The Antiphonal Time of Violence in Leah Purcell's The

souTherly 173 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 indigenous 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 characters. 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.

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