Rewriting Australia’s colonial mythologies: Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson (2021, Australia)

Australian cinema scholars, including Therese Davis and Graeme Turner, have identified a trend taking place since the early 2010s of ‘mainstreaming indigeneity’. Across film and television works, Indigenous Australian practitioners have produced work intended for a wide audience that represents Indigenous people and culture in positive ways as part of mainstream Australia. Paralleling this trend have been more-challenging films that tackle historical injustices faced by Indigenous Australians and their present-day implications. Leah Purcell is an Indigenous Australian performer, writer and director whose work in theatre, television and film participates in this process of ‘mainstreaming indigeneity’. Her 2021 film The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson adapts the classic 1892 Henry Lawson short story of the same name but expands the story to give voice to its Indigenous and female characters. This chapter applies adaptation and genre theory frameworks to argue that Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife takes the project of ‘mainstreaming indigeneity’ towards its logical endgame: redefining the Australian cultural mythologies that emerged from the nation’s colonial history to position voices previously marginalized on gender or ethnic lines at the centre of those mythologies. To achieve this, Purcell colonizes conventions and traditions of settler culture, including the Western genre and the legendary status of Lawson’s writing. By positioning her film as adding to rather than deconstructing these storytelling and cultural traditions, her adaptation of The Drover’s Wife contributes to important social change by reinforcing the central role of women and Indigenous Australians in the nation’s history and culture.

Keywords: adaptation ; Australian cinema ; colonial mythology ; genre ; Indigenous filmmaking