”, as Russel Ward (1958) famously labelled it in his groundbreaking book of the same title, set the tone of the dominant national narrative for many years to come, cementing the significance of the bush, as well as the figure of Henry Lawson, for articulating the settler sense of national belonging. Frank Moorhouse, the editor of a The Drover’s Wife: A Celebration of a Great Australian Love Affair, a collection of essays on the significance of Lawson’s story, sees the tale as “an allegorical telling of the first white Australian settlers in a harsh land, and the threats they faced, some of which they brought on themselves through their treatment of Aboriginal Australians” (2017, Loc. “The Drover’s Wife – A Great Reading Adventure”). Today, Lawson scholarship continues to be preoccupied with the rather ingenious process of mythologizing both the man and his work (see Lee 2004). Popular are also the many playful rewritings of Lawson’s most famous short story, which have always, in one way or another, revealed something particular about the time in which they were written: the most well-known versions include Murray Bail’s (1975) “The Drover’s Wife”, Frank Moorhouse’s (1980) “The Drover’s Wife”, Barbara Jefferis’s (1980) “The Drover’s Wife”, Anne Gambling’s (1986) “The Drover’s De Facto”, and Mandy Sayer’s (1996) “The Drover’s Wife”. The fact that these rewritings continue to resonate on the Australian literary scene is illustrated by Moorhouse’s (2017) edition of the existing versions, and Ryan O’Neill’s (2018) recent (but certainly not the last) creative rewriting in the form of a collection of 99 reinterpretations of the story in his The Drover’s Wives. This continuing interest in Lawson’s original story attests to its resilience as a foundational source of the national obsession with the bush mythology and colonial origins.

The present article focuses on the theatrical adaptation of “The Drover’s Wife” written by Australian Indigenous actor, writer, and director Leah Purcell.¹ Her play of the same title, The Drover’s Wife, in which she also played the lead, premiered in Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre in September 2016, attracting enough commercial and critical attention² for Purcell and her troupe to start developing the play into other formats and genres: in 2019 Purcell published the novel The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson and a feature film of the same title, written and directed by Purcell, was released in 2021.³ The main incentive for Purcell’s rewriting of Lawson’s story is the desire to inscribe a much larger and more significant presence of Indigeneity in the famous tale. In Lawson’s canonical story, Indigeneity remains elusive, marginal, and ultimately ambivalent: apart from a treacherous “Black” who builds a hollow woodpile and the midwife Black Mary who helps the drover’s wife deliver her baby, the story, like many colonial tales, has erased Indigeneity from the nation’s foundational narrative. However, in Purcell’s rewriting, Indigeneity is brought to the forefront as Purcell assigns both these characters a much more fundamental role in the plot. The play not only gives Black Mary an entirely new meaning, but it also introduces a new Aboriginal character, Yadaka, whom Purcell uses to weave her great-grandfather’s story into the play, turning, as she explains in an interview, Lawson’s antagonist Black character into a hero (quoted in Lamb 2018, n.p.). Yadaka becomes the play’s key character, revealing that the drover’s wife has Indigenous origins, since she is Black Mary’s daughter. This powerful twist implies several things that are unpacked later in this article: while Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife” has been interpreted in a host of different, often contradictory ways, never before has its whiteness been challenged in the same way. Purcell’s play, with its depictions of frontier violence and disturbing, haunting images of racism, rape, lynching, and murder, is a tour de force that unflinchingly confronts the very foundations of the Australian national literary canon and national history, providing an alternative to both. At the same time, I will argue, it is Yadaka, the Aboriginal character, who carries the drover’s wife’s story as he is the one who exposes to her, and, by extension, to the nation, the long-buried secret of her origins. This strategy positions Indigeneity as one of the foundational elements shaping Australian national identity and its sense of settler belonging.

