“We got racism from both sides. The white people in the township knew we were Blak, then the Aboriginal people from Cherbourg resented us because we lived in town”
When Leah Purcell was a little girl in outback Queensland and was having trouble falling asleep at night, she would call out to her mother to read to her. The choices were scant. The youngest of seven children growing up with a single Indigenous mother and absent non-Indigenous father, Purcell and the family worked hard to make ends meet and books were in short supply. But there was one she never tired of: Henry Lawson’s short story, The Drover’s Wife. It didn’t matter that it was so well-loved it no longer had a cover, Purcell knew the story word for word and would always recite the last line: ‘Ma, I won’t never go a drovin.’ To her five-year-old mind, the drover’s wife was her mum, Florence Chambers, the centre of her universe.
Decades and a lifetime later, after nursing her beloved mother through alcoholism, cancer and ultimately death, Purcell watched on with pride and a little astonishment as her debut feature film had its
