When Leah Purcell was filming the acclaimed movie Jindabyne in 2006, she would go up into the Snowy Mountains on her days off.
One day, taking in the beauty of Mount Kosciuszko she suddenly yelled out: "I love this landscape, I'm coming back, I think I'm going to do a film, I think it's going to be The Drover's Wife, and I think I am going to be in it."
Her voice echoed around the mountain range. Cut to 2019, "and I am literally on the opposite mountain range and I'm singing out 'action' and 'cut' on my debut feature film".
She had come a long way from the small Queensland town of Murgon, adjacent to Cherbourg, which was once a government reserve where Aboriginal people were taken when they were forcibly removed from their country. A place of hardship where they were not allowed to speak language or practise culture.
When Leah left Murgon she had three bags, a baby on her hip, a tank full of petrol and nothing left to lose. She was escaping a violent relationship, grieving the death of her mother. She didn't know where she would sleep that night, or where her next meal would come from. She was 18 years old. "I just made my mind up that I was going to do it for myself and my daughter."
If she stayed, her only option would have been working in the local abattoir, her days a cycle of drinking and the domestic violence she had lived with since she was 14. "It was normal for us young girls to be in these violent relationships."
She loaded up her yellow Datsun Sunny, shoved it down the drive, push-started it, "and away I went."
Actor and friend Deborah Mailman remembers the young Leah as having "long dreadlocks" and being "really strong". "I just remember thinking how stunning she was and the sort of passion and energy that she had wanting to be an actor."
Even then she had confidence that was at odds with being beaten down as a teenager. She didn't have anything new until she was 13. Her clothes had come out of plastic bags relatives would leave on the verandah. "I think I got my confidence from having nothing to lose.
In early TV presenting jobs, Leah had to phone a friend at home to find out what some of the words meant. Finally, the woman on the autocue noticed she had trouble reading and helped her. Leah would go on to write books, plays and film scripts.
'My mother never had a voice'
Leah might have gotten out of Murgon, but she never left her people. A Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka woman, she is the storyteller, the holder and keeper of the stories. For 30 years now she has been telling the story of her family, of her mother and grandmother. "I'm a truth-teller. All I can share is the truth in my family's stories, because that's all I know."
Her grandmother Daisy was born on country at Mitchell but became part of the Stolen Generations when the children were herded into a cattle cart and taken away to Cherbourg. They think she was around five years old. She never saw her parents again.
Leah's mother, Florence, was part of what she calls the "lost generation". "They were punished if they spoke a language or spoke about culture," Leah says.
Leah has been researching her family history since she was 14. "I was at the crossroads of whether to be a good girl or a bad girl. And culture and my identity as a black fella pulled me back and set me on my life's path."
Her acclaimed late '90s one-woman show Box The Pony, a tour de force that played sell-out seasons at the Sydney Opera House, and went to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and the Barbican in London, was about the three generations: her grandmother, her mother and herself. "Those two women are vitally important to me, they have shaped my Dreaming of where I wanted to go and what I stood for," Leah says. "I am applying my Dreaming or my Songlines to their stories, but my grandmother's story was the foundation."
She would give them the voices they never had, shouting them as loudly as she could. "My mother never had a voice. My grandmother never had a voice."
Now, says Deborah Mailman, "she doesn't just open the door, she kicks it off its hinges in terms of creating opportunities."
The pain of being the 'secret family'
Leah was the youngest of Florence's seven children. Born when Florence was 42 it was just her and her mother. "I was her shoulder to cry on. I had a lot of responsibility as a child. My job was to protect her and look after her."
Her father was a white man, the local butcher and boxing trainer, who lived with his white wife and three children on the other side of town. "We were the secret family and it was all hush, hush, but I think, you know, small country town, everyone knew."
Even though they could "drive each other crazy", Leah adored her mother. "She was mighty, she was my mother, my father, my hero. She was four-foot-nothing but she was unreal. Everyone loved her. She was doing reconciliation before the word became fashionable."
