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

Abstract

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