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FIoNA MorrISoN

The Antiphonal Time of Violence in Leah Purcell’s The drover’s Wife

during the original 2016 production of The Drover’s Wife, her adap - tation for the stage of henry lawson’s famous short story, leah Purcell reports that her costume designer found a quotation from lawson that seemed the perfect summary of the shared drive powering their crea- tive work: “it is quite time that our children were taught a little more about their country for shame’s sake.” This opinion, sourced rather ironically from a nationalist piece lawson wrote for Republican in april 1888 called “a neglected history,” was pinned up and presided over both rehearsal and production, and later became the epigraph of the playtext in all its subsequent editions. Purcell already knew she had her grandmother’s blessing for the theatre she wanted to create, delivered in a dream during the early process of playwriting itself: “i asked her, am i doing all right? and she bowed to me. The ancestors are happy, you know?” (Purcell, SMH 2016). she also recognised the positive force of lawson’s statement: “a sign that henry’s going, ‘you go, girl’” (Purcell, The Guardian 2017). lawson’s 1888 statement and his short story of 1892 are both profoundly renovated by intertextual repurposing in an indigenous context and by an indigenous writer. Purcell up-ends lawson’s story with an economy and power that makes it seem retrospectively inevitable. at the centre of the nine- teenth-century australian classic about a stoic woman protecting hearth and home as she waits for her droving husband to return sits a negative reference to an indigenous labourer who stacked the woodpile hollow, and thereby paved the way for the invasion of the drover’s shanty by a snake. in engaging this shadowy figure in visceral and immediate action on stage, Purcell points our attention directly at the kinds of profound representational absences that have enabled and 174 souTherly supported our received versions of colonial experience. Purcell ex- plicitly re-imagines lawson’s settler experience at the frontier in a time of systemic and violent conflict, where the maligned aboriginal man emerges as a fully embodied hero bearing news of the drover’s wife’s own complex indigeneity. The dramatic space cleared by the absence of the faithful snake dog, alligator, is filled, with brutally tragic con - sequences, by yadaka, this charismatic and compelling cape york man, with adoptive ties to the people whose country the drover’s shanty occupies and invades. he spends much of the play working to help and protect the drover’s wife—putting himself persistently in the way of the brutally tragic end that awaits him. in this way, Purcell storms straight into the “great australian silence” (stanner, 22–25), to use stanner’s famous formu lation of australia’s widespread historical amnesia; a phrase now used to characterise extensive settler-invader elisions and negations of indi- genous experience, including massacre. Purcell breathes life into both peripheral and central characters, building a material and symbolic world for the violent action of her play: “i’ve activated all the charac- ters. in my version, i have brought them to life for the stage and reinvented the conversations and action that might have taken place” (Purcell, The Drover’s Wife).1 To this recasting of lawson’s now famous settle-invader mise en scene (dramatised in the context of her own family history and settler-invader accounts of the time), Purcell imports a.b. Paterson in the form of the setting in the alpine area of nsW, as well as a tip of the hat to the murderous plot twist that appears in Katherine Mansfield’s colonial short story of a similar vintage, “The Woman at the store.” in addition, Purcell deploys what Maurya Wickstrom has argued is theatre’s great capacity: “to invent or inaugurate particular types of time which allow us to be in history, as history, in a time of our own creation” (Wickstrom 1). The controlled but explosive force of Purcell’s intervention into time, space and narrative detonates at the heart of the canon of australian and antipodean nineteenth-century realism and settler- invader nationalism. When read through the lens of the ethical restitution of the peripheral figure of the aboriginal man, we see fiona Morrison 175 instead a context of unregulated sovereign power and bare survival at a time in which the indigenous peoples “moved through this land like a shadow” (31). This “shadow history” reorients the question of shame toward the lack of knowledge or understanding about the shattering experience of indigenous peoples in this history, rather than a generalised misunderstanding by settler-invader peoples of their pioneer past that one supposes vexed lawson. one of the ways in which this is achieved is through the brutally immediate dramatisation of the historical fact of violence against vulnerable bodies on the colonial frontier (indigenous, female, young). building out from this material immediacy is the allegorical and symbolic sense in which this particular experience was, in fact, general experience. There are, then, two kinds of shame at work here—the shame of pervasive settler- invader ignorance, and the shame emerging from the untold stories and silenced histories; of indigenous peoples operating “in the wake” of violence and trauma (sharpe 1). it is in the pressing political context of this settler-invader shame that this essay seeks to read the representations of violence in the playtext of The Drover’s Wife. shame does not easily survive properly detailed and ethical attention, and it is this attention that i would like to bring to this close reading of the violence in the play. of particular importance to this project are the indigenous commentators working on the vexed question of history and indigenous self-representation, which must negotiate first and foremost a radically different mode of being in relation to time. as nganyinytja, a Pitjantjatjara woman, wrote to diana James in 1988:

