First a Play, Now a Book, Soon a Film: Reimagining Henry Lawson’s Short Story ‘The Drover’s Wife’

First a Play, Now a Book, Soon a Film: Reimagining Henry Lawson’s Short Story ‘The Drover’s Wife’

In a recent interview, George Singleton uses a spatial analogy to describe the process of writing long- and short-form fiction: ‘writing a novel is a walk across a bridge, while a short story is a walk across a tightrope’. Singleton’s analogy captures the experiential differences of writing long and short prose, and alludes to the characteristics that distinguish the short story as an enduring form: narrative economy, unity of effect or impression, and the compression of both the story’s temporal setting and characters (Chan; Glazener).

The process of adaptation, however, is a more 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 the story and history itself. As Linda Hutcheon confirms, ‘Retelling a story in a new medium, and at a later time for a new audience, can lead to a new comprehension of both past and present’ (viii).

This paper investigates the ethics and politics of contemporary adaptations of Henry Lawson’s frontier narrative, ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (1892). Leah Purcell’s contemporary reimaginings, for example, transverse stage (2016), page (2019), and screen (forthcoming), and repurpose colonial tropes and stereotypes to rework what Lawson perceived as Australia’s ‘Outback hell’ (Lawson qtd. in Barnes 11). Moreover, by remediating Lawson’s iconic tale, and by infusing the story with her own personal history, Purcell moves beyond simply reimagining the story to foregrounding the corrective dimension of retelling. In other words, in recasting Lawson’s story, Purcell not only shifts the story to a different medium but illuminates and interrogates the past in order to destabilise one of Australia’s foundational narratives.