From Stage to Page to Screen: The traumatic returns of Leah Purcell's The Drover's Wife

The process of adaptation is a complex project of reconfiguration: one that is not only governed by ethical issues and aesthetic tensions but by the social, cultural, and political issues that arise in the calibration of old stories for new times, new audiences, and new medias. Since the past itself can either be contested or conserved, rewritten or restated, the act of retelling always calls into question the relationship between story and history. This article investigates the ethics and politics of Leah Purcells multiple contemporary adaptations of Henry Lawson's frontier narrative, 'The Drover's Wife' (1892). Purcell's contemporary reimaginings traverse stage (2016), page (2019), and screen (2021), and repurpose colonial tropes and stereotypes to rework Lawson's 'Outback hell'. By remediating Lawson's iconic tale, and infusing the story with her own personal history, Purcell moves beyond simply reimagining the story to foregrounding the corrective dimension of retelling, such that Australia's traumatic history must be claimed by us in the present. Purcell's multiple adaptations, then, not only shift the story to different mediums, but illuminate and interrogate the past in order to destabilise Australia's foundational narrative.