The Drover's Wife

To introduce warmth and all-important ethical perspectives, Purcell switches between a third-person account of events and first-person reflections of the emotional and subjective impact of these events. These reflections become meatier as the book rolls on. The real meat of the novel is its characters. New characters trick, trip and undermine the racial anxieties that the colony has about Country and its peoples, while old characters are thoroughly re-created with their own surprises and tensions. These surprises don’t happen, as you might think, in the moments of rapidly escalating crises, but rather in the natural lulls of the plot when guards are down – ours and theirs. Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife offers the edge of one of this continent’s sharpest storytellers on one of its cutting colonial stories.

Alison Whittaker, The Saturday Paper

The set-up in Purcell’s prose leaves us craving action. Ultimately, we are rewarded. After the reveal, the book blisters at great speed to its well-executed ending. The extent to which Lawson’s story has fuelled Purcell’s work is evident in the high level of detail faithfully transferred from the original. Purcell has written herself and her mother into Molly Johnson’s story because they recognise themselves in it. This layered adaptation reminds me how retellings by those who can offer a different perspective can unsettle the status quo. More appropriations and contestations of ‘the classics’ by First Nations writers, please.

Ellen Van Neerven, Australian Book Review