Gunpowder and gardens: reading women in The Proposition

Abstract

The John Hillcoat-directed, Nick Cave-penned film, The Proposition (2005), is most instantly recognizable as one recent reinterpretation of ‘the western’ cinematic genre, which makes the focus of this article on its representation of the garden and female corporeality unlikely. Yet, The Proposition is not a stock transferral of ‘the western’ to contemporary imaginings of late nineteenth-century colonial Queensland, and an attentiveness to the peripheral interest of The Proposition in the garden and female bodies, rather than the climactic show-down in the main street (which never occurs in Hillcoat's film), raises tangential but telling issues about borders and migration in a settler context that are perhaps not the anticipated subject of a film that ostensibly turns around its eponymous proposal: the murder of one outlaw brother by another to save the life of a third male sibling.