We have no books, our history was not written by people with pen and paper. it is in the land ... We learned from our grandmothers and grandfathers as they showed us these sacred sites, told us the stories, and and danced with us the Tjukurpa (the dreaming law). We remember it all; in our minds, our bodies, our feet as we dance the stories. We continually recreate the Tjukurpa. (James 33) 176 souTherly

Very broadly, then, indigenous conceptions of time offer not a succes - sion of distinct markers of time indexed to progression (past/present/ future or historical epochs delineated by colonial his tory), but a unity of times connected to a spiritual reality grounded in a being and knowing of place (Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place). This suggests an active and continuous time, both non-linear and pro foundly intergenera tional. as aileen Moreton-robinson’s work on decolonisa - tion and sovereignty indicates, the radical difference in notions of time and history is deeply consequential for aboriginal claims for sovereignty in the context of radical dispossession (Moreton-robinson, The White Possessive). alexis Wright offers a relevant and telling perspective on this matter of history in a 2006 interview about her novel, Carpentaria:

i did not want to write a historical novel even if australia appears to be the land of disappearing memory ... i have had to deal with history all of my life and have seen so much happen in the contemporary indigenous world because of history that all i wanted was to extract my total being from the colonising spider’s trap door. (Wright 90) in fact, Wright has never ceased tackling issues of indigenous history and time in her creative and critical production, and her latest work Tracker (2018)—a collaborative memoir—indicates this continuing commitment, as does Kim scott in his 2017 novel, Taboo. These kinds of work with memoir and the novel join ali cobby eckermann’s poetic labour in the long-form Ruby Moonlight (2012) to find ways to address the killing past. leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife showcases drama’s contribution to this ongoing work. even leah Purcell’s account of writing The Drover’s Wife is one of fateful unfinished business and timely eruption. drafting her new play had a purposeful velocity associated with something that had found its proper time and proper venue: “i wrote the first act in five days, the second act in two. it just poured out” (Purcell, Sydney Morning Herald, 2016). in the notes for the belvoir production, Purcell recounts that it was after a frustrating workshop in which she participated as a director fiona Morrison 177 that she concluded that it was clearly time to write again. her first port of call was her bookshelf: “i looked at my bookshelf and there it was: my little red tattered book of henry lawson’s short stories. The red cover had now fallen off its spine, thread fraying and my drawings inside as a five-year old fading” (vii). in all her interviews for the play, Purcell refers to this much-loved edition of lawson stories: “i’ve still got that book with all my scribble in it. Mum always used to say to me ‘don’t write on the words.’ so, all the drawings are on the blank pages and in the margins of this tattered little book” (Purcell, Sydney Morning Herald, 2016). once she had the book itself in her hand, “she was off.” her frustration had found release in a new creative certainty and the book seemed to operate like a talisman: “i didn’t even reread the story. i just decided to go with what i remembered” (Purcell, Sydney Morning Herald, 2016). Purcell recalls that she particularly loved “The drover’s Wife” story: “My mum used to read me ‘The drover’s Wife’ and i loved it” (Purcell, Guardian 2017). Purcell’s mother was the key performer of this text through repeated reading and recitation: “Poor thing, i’d make her recite it to me—it just drove her crazy” (Purcell, Guardian 2017). in 2017, when she won the book of the year at the nsW Premier’s awards and the Prize for literature at the Victorian Premier’s literary awards for the play-text, Purcell elaborated on this:

