When Leah Purcell was five years old, she liked nothing better than climbing into her mother's bed at night and listening to her recite Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife.
"I was a mongrel sleeper,” she says, tossing her curly blonde head and laughing. “So I'd say, ‘Mum, recite that story.' I know I was five years old because, in the margins of the book, I wrote, “Dora, Dick, Nip and Fluff,' the characters from my Grade One reader. I was practising my writing." And she still has that book today.
Leah was drawn to the strong, “sun-browned bush-woman" in Lawson's tale and her irrepressible son, the little man of the house, who was determined to protect his fatherless family from all comers. Leah's reimagining of The Drover's Wife, which she's written over and again as an award-winning play, a novel, and now a feature film, breathes especially vivid life into those two characters.
"I was that boy in the story," she tells The Weekly, sitting by a roaring fire in the comfy lounge of an old pub, after an afternoon roaming with a camera crew through a paddock of eucalypts and golden, waist-high native grass.
“My father wasn't around. I felt like I was there to protect my mother. I was making adult decisions by the time I was 10 years old ... When that boy comes out swingin' and fightin', that was me. And my mother was the drover's wife. She taught me how to split a log, she taught me how to stack the wood heap. She would say, “Don't stack it hollow because snakes will get in under there," just as they did in the Lawson classic.
この記事は The Australian Women's Weekly の May 2022 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The Australian Women's Weekly の May 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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