Tarantino meets Deadwood in this full-throttle drama of our colonial past, written by the indomitable Leah Purcell.
Henry Lawson’s story of the drover’s wife pits the stoic silhouette of a woman against the unforgiving Australian landscape, staring down a serpent—it’s our frontier myth captured in a few pages. In Leah’s new play the old story gets a very fresh rewrite. Once again the drover’s wife is confronted by a threat in her yard in Australia’s high country, but now it’s a man. He’s bleeding, he’s got secrets, and he’s black. She knows there’s a fugitive wanted for killing whites, and the district is thick with troopers, but something’s holding the drover’s wife back from turning this fella in…
A taut thriller of our pioneering past, The Drover’s Wife is full of fury, power and has a black sting to the tail, reaching from our nation’s infancy into our complicated present.
To read the introduction by Tony McAvoy click here.
For teaching resources on provided by the Copyright Agency’s Reading Australia initiative click here.