i’d go “mum tell me that story”; because i was a mongrel kid with sleeping and poor thing, she would be reciting it to me. and i’d get her to stop so i could have the last word where that little boy would go “Mother i won’t never go a drovin.” i would be prompting her as she was falling off to sleep. (Purcell, Sydney Morning Herald, 2017) in her practised response, Purcell adopts the position of the steadfast eldest boy who stays awake with his mother through the night as she guards her children against the threatening presence of a snake. The dramatic qualities of oral recitation, vernacular speech and prompted direction speak to her theatrical vocation, but her writerly vocation 178 souTherly and intertextual vision is also anticipated by copious writing and drawing in and through the canonical work. What is also evident in this account of creative origin is the importance of the beloved maternal figure, patiently repeating a favourite tale to an imaginative child. The call and response pattern, together with the interlinear writing, marginalia and drawing, indicate an intimate dialogue with lawson and a moving memorial to Purcell’s own steadfast mother. This offers a portrait that outlines childhood delight which then transforms seamlessly into the adult works of critique. Purcell’s play responds with transformational and decolonising authority to the ambivalent position any indigenous reader of lawson’s canonical work encounters. Purcell takes the gestural and negative presence of indigenous people and replaces it with a character based on her great-grandfather: “The man who stacked the wood the snake got in under—i made him the hero. That allowed me to put my great grandfather’s story in there too because it is amazing ... his journey is how my black man comes in this story. he leaves Melbourne, follows the mountains and comes up into the ranges” (Purcell, Sydney Morning Herald, 2016). as Purcell comments: “weaving my great grandfather’s story through the play has given it its aboriginality, so to speak, and i’ve embellished the story to give it more depth and drama for the stage” (vii). in earlier production notes she added: “i was also influenced by the history that was taken from my great grand- father’s personal papers and the recorded history that was documented by people of authority at this time” (Purcell, “Writer’s and director’s notes: The Drover’s Wife—belvoir st Theatre”). The hand of fate that propels tragic action in greek and Jacobean tragedy is replaced in Purcell’s play by the deadly hand of this history. brutality, violation, dehumanisation and piercingly conscious loss are all aspects of yadaka’s experience, and the Wife’s too, but survival is also finally emphasised. The wife’s signature endurance is signalled at the close of the play as she manages to survive and bear witness to the suffering and loss of yadaka and other indigenous presences in the play. her grief marks their historical materiality and subjectivity and contests absolutely and poetically more standard regimes of non-representation, fiona Morrison 179 un/survival and non-being. her articulation of grief for them is of tremendous ethical significance, given the unrecorded “intimacies of violence” in unsettled terrain of the colonial frontier (edmonds and nettlebeck, Intimacies of Violence). it is the capacity of the theatre to deliver a dynamic and particular body, and with this in mind, Purcell engages point blank the unpalat- able realities of the violated and suffering body, making the institution of colonial violence acutely material in the process. The extremity of the violence in The Drover’s Wife is not completely un familiar, though it is absolutely particular. although Purcell has said: “i think of this play as an australian western for the stage” (viii), and though “western” certainly contextualises the violence of the unregulated frontier, i want to argue for the importance of dramatic tragedy as a genre that frames the work of Purcell’s adaptation. There have been significant adapta - tions of tragedy by indigenous artists: The Shadow King (co-created by Tom. e. lewis and Michael Kantor, 2013) was an adaptation of lear put on by the Malthouse, and Wesley enoch’s adaptation of euripides’s Black Medea for belvoir appeared before this, in 2005. Warwick Thornton’s films Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017) also participate in this indigenous engagement with tragedy in very compelling ways. The genus of unflinching portrayal of tragic violence seen in The Drover’s Wife also appears in contemporary british and irish tragedies by women, including sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Marina carr’s By the Bog of Cats (1998). There are a variety of connections between these plays and Purcell’s theatrical adaptation of lawson’s short story—questions of revision, questions of gender and ethnicity, por - traits of radical dispossession and extreme transgression and, above all, the haunting presence of long and bitterly unequal wars. The affective link in all three plays relates to the texture of dramatic violence and the lingering sense-print of tragic and futile loss. in each of these plays, a moment of almost unnegotiable violation is presented on-stage, without demur or sentimentality. a sharpened and unafraid presentation of the physical texture of brutality shouts out to the correspondingly vacant historical record. for these women playwrights, 180 souTherly the negotiation is first with the “normative violence” of relative invisibility. This is complicated by both gender and indigeneity in Purcell’s play. The material experience of physical violence follows from this, and the radical vulnerability of certain subjects is constantly tested and dramatised at the level of the body. although the species of violence and the shape of catastrophic event in Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife partakes of elements we associate with tragedy, this only helps map the intensities of the play to a certain extent. The violence of the frontier wars that subtended colonial invasion in the nineteenth century culminates in the brutally tragic loss of the male heroic protagonist in Purcell’s play. standard versions of tragedy are then subverted and re-routed by the embodiment, decisions and movements of a surviving female heroic protagonist— the Wife—at the very end of the play. This subversion is engineered by what i will refer to as an antiphonal movement between the “time of the gun” (the time of colonial and sovereign violence) and an alternate time, or duration, of hospitality and recognition. The power of the “counter-time” of connection destabilises the standard notion that order arises from disorder at the end of the tragic play. indeed, the disordered world of the home as a scene of perpetual defence again assault continues on, albeit as a story of indigenous resistance, flight and survival. The survival of the isolated woman, though one trans - formed through knowledge of her true identity and community, ensures that yet further resistance to western tragic form emerges, this time from representations of female grief and mourning, which bears witness to both relationality and profound injury and forms the subversive coda of the play. in the western traditions of tragedy, the world of violence is untimely; hamlet comments late in act 1 that “time is out of joint” as an indexical sign of tragic disorder and disconnection. Purcell’s playtext liberally uses terms such as “beat” (a musical term) and “clock” (a vernacular term) as an instruction for the ways in which characters move through space and interact with one another. The playtext directs its various durations with a musical notation of “beat,” but time is also foregrounded in the mobilisation of “clock” as an fiona Morrison 181 instruction to wait for a moment to recognise, realise or notice. Though there is a great deal of discretion for the performer in inter- preting these durations, both stage instructions indicate delay—a moment of waiting, in otherwise tense forward-moving action. The tension between dilation and rushing progression is perhaps the most fundamental of the playtext, and these two different kinds of temporal effects indicate something of the two orders of lived experience at the frontier. The “time of the gun” offers an accelerated and adrenalised tem - porality associated with both verbal and physical violence. The foreshortened and urgent texture of violent time offers a sense of the “state of emergency” that defines the unregulated colonial frontier. The rhythms of this violent world and its violent action are dictated by the mobile white men who come and go from the drover’s shanty. This time of subjective violence is offset by the temporalities of storytelling, domestic work, ritual and vision. This is the time of simple but rich exchanges of material humanity by precarious subjects who inhabit the state of exception on the frontier. The dimension of these exchanges rather radically populates a scene of bare life with a textured open-ness to the other and to human connection. in this strand of temporality, the political body is open, exposed, and the time is characterised by dilation and delay. in the vision sequence, in parti- cular, an entirely different order of temporality is invoked, and this deepens and complicates our sense of the time of recognition in ways that resist neat categorisation of time or epistemology. These two orders of temporal experience offer a distinct pulse of expansion and contraction in the play overall, overseen by the humming time signa- ture of impending doom. The Wife and yadaka know at the outset how much time they really have; they are intensely conscious of time from the beginning. The time they dread—where the human and the inhuman collide—coalesces at the “catastrophe” of the play in scene 7 and its aftermath in scene 8, when the two rhythms or temporalities become tragically enmeshed. The scene of unfolding action over just two days is the single space in front of the drover’s shack: a “two room shanty” in “dense scrubland 182 souTherly of the alpine country of the snowy,” with “mountain behind ya, dense flora in front of ya” (3). in the foreground of the shanty there is a chopping block, which is both practical and ominous. There is a large snow gum out of sight, where a dead bullock decays and where the “smell of death is strong” (3). This external space in front of the home is a liminal zone held between the exterior and mobile life of walkabout or droving, and the interior and domestic space of food and sleep. Most of the action of the play, bar the lynching, takes place in front of the shanty where the inside/outside is not altogether distinct, and this generates larger allegorical implications about the impossibility of settlement, which is further disturbed by the continual reference to the fact that the ground is not level and wood cannot be effectively stacked. The notion that something is buried is repeated often. The central female figure patrols this semi-domestic terrain with a single shot rifle as a kind of prosthesis or phallic prop in order to protect the vulnerable bodies within her care. if the setting generates an intensity and unity for tragic action, so too does the optic of the gun. The Wife’s gun presides over the play, with its lesser partner, the axe, and its sophisticated and meaningful alternative, the spear, lying to the side or disappearing into the wood - grain of the shanty. given that the Wife is assaulted with predictable regularity when her husband returns home from droving, and that the circulating itinerant white men also seem to know exactly when she and the children are vulnerable (16), the Wife is a good shot—a “dead eye”— and her gun is always loaded. it isn’t until scene 7 that the Wife actually puts down her gun voluntarily while she is outside. The velocity of the opening in the middle of action is orchestrated through the central optic of the gun. as the lights “snap up” (1), we see a collared and wounded indigenous stranger stranded on the ground outside the shanty, with the Wife standing over him, her gun expertly aimed. rather than harm him, the Wife wants him immediately gone despite his terrible wound, knowing how he exposes her. This accelerated action is further intensified by the fact that the Wife is experiencing strong labour contractions; her specifically female body “clock” is ticking and her vulnerability increases apace. swagman Mcnealy manages to “time” fiona Morrison 183 his wresting of the gun from her during a contraction and threaten sexual assault even as she begins the long process of giving birth. yadaka joins her in a fundamental commit ment to protect family and children as he tries to save her from the swagman in this opening scene, and then help deliver her stillborn child, a daughter who has been killed in the struggle with the predatory white man. Time is under violent pressure from the beginning, it detonates with painful contractions and a violent struggle and culminates in a stillborn child. from scene 1, the Wife and yadaka already know how much danger they are in: they know that reprisal is inevitable and that it has a clock, because they know how long it will take Mcnealy to cross the mountain, limping (9). The time of the gun inevitably returns when Mr Merchant, the Peddler and next white invader and brutal racist, turns up in scene 6. his is not the physical threat of rape and murder, but of the verbal degradation and deadly bigotry. his dehumanising attacks thematise the Wife and yadaka as dogs. despite his superficial courtesy, he efficiently denigrates the Wife first: “i’ll put that down to that dumb bitch being a little too lenient with her Jacky. They all are, a damn disgrace” (35). Then, having called him “Jacky,” he likens yadaka to a dog: “like a mongrel dog, a good kick in the guts sits ‘em up” (36). The rising action of the play leads implacably from scene 6 to 7, when the penultimate invasion of a white man appears in the shape of spencer leslie, a relatively mild-mannered if skittish trooper who announces the form of colonial law of which the Wife and yadaka have been afraid since the beginning of the play. We learn that both yadaka and the Wife are responsible for their own acts of violence in self-defence, and these will now be answered with summary justice. after the Wife fatally shoots leslie/the law (40–42), the play moves inexorably to its catastrophic scene of the rape of the Wife and the lynching of yadaka by the two drovers, Parsen and McPharlen, who are not the retributive arm of the law, but self-appointed and brutal exterminators of indigenous men. an alternative duration to the accelerating tragic violence appears in scene 2 and lasts until the end of scene 5. This is an expansive and dilatory order of time that offers a decolonising challenge to the time 184 souTherly of the gun. in dramatising this “counter-time,” these scenes do not operate according to a time of emergency, but rather a time of human dignity, identity and growing recognition. it is not sentimental—the Wife does not lay down her gun for a moment—but the time is never- theless protected and cohesive. The lack of acceleration and violence instantiates an antiphonal sense of delay or dilation. yadaka does tarry; he is dilatory because of his knowledge of the Wife’s ancestry and their adoptive connection, and the time of delay is textured by rhythms of storytelling, domestic work, ritual and vision. There are ceremonial moments of initiation and the gift and the communion of grief-work. This antiphonal time culminates in a declaration of indigenous iden- tity that the Wife only fully accepts in the wake of the catastrophic events of scene 7. The time of recognition starts in scene 2 with exchange of stories, personal details and formal names—the Wife’s account of the gin who told her “don’t be afraid to cry hard for ya dead” (9) and yadaka’s story of his travels, of the circus and meeting his wife and adoption by her people (10 ff). The Wife’s magnificent account of her “bullock” story during the serene domestic moments on the porch in scene 4 (16 ff) continues the alternative pattern of exchanged time. although it is an account of a shooting, one in which the Wife declares that “time stopped” before she took her single successful shot, yadaka’s involve- ment through dance makes this a powerful dialogue between the protagonists. it is at the end of this scene that the Wife frees yadaka from his collar with her axe, an act based on trust and exchange (18). The stories they share of lost children offer the kinds of figurative language that lengthen and temporise the velocity of violence. yadaka, for example, talks of his premonition of danger for his wife and children: “this big wind picked up, i was huntin’ ... blew all around but never touchin’ me. i could see the duewangung in it as it [making a hand action of spinning up] ... straight up. no good.” This shared and sustained work of recognition thus rises in intensity and descriptive force in scene 6, before Merchant arrives in a misleading comic flurry of stage business related to his infected tooth (32) and then turns out to be yet another dangerous animal. fiona Morrison 185

