Leah Purcell on reinventing The Drover's Wife three times: 'I borrowed and stole from each'

The actor, playwright and screenwriter’s first novel solidifies her take on Henry Lawson’s classic: first a play, now a book, soon a film

When Leah Purcell inverted Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife into an iconoclastic Indigenous tale of gender, identity, racial violence and domestic abuse, she was consciously tackling one of the shibboleths of white Australian foundation literature.

Like much of his writing (and that of fellow bush bard AB “Banjo” Paterson), Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife is preoccupied with white pioneering travails to which Aboriginal people are incidental, with their inner lives left unchanneled – relegated to literary staffage, if you like, in the revered canon of the early bush/settler yarn.

Related: The Drover's Wife review – plot twist leaves Australian classic spinning on its axis

Related: How Leah Purcell went from C-average student to $140,000 prize-winning playwright

Continue reading...