Revenge Lit and the Mummy-Western

In Australia, stupidity rises, totalitarianism descends. Between them, the judges of the prestigious premiers’ literary awards in Victoria and New South Wales gave prize money of $165,000 to honour a play script in which the central male Aboriginal character is so phoney he confuses European and Australian trees: “We start our walkabout just before the leaves start fallin’.”

The Drover’s Wife by Leah Purcell, a fifty-six-page play published by Currency Press, won the country’s richest literary award, the $100,000 Prize for Literature in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and also the Prize for Drama, $25,000. At the New South Wales Premier’s Awards it won Book of the Year, $10,000, and the Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting, $30,000. The script picked up three Awgie Awards from the Australian Writers’ Guild, and at the Helpmann Awards was named both Best Play and Best New Australian Work. National and international tours are being planned and Screen Australia has already provided development funding for a film to be written and directed by Purcell.

In 2014 Purcell, an actress, writer and director, had submitted the first fifteen pages of her play draft to the Balnaves Foundation Indigenous Playwright’s Award and received a $12,500 playwriting commission plus $7500 cash. The finished play, The Drover’s Wife, which she describes as an Australian western, was completed in seven days and presented in a four-week season at Sydney’s Belvoir in late 2016. The performance, with Purcell in the title role, was much praised.

Moving on from Henry Lawson’s familiar short story, Purcell places his woman in a similar but different setting, moving the location of the isolated shanty to the alpine region of New South Wales, then subjects her to a series of bloody and violent incidents linked by modern gender, race, historical and faux-historical concerns. “I just wanted to write a good story, but with the Black Lives Matter movement it’s so relevant it’s ridiculous,” said Purcell. It may have slipped her mind that she has her heroine murder two men—white men.

The New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards judges offered praise which is racist and sexist, irresponsible and Australiaphobic:

Leah Purcell’s retooling of Henry Lawson’s story represents a seismic shift in postcolonial Australian playwriting. Once again we meet a drover’s wife, alone with her children in a harsh frontier landscape. But the snakes here are white, male and merciless. By placing two Indigenous characters at the heart of this version, the original is demythologised and subverted before being brilliantly remythologised.

Brave, ruthless and utterly compelling from the first image, this epic tragedy is a passionate howl of pain and rage, while simultaneously announcing itself as a declaration of war on Australia’s wilful historical amnesia. Purcell ranges across form and style, from western to horror to comic flourishes. Though relentless in its annihilation of hope, The Drover’s Wife still allows the possibility of redemption.

Leah Purcell has made a bold and exciting contribution to Australian playwriting and, arguably, to Australia’s identity. She has repurposed colonial tropes and reinvented an existing form to insist that we consider a new exploration of culture. The unforgettable central character brims with emotional integrity and contradiction. Birth and death co-exist, as do love and brutality, despair and resilience. This is a work to challenge our sense of ourselves and of our place.

The judges accuse Australia of “wilful historical amnesia”. The play opens and Yadaka, the Aborigine with arboreal confusion, is shown wounded and wearing a cruel iron collar. He is being dramatically menaced by the Drover’s Wife holding a long military rifle. He explains that he has been arrested for an incident of rape and murder of which he was innocent: “They took me in. Collared me. The trooper said I would hang, no doubt about it.” When he asks the heavily pregnant woman for help she says, “I will do no such thing. The collar is government property. You are theirs.” Yadaka replies, “Never.”

Her water breaks and flows onto the stage. She reaches between her legs, “Oh, my dear Lord no, there’s a foot.” With Yadaka assisting, she goes offstage for the childbirth. He returns covered in her blood. The baby is born dead. Discussing her children, Yadaka says, “In my tribe you would be treated like a … queen.” Now she relents and removes his collar with the help of an axe and an unspecified tool—the matriarchy, wielding a prop-table axe, destroys the symbol of slavery.

The play is set in country New South Wales in 1893. Why would police officers place an iron collar on an arrested man? Most likely a murder suspect would have been handcuffed before being processed for trial. Iron collars went out of New South Wales history by the end of the convict period and may not have been so popular after Governor Darling’s unfortunate experiences with Sudds and Thompson in the 1820s. Very probably the writer has been influenced by well-known photos from northern Australia of Aboriginal prisoners in neck chains which left their arms and legs free for movement.

Yadaka escaped from custody by killing a trooper and a Native Policeman. He has some unfriendly words to say about the Native Police. In New South Wales the use of Native Police ended in the 1860s.

Towards the end of the play we are told that her white friends have turned against the Drover’s Wife. They have racially slurred her when told she has been seen with an Aboriginal man, and this association is used as a pretext by the authorities for removing her young children. Did none of the judges find this simply silly? There is a problem here which has nothing to do with “historical amnesia”.

The “redemption” the judges refer to has the Drover’s Wife, with rifle, and her fourteen-year-old son, with spear, heading off to reclaim those stolen children and then to take revenge on two very bad white men. This “redemption” is an attack by the present on their own dreamed-up nightmare of our colonial past. Purcell’s text is imprisoned within a specific Australian form of genre writing: Revenge Lit—an Australian literary genre, not previously identified.