Writing Indigeneity back

Available reviews of Purcell’s play often refer to it as a postcolonial rewriting (Hennessy 2016; McLoughlin 2016; Morris 2017), and as such the play certainly complies with narrative strategies that were theorized by many scholars as the “writing back paradigm” (Schmidt-Haberkamp 2005, 247–248; Edwards 2008, 53–55; Thieme 2001, 1). In this paradigm, postcolonial textual or visual representations reject and/or challenge the authority of the imperial discourse through diverse, frequently overlapping acts of liberation, such as the oppositional use of language, re-visioning historiography, and rewriting the canonical narratives; the last of these, by insisting on a counter-discourse as an act of resistance, has received most critical attention (Schmidt-Haberkamp 2005, 246). Importantly, John Thieme (2001, 2) problematizes the tendency to view the relationship between what he terms “pre-texts” (canonical master narratives) and “con-texts” (their rewritings) as a simplified, essentialist binary opposition and describes this relationship as being much less combative and more interactive than it may seem at first sight. In my view, this observation also applies to Purcell’s play: on the one hand, Purcell indeed engages in what other postcolonial writers and critics have done before; in other words, she “embrace[s] the process of rewriting as a way of challenging the Western literary canon and, by extension, Western perspectives, ideologies and discourses” and, as such, provides an “alternative reading” (Edwards 2008, 53). On the other hand, the play also remains a unique response to Lawson, who himself was writing back, in a way, to the British canon, struggling to establish a distinctive Australian voice independent of British literary inspirations – indeed, his best-known and most republished story is a “phenomenon unique in the Australian artistic imagination” (Moorhouse 2017, Loc. “The Drover’s Wife – A Great Reading Adventure”). However, Purcell’s play is first and foremost a critical intervention into the history of writing Indigeneity out of dominant Australian narratives, both historical and literary. In what follows, the present article relies on a close-reading analysis of the play’s text to highlight Purcell’s rhetorical and narrative strategies of writing Indigeneity back.⁴

As suggested above, Purcell’s major strategy in her theatrical response to Lawson’s story is in introducing a new Indigenous character. Yadaka appears in the play through a familiar trope: he is an Aboriginal fugitive accused of killing a white woman.⁵ But he proves to be a proud and dignified man of his tribe, and a source of knowledge through which eventually the drover’s wife herself is revealed to have Indigenous origins. Yadaka’s presence on the stage is symbolic from the very beginning: the first image of him, on the run, badly injured, with an iron collar around his neck, indicates that this story begins with him and that Indigeneity will be given prominence in the play. While at the start Yadaka is at the mercy of the drover’s wife, who holds him at gunpoint, soon the two of them form a strategic alliance when they join forces to get rid of a swagman who threatens to kill Yadaka and take advantage of the drover’s wife (Purcell 2016, 5). The drover’s wife’s vulnerability is exposed, as it is in Lawson’s original story, through her isolation, as she is left in the bush with her children while her husband is supposed to be away droving. However, in Purcell’s play she is pregnant, about to give birth. Having no one else to rely on, she accepts Yadaka’s help. He temporarily acts as her midwife, and at this moment the two characters’ alliance presents an interesting race and gender dynamic on stage. Their fragile friendship is sealed when Yadaka offers to bury the newborn child who died at birth, encouraging the wife that it is the “proper thing to do” (9). In exchange, she helps him get rid of his iron collar (18). It could be argued that at this moment their relationship is still defined by economic terms because it is mutually beneficial. However, the role of Yadaka shifts when he becomes, in his own limited way, the family’s protector, shielding the wife from dangers, which, paradoxically, are not posed by external, natural forces as they largely are in Lawson’s story (e.g. a flood, a bushfire, a stray bull, a black snake), but exclusively by white male settlers: a swagman, a peddler, a trooper, and two stockmen – each of them escalating their violence towards Yadaka and the drover’s wife. This line of abusive white settler men is revealed to include even the drover himself, who is implied to have been mistreating his wife. While he seems, as in Lawson’s story, totally absent from the narrative, it turns out in the play that instead of being away droving, he is dead, killed by his wife in self-defence, his corpse lying under the woodpile. She is only pretending that he is droving to divert the attention of the passers-by from her vulnerable situation. Hence, the drover is strangely absent and present at the same time.

