Sydney Film Festival 2021 - Film Review - The Drover's Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson

Leah Purcell The Drover's Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson

Well known indigenous actor, Leah Purcell wrote, directed and acted in this period Australian Western genre film set in 1893 in the alpine country of the Snowy Mountains. 

Purcell has melded a number of themes together - isolation and hardship in the Australian rural backcountry, domestic violence towards women, treatment of the Aboriginal community and the commitment of a mother to her children (which is central to the overall story).  The film is visually atmospheric and plays to the topography of the Australian landscape and its relationship to the lives of the characters. This is recognised in Aboriginal storytelling and Purcell's reimaging of the Henry Lawson classic tale 'The Drover's Wife'. Purcell includes elements of Lawson with the rough hewn house, the bevy of children, the general living conditions and a menacing bullock that arrives one day.

The plot line is centred on Molly Johnson (Leah Purcell) who lives on an isolated farm with her young children while her drover husband is away for months at a time herding sheep flocks. Molly struggles to care for her young family and on a chance encounter with the newly arrived Sergeant of the constabulary, Nate Clintoff (Sam Reid) and his wife, she sends most of her children to town to the care of a charitable woman.

All is not what it seems and when the Sergeant learns from a droving team that Molly 's husband has not been seen for some time, he begins to suspect that something else has happened. The situation is further complicated by an escaped Aboriginal man, Yadaka (Rob Collins) wanted for murder who arrives at Molly's farm as he journeys to a hideout.  

There are a few jarring elements in this film. The dialogue is a mix of modern expressions and the formal verbal language of the 19th Century; the local frontier town has characteristics more akin the American West than the Australian version of the same; Molly has a loaded rifle at the ready be it needed for beast or human and is perhaps too gun totting; and there are more than a few cliched scenes in the film. The Drover's Wife was a personal project for Leah Purcell and took some years to bring to completion.