The antiphonal time of hospitality and community expands during the burial and mourning of daisy Johnson, the Wife’s stillborn baby girl, in scene 3. The scene culminates a strong challenge to the time of the gun through the inclusion of the scottish ballad “black is the colour of my True love’s hair” (14–15) which returns in scene 4 as a reprise and more strikingly in scene 8 as the Wife mourns yadaka and the loss of the woman she now understands was her mother, the “whitest gin,” black Mary. The double meanings and ironies of this song proliferate both time and attention (“i love the ground wheron she stands… and still i hope / That the time will come / When you and i will be as one” 15), but the further antiphon to violent acceleration lies in its repetition across the play as well as the original sung performance that included the ritualistic gestures that accompany the burial of daisy: “She takes the baby, kisses forehead, does a traditional action of a clenched fist placed on the head and blows a breath into the clenched fist. Yadaka clocks this: he knows this action” (14). scene 5 produces a beauti - fully paced and gently inquisitive anticipation of the manhood rituals to which yadaka thinks danny should have access. ritual, repeated gestures also characterise the domestic work that interleaves and structures the dilatory middle of the play—chopping, sweeping and stacking wood. The formal moment of the gift is allied to these ritualistic temporalities, as is the rehearsal for the rites of initiation that yadaka responsibly envisions for danny, secretly knowing their kinship. yadaka makes a gift of a spear (23) and a cup of tea (28–29) and in turn the Wife makes a gift of clothes for his wood-chopping work (37) before he departs as a recipient of human hospitality, seemingly safe. The time of recognition and the time of the gun collide catas - trophically in scene 7, which opens with a complex experience of time when Molly Johnson experiences the presence of her mother, black Mary, in a vision. she is calling for yadaka, it seems, but her mother’s presence is indicated by an eerie sound and spiritual experience that thickens time and anticipates the final scene of recognition that emerges in this sequence: 186 souTherly