Revenge Lit occurs across different literary forms and is identifiable in fiction and non-fiction, plays and film scripts, memoirs and family histories, poetry, journalism and history writing.

Revenge Lit is not confined by subject matter. Some works of Revenge Lit are directed against individuals: David Marr on Cardinal George Pell, Niki Savva on Tony Abbott, and almost anyone on Sir John Kerr. It is the dominant genre in texts which explore racial or gender themes in Australia—the animus it implies is generally against white males. It is also well represented in history writing, where the hostility is directed towards Australia. Here it includes not only any book by Henry Reynolds but also those in which authors thank Reynolds for his assistance. It is well represented among contributors to the “Honest History” (sic) website.

Black Revenge Lit is popular among writers who claim a mixed Aboriginal and European or Asian descent. One might imagine that these writers would be the very people whose own families represent a successful blending of cultures. Unfortunately, when dealing with Aboriginal Australia the current of Black Revenge Lit has developed into a fast-flowing river of prejudice. Representative authors who have profitably developed the genre include Sally Morgan, Anita Heiss, Larissa Behrendt and Stan Grant. It is a literary genre which excludes works seeking a genuine and hopeful reconciliation between Australians.

While diverse in its objectives, Revenge Lit is a tightly directed and destructive jet of intolerance deployed against a very soft target which, betrayed from within by our leftist education systems, never fights back—a certain idea of Australia as a tolerant modern democracy worthy of respect and affection.

Leah Purcell’s script is well crafted and dramatic theatre writing, but is ensnared in Black Revenge Lit conventions. Though both Yadaka and the Drover’s Wife have mixed European and Aboriginal heritage the play does not explore this intermingling of the races in a positive or optimistic way. When Yadaka makes the completely unsurprising revelation that the Drover’s Wife had an Aboriginal mother this only suggests flicking a change-of-life switch, as she ponders, “Become a black?” and Yadaka replies, “You are. And you know it.” At the age of forty the lady turns black.

The white men are bad, and unbelievable fantasies. In the act of raping the Drover’s Wife the villainous white perpetrator carries on a short conversation with his mate concerning the black man they are about to hang:

“How many will he make?”

“Thirty something. Thirty-eight.”

“That all?”

“I’m not getting paid.”

Comments by the judges of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards confuse this conformist Revenge Lit text with a work possessing intellectual and historical substance:

This re-imagining of a classic Australian short story explodes out of the blocks with a moment of stark brutality and never lets up. The homestead-bound battler of Henry Lawson’s famous short story is here expanded to a figure whose tragedy speaks to both the universal and the specific, while the layered and carefully calculated writing converses with multiple other texts and forms including the titular story, white Australia’s telling of colonisation, modes and genres including the Western, horror, comedy and thriller.

This is playwriting that acknowledges and exploits the conventions of theatrical drama, without being beholden to them. Relentless in its trajectory, neither characters nor audiences are let off the hook as the piece drives towards two heinous acts of violence, and then beyond them, into the beginnings of something other. The Drover’s Wife subverts, re-inspects and interrogates our histories through powerful storytelling.

The play is lively, violent and funny, but elitist theatre audiences are pandered to with the usual white-bad, black-good discussion that all the other Revenge Lit texts have made so familiar. Though they deny it, “audiences are let off the hook” by the play’s failure to deal truthfully with the less attractive elements of black culture and especially violence between Aborigines themselves and against white people. Wake me up when we have a play that presents the brutal murder and body mutilation of a settler family who believed they were living in harmony with local Aborigines.

The Drover’s Wife is a well-written performance piece for its author. Colonialism is not responsible for the racism, misogyny, brutality and blood on the stage: entertainment is. The play is a vehicle written by an actress with a starring role for herself in mind.

Towards the end of the mummy-western, before heading towards civilisation to enact a Sam Peckinpah bloody revenge on her pale enemies, the Wife speaks to her son: “Layers, Danny. Layer up, son, the snow’s comin’.” On they go into the sunset—she with that phallic rifle, Danny with a spear, seeking a furious revenge against white Australia. By now she has already killed her violent (naturally) husband, and a police trooper, and a stray bullock—probably the property of a neighbour. The symbolism of the fatal stage femme shooting, skinning and butchering a castrated bull did not seem to have been noticed by her almost-lover Yadaka. The murdered husband, incidentally, had been buried under the famous wood pile which sheltered Lawson’s black snake, his boots beside him: “Ya can’t bury a man without his boots.”

As they proceed Danny speaks a mangled quote from the original story: “Ma I won’t ever go a-drovin’.” Henry Lawson, who deserved those lit­erary prizes far more than our moderns, used his “dirty-legged boy” to bring his humane tale to an end with an understanding acceptance that demeaned neither man, nor woman, nor country:

“Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blast me if I do!”

And she hugs him to her worn-out breast and kisses him; and they sit thus together while the sickly daylight breaks over the bush.