‘Women’s Business’: Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife and the Reclamation of Black Australian History

Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife reimagines an iconic short story by Henry Lawson in which a predatory snake enters the house of a woman and her children while her husband is away droving. In Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri woman Purcell’s version, the snake is totemic of Country in the indigenous sense and the intruder is an Aboriginal man whose story retools the biography of her own great-grandfather, a run-away circus performer. Twisting out of the grip of Lawson’s sentimental original, the play harnesses contemporary performance aesthetics in visceral, devastating violence, soaking the stage in every imaginable bodily fluid, from blood to amniotic waters. It is an excess that seems shockingly necessary to capture the trauma seeping out of the pores of contemporary Australian race relations.