Besides partly filling the empty place left by the drover’s wife’s husband by doing physical work around the house, providing emotional support, and protecting the family when he can, Yadaka also becomes a mentor and a father figure to Danny, the drover’s wife’s oldest boy. Danny seems hungry for a male role model, and thus suppresses any prejudices he may have towards Yadaka, admiring his skills, strength, and knowledge. For example, Danny begs Yadaka to teach him how to throw spears, but Yadaka insists this skill only comes with certain cultural knowledge, such as a song, a dance, and knowing which spear is for what and how to use it. Thus, Yadaka imparts his knowledge of culture carefully and introduces Danny to the value of cultural differences. Additionally, Yadaka not only supervises Danny in the performance of everyday domestic tasks, but also teaches him about manhood. Danny has already been introduced to the normative heterosexual masculinity represented by his father, for whom manhood is equated to sexuality, as Danny reveals to Yadaka in a conversation – “Da reckons, ya ain’t a man until ya got hairs on ya balls” (Purcell 2016, 23) – and to having a pair of boots. But Yadaka opposes this model, responding “It’s not what you have on your feet, Danny, but how you carry ya’self, is what makes a decent man” (23). Thus, apart from mentoring Danny, Yadaka also offers Danny an alternative model of masculinity, telling him about his people’s “manhood ceremony” and what it involves (24). Aware of the untranslatability of certain cultural traditions, Yadaka adapts this ritual to Danny’s reality, suggesting that for the boy the ceremony could consist of Danny getting his brothers and sisters safely home from a neighbour’s farm. Thus, Yadaka is presented as a source of knowledge, maturity, and wisdom: he is fully initiated (11), he is the one who knows things. Unlike the settler characters in the play, he is positioned as firmly belonging to the land; he knows who his people are, and he knows his Country. This confidence stemming from knowledge and belonging is presented through small examples, such as in the contrast in the way that he and the wife formally introduce themselves by giving their names in order to seal their strategic partnership: while Yadaka introduces himself with his full tribal name, the wife is only able to position herself within the colonial, patriarchal framework for a female identity:

YADAKA: I’m Yadaka of the Guugu Yimithirr, adopted Ngambri Walgalu⁶. He offers his hand. She doesn’t shake it.,

DROVER’S WIFE: Mrs. Joe Johnson. (Purcell 2016, 12)

Most importantly, though, Yadaka knows the secret of Molly’s origin, a secret that he has the power to reveal (or not) to the drover’s wife, and, by extension, to the audience, bringing Indigeneity back to the discourse of the settler nation.

Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s (2011) notion of the public secret can serve as a useful theoretical framework here. In her article “White Closets, Jangling Nerves and the Biopolitics of the Public Secret”, she examines the socio-historical role of white settler men who, as she explains, “enforced segregation by day and pursued Aboriginal women by night” (57). Probyn-Rapsey discusses these interracial relationships in terms of “public secrecy” and “white closets”. Drawing on Michael Taussig’s concept of public secret, or “that which is generally known, but cannot be spoken”, she claims that it has significantly shaped “the interrelatedness of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal families in Australia” (58). In addition, referring to W.H. Stanner’s (1969) well-known description of the structural “indifference” of European settlers towards the Aboriginal fate, Probyn-Rapsey (2011) shows that the complex web of simultaneously perpetuating the knowledge of and not acknowledging the interrelatedness of settler and Aboriginal families has, in fact, been indirectly endorsed and cultivated by the authorities in the name of biological absorption and enhancement of whiteness as a structural power in establishing race relations in settler Australia (58). In Probyn-Rapsey’s line of argument, public secrecy is also related to denial in the sense that they are “important registers in which knowledge can be brought back into public discourse” (61). Thus, denial is “always partial” because “some information is always registered”, which results in the “paradox or doubleness – knowing and not-knowing” (Stanley Cohen (2001) quoted in Probyn-Rapsey 2011, 61).⁷ In the context of Australian history, denial, repression, and forgetting are powerful tropes that have defined the critical discourse on the settler–Indigenous relationship (Slater 2019, 8, 75). In his book Forgetting Aborigines, for example, Chris Healy (2008) explains that settler Australians have gone through repeated cycles of remembering and forgetting Indigenous people (which coincide with political cycles), in which moments when they even “forget their own forgetting” (203) alternate with “the will to remember” (204). As Probyn-Rapsey reminds us, “without public acknowledgment, [ … ] the knowledge of atrocity and brutality can reappear as a sublime haunting, shadowing, ghosts, the stuff of nightmares, both terrifying but also liberating fantasies” (2011, 69). Purcell’s endeavour, in this sense, can be thought of as an act of “public acknowledgement” and, indeed, of remembering.

