When Leah Purcell was in grade seven, her English teacher asked the class to write a story. Submissions were due for the local rotary club’s writing competition; the theme was “neighbours”.
At the time, Purcell didn’t much see the point of school. She lived three hours inland from Brisbane with six siblings and a single mum, in the small country town of Murgon. “What Murgon’s famous for is Steve Renouf, if you follow the Rugby League – which you probably don’t,” she says, laughing. Her mother had moved there from the Indigenous settlement of Cherbourg, where her grandmother – a member of the stolen generations – had been shipped after authorities wrenched her from her family’s camp when she was just five years old.
“I just didn’t grasp why I had to be at school, you know? I just wanted to stay home with my mum,” Purcell says. “I was a C-average student in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town. There wasn’t a lot of hope for me.”
Sure enough, when she got her paper back from the teacher, it was covered in those dreaded red marks. “Commas, full stops, capital letters, spelling – there was red everywhere, and down the bottom it just said, ‘see me’,” she remembers.
“So I dragged myself up after school and I’m standing there with my lip hanging ... ‘Well, look at all the red on this!’, I said – and the teacher goes, ‘Nah, that’s not why I want to see you. I want to see you because this – this is a really good story. Would you like to enter it?’”
Mrs Rosemary Bishop offered to help with the spelling and grammar – and for the first time in seven years of schooling, Purcell showed up at school the next day at 8.30am, ready to work. “It turned me around.”
That kids’ writing competition was to be the first of many wins across Purcell’s career in the arts. The most recent was awarded in Sydney on Monday: Purcell – now 47, and an acclaimed playwright, director, musician and actor – won the $30,000 prize for playwriting at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and made history with the first play to ever win the $10,000 prize for book of the year.
In January, her play – a radical postcolonial re-imagining of Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife, which Purcell wrote and starred in – also took home the Victorian prize for literature which, at $100,000, is Australia’s richest literary prize. That’s $140,000 for a piece of work that’s so far only been performed in one run at Belvoir St theatre.
Anyone lucky enough to have had a teacher like Rosemary Bishop knows how life-changing it can be, and Purcell says she owes her “a little thank-you note”. (For the record, she’s not the only one: a quick Google pulls up the Yalari foundation, a non-profit organisation which offers a scholarship to Indigenous kids in Bishop’s name. Its founder, Waverley Stanley, was taught by the same teacher in the same grade in the same high school – over two decades later.)
“I used to fear the English language,” Purcell says. “Just to say that – ‘I’m a writer’ – I used to think, ‘You fake woman. How dare you even say that. You’re a C-average’ ... I wasn’t supposed to get to where I am today.”
Purcell’s retelling of The Drover’s Wife was one of the biggest talking points in Australian theatre last year. The Indigenous characters that are sidelined and negatively stereotyped in Lawson’s story are here placed front and centre; and the snake that menaces the woman at the heart of it is the “least of my worries” for Purcell’s title character – it’s the men, and white men in particular, who present the largest threat.
In their statement on Monday night, the panel of judges called her play “a declaration of war on Australia’s wilful historical amnesia”. For Purcell, whose work has always been politically charged and rooted in her identity as a Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri woman, it represented a logical next step.
“Being an Indigenous person, you’re seeing outsiders write about Indigenous [characters], they’re always the bad guy or they’re not doing too well,” she says. “I said, ‘Well, being an Indigenous writer, I need to turn that on its head.’”
The play is so layered in meaning and ideas that each review seemed to take something different from it, but for Purcell evolving meaning is part of the process. “If I was to sit down and think about the issues that I wanted to cover, mate, I’d never write a thing,” she says. “Especially at the stage where I am now as an Indigenous writer, I just tell our story through theatre. I’m not trying to change anyone’s perspective – it’s their business how they see it.”
The idea to reinterpret Lawson’s story came from Purcell’s bookshelf. Scanning it for inspiration, her eyes landed on a book which had belonged to her mother – a collection of Lawson’s short stories, furnished with the scrawl from a seven-year-old Purcell. “My mum used to read me the Drover’s Wife, and I loved it. Poor thing, I’d make her recite it to me – it just drove her crazy,” she laughs. Her mum, Florence Chambers, died in 1988; she was one of the many strong, influential women in Purcell’s life who are immortalised in her first major play, 1997’s Box The Pony.
“It was always going to be performance or sport for me, but performance always sort of came out on top,” Purcell says. She was raised around a family with a flair for entertainment; she talks of her mother as a captivating performer (“she’d dance with bottletops on her toes”), and an aunt and uncle who, when it came to a punchline, “would put Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg to shame”.
After the success of Box the Pony, and starring turns in Police Rescue and Fallen Angels, Purcell started picking up acting and directing credits across both the stage and screen, from Lantana to Love My Way to Cleverman, to a series of productions at Belvoir St and beyond. “When you’ve got work you’ve gotta grab it and you’ve gotta run hard,” she says.
Although the Drover’s Wife has not yet been seen outside of Belvoir, her partner in life and in business, Bain Stewart, says there are big plans ahead for the play: a national tour with international interest; a film production helmed by and starring Purcell; a book deal with Hachette for a historical novel; and they are in discussions for a TV series as well.
“I’m very conscious that I’ve taken a non-Indigenous story and flipped it – that I’ve taken someone else’s story,” Purcell says. But she feels, in a way, that she would have had Lawson’s permission.
“When we were in the rehearsal room, my costume designer put this quote she had found from Henry Lawson up on the door ... I hadn’t seen it before, but when she put it up I said, ‘You know what? That to me is a sign that Henry’s going, ‘You go girl!’.”
The quote was reprinted as an epigraph in the play’s program: “It is quite time that our children were taught a little more about their country for shame’s sake.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion