As the build team for the feature film The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson, ALIEN PROOF CONSTRUCTION owes its gratitude to director Leah Purcell, production designer Sam Hobbs, and Bunya Productions for the opportunity to work on this seminal work.
Much of the build followed traditional slab-hut construction techniques using hand saws and axes to fell and construct with bush timber, river stones hand-set in mortar, as well as modern chainsaw rough-edging to achieve the effects required for authenticity.
The crew lived and worked on-site in Adaminaby in the Snowy High Country and in bushland west of Sydney, and became intrinsically connected to this vital story, which centres on the powerful recognition of Molly’s cultural identity as a First Nations Australian, with the film having its own ‘Songline’, passing down the stories and cultural practices of ancient traditions.
“Leah Purcell’s Indigenous feminist reimagining of Henry Lawson’s classic is a bullet between the eyes of a whitewashed fable”
The Guardian
“[The film] follows on from [Purcell’s] award-winning 2016 Belvoir Street Theatre play and subsequent 2019 novel of the same name. In rewriting Lawson’s colonial classic, Purcell was inspired by her own lived experiences and ancestral history, and she has used the original story as a basis for her own clear-eyed reimagining. In this third – cinematic – incarnation, Purcell’s supreme acting takes centre stage, the weary flickers of her facial expressions clue us into the deep anguish of Molly’s past.”
Debbie Zhou, Guardian Australia