The play reflects Probyn-Rapsey’s analysis of liaisons between white men and Aboriginal women when Yadaka exposes the entanglement of Black and white lives, embodied by the relationship between Molly’s white father and Black Mary, yet he stresses that it was a consensual, loving relationship that went against the norms of the day and expected outcomes. However, secrecy, whether imposed or voluntary, is embedded in the family’s history; the fact that Molly’s father never speaks of her mother taps into Stanner’s idea of the “great Australian silence” (1969, 25). Yet it is also made clear that the knowledge of Molly’s descent circulates in the public, no matter how subaltern, consciousness – after all, the character of Ginny May, who not only helps the drover’s wife deliver her babies, but is also later revealed by Yadaka to have helped deliver Molly herself and to have witnessed her mother’s death during childbirth, is the one who “keeps the story alive” (Purcell 2016, 38). The way that Probyn-Rapsey relates public secrecy and denial is also made visible in the play through Molly’s response to Yadaka’s revelation: her first reaction is to emphatically reject his version of the history, using the power of her white authority (including her gun) to silence him. At the same time, she is caught earlier reflecting on Ginny May’s help with sympathy and gratefulness: having her close while giving birth and having to bury her dead father was a “comfort” to her (28). While she publicly tries to downplay and deny Ginny May’s mourning of her father, saying “It’s not like she knew him”, and admitting being a little afraid of her, she also acknowledges that “there was also this beauty and comfort in the sound … [of Ginny May’s wailing]” (28). The dynamic between fear on the one hand and comfort and safety on the other foreshadows the later scene in which Molly sees the ghost or spiritual presence of either Ginny May or Black Mary (it is not clear which at that point), who brings her the two babies that she lost (36). Hence, even before Yadaka’s revelation of her origin there are many signs that Molly knows something is going on - she both knows and doesn’t know - and the confrontation with Yadaka forces her to remember. For example, the small acts of Molly’s gradual, subconscious remembering include the moment when she realizes that Molly is a pet name for Mary; that is, for “Black Mary. Whitest gin around” (50). In addition, Molly becomes aware that it is not only she who is beginning to remember but that the small settlement is also aware of her mixed ancestry, as Molly remembers casual remarks uttered by her neighbour: “Miss Shirley McGuinness once said, ‘Danny was quite brown … He might be a throwback?’ Throwback, didn’t know what that meant” (50). Thus, in this perspective it could be argued that Purcell’s rewriting of Lawson’s story also brings this public secret up to the national level, making it known that the history of Australia is “kin-fused”, to echo a term that Probyn-Rapsey coined in another article in which she makes a claim for recognizing the existing but suppressed history of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal intimate relations and family connections (see Probyn-Rapsey 2007). The ways in which the play resonates with notions of “kin-fused” and (il)legitimate connections and their implications are explored in the following section.

“Kin-fused” revenge and alter/Native belonging

Re-imagining the character of the drover’s wife is a key strategy in Purcell’s re-imagining of Lawson’s story. It transpires in the play in two major ways: first, Molly Johnson, who passes as a white woman, is revealed to have had an Aboriginal mother, Black Mary, which was kept secret from her. This modification to the original narrative has several consequences: first, it sparks the process of remembering and brings Indigeneity back in to where it had been written out: Molly’s family and the settler nation, as has been discussed above. Second, the idea of “kin-fused Reconciliation”, as developed and critiqued by Probyn-Rapsey, is subverted through the employment of settler violence in the play – violence which is imposed on the drover’s wife by the settler colonial patriarchal authority represented by various white male characters (including Molly’s husband, the drover) who present an imminent danger to the drover’s wife’s safety, and which ultimately generates another cycle of violence, precluding an easy redemption for a non-Indigenous audience.

