The story Leah Purcell never grew tired of
It’s been a remarkable few years for the stage and screen actor, writer, director and author, but the release of Purcell’s debut feature film is tinged with regret.
When Leah Purcell was a little girl in outback Queensland and was having trouble falling asleep at night, she would call out to her mother to read to her. The choices were scant. The youngest of seven children growing up with a single Indigenous mother and absent non-Indigenous father, Purcell and the family worked hard to make ends meet and books were in short supply.
But there was one she never tired of: Henry Lawson’s short story, The Drover’s Wife. It didn’t matter that it was so well-loved it no longer had a cover, Purcell knew the story word for word and would always recite the last line: ‘Ma, I won’t never go a drovin.’
To her five-year-old mind, the drover’s wife was her mum, Florence Chambers, the centre of her universe. Decades and a lifetime later, after nursing her beloved mother through alcoholism, cancer and ultimately death, Purcell watched on with pride and a little astonishment as her debut feature film The Drover’s Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson had its world premiere at last year’s prestigious South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas.
Her only regret was that Florence was no longer around to see the film.
“She was my mother, my father, my hero,” Purcell says today.
The debut of the film, which showed at the Sydney Film Festival last November and is released nationally this month, caps off a remarkable few years for the stage and screen actor, writer, director and author. She stars in the ABC iView comedy series All My Friends Are Racist and has created a cult following as Rita Connors in the hit TV series Wentworth.
Purcell’s ‘Drover’s Wife trilogy’ is now complete: her Helpmann and AWGIE Award-winning 2016 play The Drover’s Wife, a powerful, contemporary reimagining of Lawson’s 1892 short story, is set to tour beyond Sydney’s Belvoir; while her 2019 fictional novel The Drover’s Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson was published by Penguin Random House and takes readers deep into the psyche of the drover’s wife herself.
Purcell and her life and business partner Bain Stewart are now in discussions for a three-series television spin-off from the film, set in the present. Purcell, it would seem, is unstoppable. But you’d be wrong to think all the prizes and international film festivals sound like they belong to another life than that of the self-confessed “C-average student in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” country town of Murgon, Queensland.
Sharing a coffee with this affable, energetic woman in an inner-city Sydney cafe, you quickly understand the fierce pride and determination with which she imbues her retelling of the Lawson tale, seen through an Indigenous female lens that was crucially formed during her own childhood in that small rural town, a seminal time in Purcell’s life despite or perhaps because of the hardship and heartache.
Purcell grew up with her extended family of nieces, nephews and grandparents in the 1970s and 80s. It wasn’t an easy life. Her father upped sticks when she was two, creating a new life and family with his new non-Indigenous wife, while her mother worked as a maid, nursing Purcell’s grandmother through Parkinson’s, then her grandfather after her grandmother died.
“My mum was a drinker. I could see why she did it, I was there when she cried,” Purcell recalls. “I’d be the one to make sure she got home from the pub, put her to bed, feed my nan ’cos Mum was up having a session.”
One of only five Aboriginal families in Murgon, they copped abuse from the Aboriginals at the nearby Cherbourg mission where her mother had grown up.
“We got racism from both sides. The white people in the township knew we were Blak, then the Aboriginal people from Cherbourg resented us because we lived in town, we were the ‘accepted Coons’. I’ve been walking two worlds for a long time.”
She also grew up surrounded by love and a sense of hope for a united future, proud of her Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri heritage.
“Mum was all about reconciliation before the word became fashionable,” says Purcell, noting the house was always full of music, parties, singing and dancing with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.
“The education I got hearing their stories was priceless. I wouldn’t change anything because it’s made me the woman I am today.” Purcell was resigned to her fate when she found herself in an abusive relationship at 13, pregnant at 17 and losing her mother only a month after her daughter was born.
“I copied what Mum did and started drinking pretty bad,” she says. But another thing she’d inherited from Florence was her love of black-and-white films, which the pair would watch together. Doris Day, Liza Minnelli and later Barbra Streisand and Whitney Houston were favourites, and Purcell would recite the films line by line, belting out the tunes to a big mirror in the hall.
“That was my escape and my training ground, but one day I caught a reflection of myself and thought: ‘Who are you?’ And a little voice said to me: ‘Why not follow your dreams?’ I’d lost who I was and needed to get out of there, so I packed my bags, jumped in my Datsun Sunny and just kept going.”
Her fortunes turned when a preschool friend rang and invited her to flat with her in Brisbane, offering to babysit while Purcell attended a local acting course.
“What a gift,” muses Purcell today.
Her professional break came in 1993 when she landed the role of Marijuana Annie in the first Indigenous musical Bran Nue Dae for Black Swan State Theatre Company’s national tour. She had found her calling. A move to Sydney and a regular role on ABC TV’s Police Rescue followed soon after and by 1997 she had her first Australian Film Industry (now AACTA) award nomination for Best Actress in a TV Drama for Fallen Angels.
