Leah Purcell’s operatic retelling of Henry Lawson’s classic Australian bush tale opens with an invitation: a whispered incantation and singing in language, as Wiradjuri soprano Shauntai Abdul-Rahman calls us to listen, look, learn. At the centre of the stage an older woman (Jeanette Fabila) wearing ceremonial headdress sits cross legged. Clap sticks sound as dancers arrive on stage, coalescing in something like a corroboree. In the audience, we sense that we’re participants in something ceremonial and salutary.
It immediately signals the significance of this latest iteration of Purcell’s story, composed by George Palmer (Cloudstreet) for Opera Australia and Queensland Performing Arts Centre (where it premiered in May). Starting with her acclaimed 2016 stage play, and in subsequent novel and film versions, Purcell – a Goa Gunggari Wakka Wakka Murri woman from Queensland – has used Lawson’s short story about a “sun-browned bushwoman”, who spends a tense night guarding her four children against a snake, as a springboard for a postcolonial feminist western that tells ugly truths about colonial Australia’s treatment of women and first peoples.