Unlike the original story in which the drover’s wife remains unnamed, Purcell depicts Molly Johnson, on the one hand, as vulnerable (e.g. when she is about to deliver a child while having to deal with dangerous strangers) and helpless in the face of the settler colonial violence that she is not able to prevent, and, on the other hand, as daring, strong, and able to survive in harsh conditions. However, while Lawson created in his short story an archetypal figure in Australian literary production, one which has always contributed to securing settler identity, Purcell has her character do the opposite; that is, challenge the settler sense of belonging not only when the drover’s wife is revealed to be of Aboriginal descent, but also through the depiction of brutal violence committed on her. The significance of this twist is multifaceted: at first sight, the strategy of re-imagining the main character as having Indigenous blood could be read as an attempt to “indigenize” the cherished colonial tale, the settler family, the nation: although many rewritings have responded to Lawson’s “The Drover’s Wife” in unexpected, often provocative ways, the story’s construction of whiteness has largely remained unchallenged. Thus, the potential of Purcell’s play to intervene in the dominant stories of settler belonging stems from the history of suppressed dynamics of intimate cross-racial relationships in which “racism and family rub against each other, unsettling the White family and, by extension, the White Nation that legitimizes it” (Probyn-Rapsey 2007, n.p.).

In “Kin-fused Reconciliation: Bringing Them Home, Bringing Us Home”, Probyn-Rapsey (2007) introduces the term “kin-fused Reconciliation” – a liberal call, particularly in the early 2000s, to include Aboriginal kin in the “white” family to displace “a narrowly racist white view of family/nation and historical responsibility”. Her article provides a critique of such demands, analysing the limitations of the “nation as family” metaphor, particularly in the context of Australian colonialism in which family and kinship ties became the target of state-sanctioned biopolitical power:

The trope [of the nation as family] was not supposed to reflect “real” family networks but to naturalise a colonial hierarchy and supercede indigenous sovereignty. The “Imperial family of man” required the conditions of surrogacy: the break up of families of the colonized and the concentration of “orphaned” children within the colonizer’s family networks, both literally and figuratively. (Probyn-Rapsey 2007, n.p.)

Hence, the systematic assimilationist policies, implemented in Australia by the so-called Aboriginal Protection Boards, not only experimented with eugenics, embodied in the then popular phrase “breeding out the colour”, but they also were an attempt to “indigenize” the settler population and, by extension, “‘resolv[e]’ a problem of settler belonging keenly felt by those illegitimately in possession of colonized land” (Probyn-Rapsey 2007, n.p.). The “crisis” of settler belonging has become acute in both popular and academic discourses, particularly around the turn of the 21st century, as settler Australians were confronted with the impact and outcomes of decades of Indigenous activism, revisionist history, legal reforms, and various policies and programmes aimed at redressing social injustices plaguing Indigenous communities in Australia. This continuous and consistent public concern about Indigenous peoples created what Lisa Slater (2019) calls the “anxiety” of settler belonging (1–5) and led, among other things, to “a potent articulation of non-indigenous insecurity and alienation found [in] a renewed public voice” (Potter 2019, 2). Hence the desire, if not a fantasy, to “indigenize” and become “grounded” (Potter 2019, 5) remains one of the most pronounced tensions in settler belonging in Australia, represented in multiple literary texts, films, and artworks.

As explained above, Purcell’s play touches upon the theme of “indigenizing” the settler nation through re-imagining the drover’s wife as having Indigenous blood as well as through the trope of remembering, as Molly begins to gradually remember the suppressed stories of her mother, Black Mary. After Molly shoots a trooper who has come to arrest Yadaka and take her in for questioning, it dawns on both her and Yadaka that she may not get out of this predicament, not even by coming up with a desperate lie in which she would put all the blame on her “Black helper”. In a significant moment, Yadaka proposes that she should flee with him and, in effect, become a fugitive like him:

YADAKA: Come with me.She almost laughs.

DROVER’S WIFE: Become a black?

YADAKA: You are. And you know it.Silence.

What you saw tonight, was Black Mary, your ngamoor wawu, your mother, holdin’ ya children.