That same year she wrote her own story for the stage, Box the Pony, a title inspired by her boxing trainer father with whom she had reconciled later in his life (he died aged 95). The one-woman show debuted at Belvoir before touring the Sydney Opera House, the Edinburgh Festival and London’s Barbican Theatre, earning rave reviews and multiple literary awards for her manuscript. Satisfied, Purcell returned to acting and focused the next decade-and-a-half on a diverse range of roles on stage and screen, from director Ray Lawrence’s feature films Lantana and Jindabyne to Janet King, Redfern Now, Love My Way and multiple stage plays with Sydney and Queensland state theatre companies, Griffin and Malthouse Theatre.
The Drover’s Wife had found its way back into her life in 2014 when she was directing a writer’s workshop and felt the urge to write another play.
“I went home and looked in my cupboard where I collect books and stories I want to turn into something. The little red back cover was sticking out and I said: ‘It’s time!’ I wrote it in seven days and said to Bain: ‘Just have a read, I think it’s pretty crap, but it’s a start,’ and he said he thought it was something pretty special.”
“We got racism from both sides. The white people in the township knew we were Blak, then the Aboriginal people from Cherbourg resented us because we lived in town”
A few months later she received an email from Belvoir calling for applications for an unpublished manuscript for the Balnaves Award for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander writers.
“It was due at 5pm, at 4.59pm we pressed ‘send’ and the rest is history,” she beams.
Purcell’s confronting, provocative and deeply moving play opens with the drover’s nameless pregnant wife (played by Purcell) alone on her remote property and in full-blown labour, pointing a shotgun at an Aboriginal man, Yadaka, lying on the ground. Moments later she is confronted by a swagman who demands a meal, warm bed and anything else he fancies, while telling her there is a murderous Blak criminal at large, possibly Yadaka.
Where Lawson writes his drover’s wife battling snakes and wild bullocks, Purcell has her fighting off marauding white men. Yadaka and other Indigenous characters so superficially sketched in Lawson’s short story are here drawn with depth and understanding; while Purcell gave Lawson’s unnamed drover’s wife an identity and a name, Molly Johnson.
In The Drover’s Wife, Lawson refers to ‘Blak Mary, whitest gin in all the land’, so in a nod to her own Indigenous mother, Purcell took her lead from that line giving her titular character an Indigenous mother, Black Mary.
“I knew there was an audience for this sort of work and my big thing was how I could make the drover’s wife me. What if she had a Blak mum, which is my circumstance? So it’s honouring my mum.”
The season sold out in four days. It is the sort of play that nightly found people milling about afterwards, keen to ask questions and thank Purcell for providing an alternative narrative.
“They’d say: ‘So what happens next?’, and I’d tell them they’d have to see the film. But first I had to write the film,” Purcell says with a chuckle.
Shot on location in the stark beauty of the New South Wales Snowy Mountains and a property in Western Sydney, The Drover’s Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson seeks, like so much of Purcell’s own work, to recast our whitewashed view of Australia’s postcolonial history.
Describing it as “an Australian Western thriller”, Purcell’s film puts flesh on the bones of Lawson’s short story, setting the story in 1893 between Molly Johnson’s isolated property and the violent frontier town of Everton where new English lawmaker Nate Clintoff (The Newsreader’s Sam Reid) has moved with his wife Louisa (The Secrets She Keeps’s Jessica De Gouw) in an attempt to establish some order.
The film is informed by Purcell’s own family’s story including the character of Yadaka (The Wrong Girl’s Rob Collins), inspired by her great grandfather who was forced into a travelling circus then abandoned, destitute; and reflects her grandmother’s white father who had tried – and tragically failed – to prevent his ‘half-caste’ daughter being taken away.
“I wanted to honour his love, because the other white males [in my family] weren’t great. It was nice to find someone had genuinely loved their Blak woman and their Blak children and tried to do the right thing.”
It is the first Australian feature film with an Indigenous female writer, director and performer since Tracey Moffatt’s Bedevil in 1993, testament again of the broad depth of talent this extraordinary woman possesses and so generously shares.
“I don’t like to be called an educator; I just like to use my art to bring about understanding of Indigenous issues that normally have a political tag to them,” she says.
What gives Purcell hope is the enthusiasm with which audiences have responded.
“Australians want to hear Australian stories, they want Australian voices, the multicultural voice is important. First Nations stories are leading the fore and people are open to receiving them. It’s empowering for us as a race, and it’s empowering for us as artists. It’s important we understand the truth of our history, whether it’s good, bad or ugly. Then we can go forward and not make the same mistakes that were made in the past.”
The Drover’s Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson will be in cinemas on May 5.
This article appears in the May issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.
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