black. black? black! No response from him, maybe he’s gone. The shadows of the night grow long: the eeriness becomes stronger. She feels the presence of something. She cocks her rifle, aiming off into the darkness. black! That you? No response Then it’s like she sees something that totally captivates her. She slowly lowers her rifle, resting it on the chopping block. She stares; just the sounds of this eerie spiritual presence. She places her hands on her breasts. [Deeply moved] Wait, don’t go. Please. Wait! And whatever it was, is gone Silence as the moment slowly returns to the reality of the night (37–38) her instinct is to delay her mother, to plead with her to wait, with her rifle lowered and this plea to wait forms the apotheosis of the antiphon of delay. at this moment, yadaka, who is well into fateful overtime, returns again (as if called) dressed in clean clothes, wet and combed back hair, to discover the Wife in the aftermath of her vision of her mother, which is worked only through sound and seemingly unspeakable. only the body speaks about the losses in the female line of mother and daughter through its production of breast milk and gives the production perhaps its most radical instance of other of the historical record. yadaka knows he should leave, but he allows the Wife to wax his hair for him and insist on boots in the last moment of reciprocal exchange in this time of recognition. he knows the truth of her vision and the truth of her family: “Yadaka looks knowingly at her. He knows this story. he eventually just says ‘ya mother, she’s black’” (39) and “‘ngambri Walgalu, they’re your family’” (40). This news of her mother, though carefully held, detonates within the Wife, and her shocked outrage and belated ejection of yadaka is interrupted by the inevitable arrival of whitefella law. fiona Morrison 187