(Purcell 2016, 43–44)

The phrase to “become black” seduces the reader to interpret it as a metaphor attempting to indigenize – the character, the iconic story, the national history; but the silence that follows Yadaka’s invitation also suggests hesitation on the part of the settler (the drover’s wife) to imagine and accept this process. However, Yadaka insists, offering an alter/Native way of life to Molly and her children: he gives her directions to a cave where Ginny May’s people – her family now – are located and where Molly’s family would be welcome with “food, blankets, shelter, and in the spring … people. Your people” (2016, 44). What Yadaka implies here is safety and protection, which is by far more than what Molly’s “own” people can offer her. Yadaka assures her that “[t]here’s safety amongst family” (44), but by “family” he means her Aboriginal kin, until now completely unknown to her, rather than her settler compatriots. Yadaka’s is a proposal in which the “kin-fused”, interracial, or illegitimate connection is tolerated and accepted. This is in stark contrast to the brutal reality of both physical and mental violence imposed on the drover’s wife by the settler society represented in the space of the bush by the white swagmen, peddlers, troopers, stockmen, and, by implication, drovers.

Unlike Probyn-Rapsey’s critique of the integrative biopower of settler family networks, this endorsement of “kin-fused” relations, represented in the play by Yadaka’s proposal, has also been theorized by postcolonial critics, John Thieme among them. In his study of postcolonial rewritings, or con-texts, Thieme rejects the conventional parent–child metaphor that has often been applied to the rewritings of canonical texts because in his view it infantilizes the postcolonial cultural production, making it seem to be of a secondary, derivative nature. He argues instead that it is rather the problematic, messy, illegitimate parentage that has become a major trope in postcolonial con-texts, where genealogical transmissions are often delegitimized by multiple ancestral legacies (Thieme 2001, 8). Thus, Thieme argues that the relationship between pre-texts and con-texts is driven by the model of affiliative, rather than filiative, relationship in which postcolonial texts often embrace illegitimacy, choosing multiple parents or, on the other hand, orphaning themselves (13). This is seen in the play when Yadaka, after suggesting Molly run away with her children and join the Aboriginal group, proposes to take care of her children, particularly Danny, whom he has taken an interest in, and is keen to continue their friendship and Danny’s education, the Aboriginal way. He wants to take Danny “for his first kill with his spear” (Purcell 2016, 44) and even introduce him to “Men’s Business” (45), which could refer to Danny’s full initiation. So Yadaka is essentially proposing that the drover’s wife and her family become integrated in the Aboriginal kinship system and “become black”. This fits into the general model of Aboriginal extended families in which adults outside the nuclear family take in and raise children of both close and distant relations. Finally, it is the originator of this inclusive gesture that makes a difference and allows it to be valued positively: it is offered by an Aboriginal person, rather than being usurped and/or appropriated by settlers themselves; in other words, it is a generous invitation to share history, space, and kin, rather than a demand directed at Indigenous inhabitants by settlers themselves.

However, this alter/Native way of life is precluded when Yadaka’s fantasy of indigenizing Molly’s family is interrupted by the arrival of two stockmen who come to “investigate” what happened to their fellow drover, and it becomes clear that Yadaka’s redemptive resolution will not be possible. Though the play does not shy away from pointing to the violence committed by the wife herself (when she is exposed to have killed her abusive husband and also the trooper in self-defence), it is the very graphic, brutal violence committed on the drover’s wife and Yadaka that unsettles the audience. The play culminates in a cathartic moment when the stockmen brutally rape the drover’s wife and kill and hang Yadaka from a gum tree. In the scene preceding this violence, it is noteworthy how their behaviour towards Molly changes: while the earlier “visits” from uninvited white men were also disturbing, hostile, and threatening, they nevertheless still considered Molly a respectable white woman, the drover’s wife. However, after the family secret is out, and the rumours spread of Yadaka’s prolonged stay on the drover’s property and of Molly’s too benevolent relationship with this Black man, the two stockmen begin to treat the drover’s wife as not only the gendered but also the racialized Other: once she crosses the racial line in the public eye, she is suddenly no longer Mrs Joe Johnson but an “embarrassment to Joe [the drover]” and a “nigger-lovin’ harlot” (Purcell 2016, 48). Now they see a Black woman whose existence is beneath their recognition, her body to be used and disposed of. The well-documented mechanism of dehumanizing the Other, employed to have the capacity to commit atrocities on other human beings, is now applied to the drover’s wife, and the ease and swiftness with which this transition occurs plays into the disturbing effect that the closure of the play brings.