When Leah was five and "a mongrel sleeper", Florence would recite Henry Lawson's book of short stories as a lullaby to put her to sleep. Their favourite was The Drover's Wife. "It's about a drover's wife sitting with her children in her shack waiting for a snake to leave the hut while her husband is away," says Leah.
It is a story that would never leave her. "I connected to that story because it was the first time I could use my imagination and see myself in a story," Leah says. "I saw myself as the little boy because I didn't have my father around. I was the protector of my mother. My mother was the drover's wife. We had a combustion stove. My mother had a wood heap at the back. She taught me to split the logs into chips. She taught me how to pack it and she would say, 'don't pack hollow otherwise a snake can get in' — just like in the story."
If Leah was a C-average student who "hated" school, it might have been because she was tired.
Out of loneliness and hardship, Florence had turned to the bottle. "She loved a man that she couldn't have. She was in a relationship where she couldn't express herself. She raised her seven children and two nephews, she looked after her own mother for 20 years."
Sometimes they would be early to the pub and the last ones to leave. "I'd want to get home. I was tired," Leah says. "Sometimes I'd knock my mother's drinks back. 'OK mum, you finished that drink. Let's go'."
Leah would get her mother home from the pub, get her to bed, sit with her until she was asleep and breathing properly, frightened she might stop breathing altogether. "She said to me, 'Without you, I'd be in the gutter'."
On Sundays, they would watch black-and-white movies together. Then Leah would recreate the movie in the wardrobe mirror in her bedroom. "I'd be singing with Liza Minnelli, Doris Day, Barbra Streisand. I'd sing with Whitney Houston, dance with Janet Jackson."
At barbecues, she would direct 20 cousins in a performance. She told Florence she wanted to be an actor. "My mum would say, 'Well, you're black, you're a woman, you're from the bush. You've got to be real here. You're either going to be a nurse or work at the meatworks.' I never let it kill my dream. I always had it in the back of my head that I was going to do this. I didn't know how; it was just a need."
But she knew she could never leave her mother. "I was born to look after her."
Leah was angry and bitter about her father's absence and her mother's sadness until she was an adult. When she was 32, she made her peace with her father. She sought him out and told him he had a lot of explaining to do. "You have to confront those issues where there's anger within you. He was very open to having those conversations and he told me his truth and I told him my truth. He told me he was very proud of me. In the end, we had a great relationship. It lifted so much off my shoulders."
Leah was only 18 when her mother died of bowel cancer at the age of 60. She spiralled into a vodka-fuelled depression.
"I had suicidal thoughts and I thought if I did that, all of this pain, all of this confusion, doesn't it just all go away?
"But I thought if I killed myself and my daughter survived, who's going to understand her? Who's going to love her like a mother? I didn't want that for her and this little voice said, 'didn't you want to be an actor?'"
Leah left Murgon for good to pursue her dreams. Now she knows that one of the greatest gifts her mother gave her when she passed away was setting her free.
Bain and Leah, a love story 'gift' from the ancestors
Leah started in community theatre in Brisbane in the early '90s. Her cousin set her up on a blind date with Bain Stewart and 30 years later they are still going strong.
Bain was a champion kickboxer who ran a martial arts gym. Like Leah, his mother was Aboriginal, his father white. "He knew I was interested in acting and he really encouraged me with my singing."
Early in their relationship, they had their first disagreement. "He said, 'Stop. You just want me to hit you.' And that just blew my mind and I went, 'Oh my God, I'm so sorry, you are so right'," Leah recalls.
"It actually made me check myself. Bruises heal, but it took me nearly 12 to 15 years to psychologically get that pattern out of my life. Bain is such a beautiful human being; he's stuck around and worked me through that. I truly believe he has been a gift from the ancestors because he has been such a support."
