Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson,The

Leah Purcell’s film is quite an achievement. It is not only her debut as a feature film director, she also wrote the screenplay based on her 2016 award-winning stage play and 2019 novelization of Henry Lawson’s 1892 short story of the same name. She also both co-produced and plays the lead role.

According to Purcell’s version, the legend of Molly Johnson began in 1893 in the Snowy Mountains in Northern New South Wales. When we first meet her she is heavily pregnant and living in a rough bark hut with her four young children. Her husband, Joe, has been away for months on a sheep drive. It is a harsh life but she is well-used to it.  One day, a fugitive Aboriginal man, Yadaka (Rob Collins), stumbles onto Molly’s farm. Cautiously, she offers him shelter and gradually comes to trust him.

This précis covers the bulk and the best of Purcell’s film. On the one hand there is the raw appeal of the isolated High Country landscape, magnificently photographed by Mark Wareham. On the other there is the evolving relationship between Molly and Yakada. Purcell clearly has spent a lot of time with her character and gives a compelling performance as an independent and importantly, self-sufficient, woman. Collins provides empathetic support both as character and actor.

These aspects of the film should have been enough to engage us but somewhat like Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (201) Purcell use her raw material for her own purposes and in a surprisingly heavy-handed way. 

In Purcell’s re-telling Yakada is re-invented as a proud and innately wise Black man by whose agency Molly learns her hitherto unknown history as the daughter of an aboriginal father and a White woman. This news would have been staggering in the day but of course in our revisionist times it hardly raises an eyebrow. Indeed Purcell drew on her own genealogy for this aspect of the story

Even more tendentiously, Purcell introduces two additional characters, Louisa (Jessica De Gouw) and her husband, Sergeant Nate Clintoff (Sam Reid). Whilst in real life an improbably photogenic pair the idea that suffragette Louisa is in no time writing about domestic violence in the local rag and Nate rapidly comes under the spell of the local town’s racist patriarchalism is given as a descriptive fact but the dynamics of what must have been, to say the least, a heated conflict is never explored. This culminates in an execution whose staging may have worked in the theatre but is decidedly awkward on screen.

In part this re-imagining reflects a broader tendency of modern Australian film-makers to portray Australia’s sorry colonial history in terms of the Hollywood Western, a tendency seen also in Warwick Thornton’s 2017 film Sweet Country.

Needless to say this is a pity, tending to favour plot and action over inquiry and reflection. The Drover’s Wife achieves a lot but it could have achieved so much more with less.

 

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