The play ends with a conversation between the drover’s wife, who survives the severe attack and comes around, and her son Danny, who returns from his mission to bring his siblings home. Danny has failed in this “manhood ceremony”, designed for him by Yadaka, because the other children were meanwhile “taken away” by the authorities after word got out that the drover’s wife is “with a murderin’ heathen savage” (Purcell 2016, 51–52). This reference to the Stolen Generations and the state-sanctioned policy through which Aboriginal children of mixed parentage were forcibly removed from their families throughout much of the 20th century is another example of the strategy that Purcell uses to write back to the whiteness of Lawson’s colonial tale, unsettling the settler belonging. Danny explains to his mother what he witnessed, trying to make sense of the changed behaviour of a female neighbour with whom Danny’s siblings were staying and who handed them over to authorities once the news of Yadaka’s presence reached the settlement: “Miss Shirley sayin’ stuff … ‘Her own kind, touch of the tar brush … quad … quadroon?’ What’s that, Ma?” (Purcell 2016, 51). Contemporary viewers understand the historical reference to the vocabulary of eugenics, of course, but it is the act of reusing the derogatory, offensive phrases that has the effect of challenging the non-Indigenous audience. Moreover, the neighbour’s remark once again attests to the knowledge of the family secret circulating in the community – knowing but not knowing.

The play’s ending is noteworthy for the way in which it deviates from and challenges the status of the canonical story as well as settler belonging by rejecting any kind of redemption or reconciliation. After the attack, the drover’s wife realizes that the difficult journey across the mountains to find Ginny May’s people in the cave that Yadaka described is her only alternative. In announcing the plan to Danny, she even repeats Yadaka’s exact words, which now serve as her only hope: “There’s a cave, supplies, and in the spring … people” (Purcell 2016, 56). The drover’s wife also seems reconciled to being part Aboriginal and so does Danny: when Molly wants him to wear his father’s boots, he rejects them, preferring to “walk like Yadaka” (54). Not only does the drover’s wife not protest, she also hands him Yadaka’s Killing Spear with the foreshadowing words: “Remember, Danny, Yadaka said the last part of ya manhood test was ya first kill” (55). This ominous remark is extended in the final scene:

DROVER’S WIFE: [low, urgent, emotional] Danny, please!

We’ll be fine. I promise.

With his spear in his hand, DANNY finally walks to his mother’s side. She places an arm around his shoulders, her faithful Martini Henry [a gun] by her side.

And when ya’re old enough, son …

I’ll introduce ya ta Robert Parsen and John McPharlen.

They step out to depart

Blackout. (56)

This final moment is significant for several reasons: first, it is an important deviation from Lawson’s original story, which also ends with a “promise”, this time pronounced by the drover’s wife’s son: “Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blast me if I do!” ([1892] 1980, 8). While Lawson’s ending works as a humorous and affectionate anecdote as well as an expression of the colonial vernacular, Purcell’s ending shifts the focus to the unfinished business of settler–Indigenous relationships, echoing Probyn-Rapsey’s statement that “[d]isputes over ‘legitimate’ family lines transform into disputes over legitimate views of Australian culture and history” (2007, n.p). Second, Purcell’s much more sinister ending implies a promise of future resistance and a hint that the violence will continue. This is nowhere near the notion of “kin-fused reconciliation”; instead, it is a case of “kin-fused” revenge. The drover’s wife’s use of the word introduce clearly has a menacing undertone, as she seeks to involve Danny in getting payback for what the two stockmen, whose names are, importantly, explicitly stated, did to her and her family – a payback that, like the wrongs, will transcend generations. Thus, it can be argued that the play uses the brutality of the violence committed by the settlers and the way it is represented on stage to indicate that there is no space for redemption or a feel-good ending for the settler audience. Indeed, the ending resonates with many Indigenous activists’ and intellectuals’ rejection of the formal process of reconciliation before their demands for full Indigenous sovereignty in all spheres of life and a full recognition of the violent dispossession of Aboriginal people that shaped Australian history is recognized and appropriately redressed. While there certainly is an important tradition of Australian narratives which do recognize the transformative potential in the reconciliatory work of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, Purcell’s play rather continues the tradition of politically engaged Indigenous writing, which keeps unsettling and problematizing the settler sense of belonging in Australia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) under Grant GA19-11234S.

