You can't keep a good Woman down

At 14, Leah Purcell was in an abusive relationship, at 17 she was pregnant and at 18 she hit rock bottom. But the women in Leah's family sit tall in the saddle, and their example inspired her to push through to become an award-winning actor, director, writer, and like them, a woman of courage.

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

When Leah Purcell was five years old, she liked nothing better than climbing into her mother's bed at night and listening to her recite Henry Lawson's The Drover's Wife.

"I was a mongrel sleeper,” she says, tossing her curly blonde head and laughing. “So I'd say, ‘Mum, recite that story.' I know I was five years old because, in the margins of the book, I wrote, “Dora, Dick, Nip and Fluff,' the characters from my Grade One reader. I was practising my writing." And she still has that book today.

Leah was drawn to the strong, “sun-browned bush-woman" in Lawson's tale and her irrepressible son, the little man of the house, who was determined to protect his fatherless family from all comers. Leah's reimagining of The Drover's Wife, which she's written over and again as an award-winning play, a novel, and now a feature film, breathes especially vivid life into those two characters.

"I was that boy in the story," she tells The Weekly, sitting by a roaring fire in the comfy lounge of an old pub, after an afternoon roaming with a camera crew through a paddock of eucalypts and golden, waist-high native grass.

“My father wasn't around. I felt like I was there to protect my mother. I was making adult decisions by the time I was 10 years old ... When that boy comes out swingin' and fightin', that was me. And my mother was the drover's wife. She taught me how to split a log, she taught me how to stack the wood heap. She would say, “Don't stack it hollow because snakes will get in under there," just as they did in the Lawson classic.