"I don't think you can talk about Leah, her life and her work, without acknowledging Bain," Deb Mailman says."They are a formidable team; they complement each other so beautifully."
Leah says she would dream up stuff, "and he would dream it up further and believed in it and would chase money. So then he got into the producing side of things."
Bain understood Leah. "I was listening to her dreams and aspirations, and then it all took off," he says. "And all of a sudden I had a tiger by the tail." She was in the ABC drama Police Rescue. She wrote and co-directed the documentary film Black Chicks Talking.
The awards and accolades would pile up when she appeared in high-profile films Lantana, Somersault, The Proposition and Jindabyne. All the time she was watching and learning: "I never sit in the green room. I'm an observer." She starred in one episode and directed another of Redfern Now, the first TV series written, acted, produced and directed by First Nations Australians. She directed across both series of Indigenous drama Cleverman.
"She's somebody that's untrained," Bain says. "She never went to NIDA or an AFTRS or a Conservatorium of Music, but she's directed scores of episodic TV, directed theatre on all the main stages in Australia. She's got publishing deals."
Leah flips pioneering tale on its head
Leah was about to semi-retire from acting to concentrate on her writing when she was offered one of the three leads in Wentworth. "And I said, 'Just let me talk to the actor in me'. And, you know, I was screaming with joy. I loved Wentworth because we women had kickass, bad-ass, boss-bitch moments."
In 2014, she was awarded the Balnaves Foundation grant to write a play about the story that had been percolating for 45 years, that was always at the back of her mind, "it just wouldn't leave me alone" – The Drover's Wife. "It would start a whole Drover's Wife journey for me. That was the first time really that I actually got money and I went, you mean I can actually just sit down and write?" She re-imagined the classic story through the prism of her own family history. Her ancestors had been drovers.
The play received standing ovations at Belvoir Street Theatre. Then Bain came home with a surprise – a book deal with Random House. The book would win the 2017 Victorian and NSW Premier's Literary Award.
"My DNA is within it. And I've sung up business on it. I sung up the play, I sung up the novel, I sung up the movie. And in cultural ways you have that thread of a Songline which connects you to country, to family, to culture," Leah says.
"I've taken Henry Lawson's story and applied it to my Songlines to allow me to go on many journeys with his story.
Her latest offering is the feature film The Drover's Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson. An outback western, it tells the story of Molly Johnson, a drover's wife who will do anything to protect her children – and does.
Leah wrote, directed and starred as Molly in the film, in an unflinching performance. "It's about a mother's love, it's about women, it's about family, survival, strength, determination," she says.
Through family history, she had found that her great grandfather was Daniel Johnson, a white stockman who lived in the Aboriginal camp, and who had tried to save her grandmother from being stolen but had been unable to reach her. She named the boy in the story after him. While she was writing she had her childhood copy of Henry Lawson's book on her desk.
"What she is doing is paying homage to her grandmother and her great grandmother and her mum, what they went through to allow her to have the life she has now," Bain says. "The sexism, the racism, the violence that was set upon them by the men of that time. She has taken this story and completely flipped it on its head."
Last June, Leah was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia for significant services to the performing arts, First Nations youth and culture, and to women. She went to the "castle in the city" – Sydney's Government House – to get the "little thingamajig" (as she coined the medallion).
She was being honoured by the very establishment that only two generations ago had treated her family as if they were barely human. "I think if I look too much into the history and what that building really represents and what it all means, you wouldn't get out of bed in the morning, would you?"
Bain told her she had been nominated by her Indigenous peers. "I thought that was pretty awesome."
"Aboriginal people have survived since time began," she says. "We lived through two Ice Ages and we're going to survive again. But we have just got to empower ourselves, empower each other.
"I believe that if you call Australia home, this ancient culture is yours as well. Slowly we're giving the power of the voice back to the individual, back to the mob, back to our people so that we can be the truth-tellers."
Watch Australian Story's The Songlines of Leah Purcell on iview and YouTube.
