You can’t keep a good woman down

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 an 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