Notes on contributors

Martina Horáková

Martina Horáková is assistant professor in the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. In her teaching and research, she focuses on contemporary Australian and Canadian literatures, particularly on Indigenous cultural production and theories of settler colonialism. She authored Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and Canada (2017) and co-authored Alternatives in Biography: Writing Lives in Diverse English-language Contexts (2011). She has also published book chapters in Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (2019), A Companion to Australian Aboriginal Literature (2013), Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature (2010), and articles in Life Writing and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. From 2016 to 2021 she was the general editor of JEASA, Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia.

Notes

1. Purcell has had a successful career in theatre and the film industry: in 1997 she co-wrote and acted in the semi-autobiographical play Box the Pony and in 2001 wrote and co-directed the documentary Black Chicks Talking, which was then turned into a book, art exhibition, and stage production. She has also acted in several critically acclaimed mainstream Australian films, such as Lantana, Jindabyne, and The Proposition. Her career attests to her multiple talents and interest in cross-genre projects for which she has received a number of awards.

2. The play was awarded several major literary and theatrical awards and prizes, including Australian Writer’s Guild (AWGIE) Awards (Major Award, Stage Award, and the David Williamson Prize, 2017); Helpmann Awards for Best Play and Best New Australian Work (2017); the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Best Drama and the Victorian Prize for Literature (2017); the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Book of the Year and the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting (2017); the Sydney Theatre Award for Best New Australian Work (2016); the Balnaves Foundation Indigenous Playwright’s Award (2014).

3. This article relies on the analysis of the play as the primary source of rewriting Lawson’s story, rather than integrating the spin-offs (the novel and the feature film) which came later.

4. The genre of drama of course demands much more complex theoretical-critical approaches. I am aware the article somewhat reduces the play’s performance and visual style at the expense of its textuality; it was not, however, in the scope of this analysis to include the large field of performance studies, particularly Indigenous performance studies in Australia, as it has been recently developed by such scholars as Helen Gilbert, Joanne Tompkins, and Maryrose Casey.

5. The image of an Aboriginal fugitive, most commonly on the run from the law because of allegedly killing a white woman, has been a popular trope in Australian literary and cinematic narratives, particularly those thematizing the frontier past. Here, the most direct allusion is to the film The Tracker (De Heer 2002), in which an Aboriginal man is falsely accused of a white woman’s murder and is chased by a search party. Other films featuring an Aboriginal fugitive include Beneath Clouds (Sen 2002) and The Sweet Country (Thornton 2017). The film Rabbit-proof Fence (Noyce 2002), which is based on Doris Pilkington Garimara’s critically acclaimed 1996 memoir Follow the Rabbit-proof Fence, has three Aboriginal girl fugitives on the run from the Moore River Native Settlement to which they were forcibly removed.

6. The Guugu Yimithirr, also known as Kokoimudji, is an Australian Aboriginal tribe of Far North Queensland. Ngambri and Walgalu are Aboriginal names for a location in the south-east of Australia, near the capital city of Canberra.

7. The notion of denial resonates particularly strongly in Australian politics and the popular imagination. It is not a coincidence that it took more than ten years from the publication of the notorious 1997 Bringing Them Home report, which recorded oral testimonies of Stolen Generations members, for Australian Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to formally apologize to the Stolen Generations. John Howard’s previous Liberal government had consistently and repeatedly denied such an apology to Indigenous people. Healy (2008) describes Rudd’s speech as a “historic event” that “brought into existence a new public truth built on the persistence of indigenous memory, the Bringing Them Home report and the work of thousands who campaigned in support of the stolen generations” (217).