during these post-vision moments in scene 7, the Wife has time to confess her murder of her husband in self-defence and yadaka only has time to relay one final moment of recognition and protection in his description of the safe winter cave (46) before catastrophe truly and finally strikes. he has finally tarried too long, and the time of inhumanity has caught him. yadaka is beaten almost to death on stage. he is then tied up and must watch the page-long rape (52) of the unconscious Wife by young drover McPharlen before being dragged off-stage and lynched on the snow gum by drover Parsen. The time of the gun defines this utmost brutality of scene 7, where both heroic but vulnerable bodies are violated, dehumanised and annihilated. it is accelerated and adrenalised and unbearably long. although there is a way in which yadaka’s death seems to read as a ritual sacrifice, it seems that a more powerful way to think about the tragedy of yadaka is the loss or denial of what agamben so movingly calls his “potentiality”—the removal of his individual and specific right “to become.” This loss of potential, which is so appalling to the audience who has watched his individual charm and commitment, creates the ethical force of yadaka as a holding position, too, for all the indigenous men treated this way. raymond Williams’s view in Modern Tragedy never seemed so awfully compelling, too: that here was an experience of extremity, suffering and loss that could have been avoided. in scene 8, the suspended yadaka is grieved over by the Wife, who picks up the images of her alpine setting and the narrative threads of their brief communion and creates a threnody. she dwells on the snow gum from which he hangs suspended, almost dissociated with grief and able to speak only in image fragments of uncharac-teristic beauty:

i love the snow gum. it’s stout trunk strong ... beautiful coloured patterns appear when wet; a gift from god. sturdy tree’s limbs waiting to take the weight of winter ... the weight of you. oh, to see these snow guns after an autumn shower ... it’s this rare beauty that reminds me why i stay ...... a vision of beauty, no more 188 souTherly

all i’ll see now is you, pale face, neck broke ... just an inch more and Joe’s boot to the ground.

The refrain from her scottish song for her stillborn daughter then takes shape in response to her loss of yadaka and her final recognition of the truth about her mother. This is her father’s favourite song, and we realise its coded memorialisation of black Mary, who is only now named as a legacy of the time of recognition. The keening repetition of “black,” its marked proliferation in the scottish song, indicates the Wife’s recognition of her identity—and this is yadaka’s heroic legacy and the final gift of his “delay”:

[singing] black, black, black is the colour of my true love’s hair her face is something wondrous fair black Mary My da, no mention of my ma’s ... name ... [singing] The purest smile and the gentlest of hands ... sang it when he was drunk v ... black Mary. Whitest gin around [singing] and still i hope that the time will come When you and i will be as one. black, black, black, black She then beings to wail (53–54)

The example of black Mary’s sister, ginny May, the aunt and healer who looked out for the Wife during her most difficult times, is picked up beautifully here in this devastating scene of voluble grief, as startling and expansive as the Wife’s poetic fragments: “cried a river she did. Wailed like the howlin’ wind in a storm. she frightened me a little ... but here was also this beauty and comfort in the sound” (29–30). This grief marks the passage of two family members and makes them present fiona Morrison 189 again. To follow Judith butler’s work on the notion of the grievable subject, the Wife’s grief summons people as subjects, open to pain and injury, tied to others and to social norms. The time “to come” that the scottish folk song predicts is of reconciliation between lovers after migration or beyond life. it implies in scenes 3 and 8 of The Drover’s Wife the reunion of mother and daughter and commemorates the continued or truncated female line. as the play progresses into scene 9 with danny’s return, the Wife responds to his news of the “taken” children with towering deter - mination about the time “to come”: “gotta get my children back. That’s our family. That’s what family do” (59). her canonical position as the indefatigable protector of children continues, but with new meanings arising from her newly acquired reality of indigenous identity through her mother’s line. The turn to survival also honours yadaka’s commitment to his adoptive kin and to her (“i’m talkin’ about survivin’!” 45) and produces a vision of both long-form resis - tance and payback that rewrites the closing plot sequence of western tragedy as a witnessing of indigenous stamina. With reference to the justice and resistance to come, the Wife says to danny: “and when you’re old enough, son ... i’ll introduce you to robert Parsen and John McPharlen” (60). The antiphonal time of the gun and the time of recognition have collided in the violent counter point of the colonial institutions of violence and the dignified human subjects these subjects sought to control, with brutally tragic conse quences. in this tragedy of indigenous frontier experience the time “to come” is not the time where order emerges from disorder, but rather it is the fiery time for resistance and self-determining action that will become the survival and pride that marks leah Purcell’s transfor ma tional and harrowing inclusion of her great-grandfather’s story at the heart of the australian literary canon.

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1 leah Purcell. The Drover’s Wife. 2016. sydney: currency Press, 2017. Vii. all subsequent references to this text will be to this edition and included in the body of the essay in parentheses. 190 souTherly

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