Henry Lawson's 1892 short story The Drover's Wife is a beloved classic from Australia's pioneering past. But like most colonial literature, it marginalizes the people of the First Nations, generally depicted as scoundrels or savages.
In her first narrative feature, Indigenous actor-filmmaker Leah Purcell reclaims the tale from an Aboriginal woman's perspective, a tripartite process she began with a play and novel based on the same source material.
An interrogation of Australia's history of racial violence that also takes on gender, identity and domestic abuse against a backdrop right out of an archetypal high country Western, the engrossing thriller is admirably ambitious but choppy, at times eluding the director's grasp.
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