Leah Purcell has based her film on an outback tale by Henry Lawson, who’s often billed as Australia’s greatest short story writer. His is a simple story about an unnamed woman protecting her children from a deadly snake lurking somewhere under their ill-fitting floorboards. In her version, Purcell is almightily powerful as the woman to whom she’s now given a name, Molly Johnson, and a wider life and reality. She’s the vital centre of an anti-Western with a driving narrative, an abiding sense of physical threat, and huge landscapes with a lethal, growing colonial presence.
Molly’s husband, a sheep drover who’s been away for months, beats her – and she has the marks to show for it. But she’s an unyielding defender of herself and her kids. When anyone approaches their homestead she’s there with a rifle, and in an early scene shoots a stray bullock and feeds the whole family. It’s when she lets down her guard, and doesn’t see off a neck-shackled aboriginal fugitive, that her life, and that of her children, changes.
