Some might propose that the history of war, racism, colonialism and sexual violence is a story tethered to the plight of men rather than women. A system that has always tilted in favour of the patriarchal mindset is also a cold store for the dirty receipts detailing untold episodes of suffering and humiliation, and Leah Purcell’s passionate and often brutal Outback western, The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson, seeks to out those receipts for display.
Purcell writes, directs and stars as Johnson, a harried yet flinty Bushwoman who is left alone on the family farmstead to look after the kids while her husband has gone away on work. As a character, Purcell moulds Johnson as a kind of rough-hewn powder-keg of righteous anger, with a mysterious episode from her past causing her to experience random bouts of violent paranoia where she believes that everyone is out to massacre her brood.
Yet Johnson is someone who is, unlike the majority of the leering white male characters in the film, methodical and open to the difficult political realities of the age: she is able to see past the endemic bigotry which powers the actions of most. She befriends an indigenous wanderer named Yakada (Rob Collins), another social outcast who helps to raise her feisty young son Danny (Malachi Dower-Roberts) while her husband is away.
The film is a reworking of a short story by Henry Lawson, and is the third occasion that Purcell has grappled with this material, having already written a book and staged a play around it. It’s evident in the passion and precision with which the story threads are pulled together that the filmmaker is deeply invested in the material, not least the possibilities it affords to confront Australia’s questionable treatment of indigenous people, as well as its womenfolk.
Visually, the high contrast cinematography and arid terrains capture the inhospitality and desolation of the Outback, and there’s always a keen sense of Molly’s fear that anyone could pop over that horizon at any moment. It’s why she’s seldom seen without her rifle, a tool that eventually compounds her levels of stress and torment. The score, by Salliana Seven Campbell, is a tad on the generic side, and it does over-stress some of the film’s subtleties.
Occasionally, the film does lack ambiguity, and there are a number of characters who, just through the casting, make-up and dress, come across as one-dimensional extremes of “goodies” and “baddies”. Yet Molly herself, and the seemingly endless string of physical and psychological trials she endures (which includes giving birth to a stillborn child on the dirt patch in front of their house), makes for a satisfying emotional core. Despite her many hardships, we empathise with rather than pity Molly – she’s the type of practical, no-fuss homekeeper who would not stand for such mollycoddling.
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ANTICIPATION.
An Outback western focusing on a pioneering Bushwoman. 3
ENJOYMENT.
Leah Purcell brings the passion, but the drama is occasionally a little generic. 3
IN RETROSPECT.
Loses its steam in the final act, but lots to like here. 3
Directed by
Leah Purcell
Starring
Leah Purcell, Rob Collins, Sam Reid
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