Kind of an Australian TV play.
Plot
A woman in the Outback is isolated in a small hut with her four children. Her husband has been away droving
for six months and near sunset one day a snake disappears under the
house. The children are put to bed and the woman waits with her dog,
Alligator, for the snake to re-appear. Near dawn the snake emerges and
it is killed by the woman and dog. It shows the struggle of a lone woman
against nature.
Cast
*Clarissa Kaye as the wife
*Mark Healey as Tommy
*William McCallum as Jacky
*Alan Ashbolt as narrator
* With the participation and co operation of Peter Dutton and the people of the Hermidale district of NSW
Original story
Henry Lawson wrote the story. It was first published in 1892. A full copy of the text is here. It's a fabulous short story. Fantastic final line with the kid promising his tired mother he'd never go drovin'.
Other adaptations
It inspired a painting by Russell Drysdale in 1945.
There was a ballet in 1964 called The Ballad of the Drover's Wife. Frank Moorehouse wrote this 1975 piece here. Murray Bail did one the same year here. Barbara Jeferis did a reinterpretation in 1980. Nigel Lovell recorded an LP version in 1968.
It was adapted into a play by Leah Purcell which premiered in 2016. A review is here.
Production
Giancarlo Manara had been an assistant to Visconti and he was hired by ANC News. he made a documentary called Living on the Fringe which was well received and led to him being hired on this. He also made the documentary All the Best Mr D and was a producer at SBS.
Alan Ashbolt produced and provided the narration.
It was filmed at Hermidale near Nyngen.
Photography - Lex Alcock, Geoff Burton. Sound - Syd Butterworth. Art direction - Douglas Smith. Continuity - Kay Bowman. Production assistant - Robert Ellis. Music composed by Sven Libaek. Harmonica - Richard Brooks. Concertina - Kemp Fowler. Executive producer - Alan Ashbolt.
Bob Ellis worked on this!
Reception
The Australian Woman's Weekly called it "so evocative, so absorbing".
The Sydney Morning Herald called it a "disappointment". In a year review that critic called it one of the disappointments of the year.
The Sunday SMH called it a "standout". The same critic called it one of the best productions of the year.
The Age called it "pretentious". Another critic from that paper called it one of the best of the year.
Awards
It was the ABC's entry in the 1968 Golden Harp Festival.
It won two Awards at the 1968 AFIs - a Silver Award and an acting award for Clarissa Kaye.
It screened at MIFF in 1969.
Repeats
It was repeated in 1969, 1972 and 1975.
It's for sale at the ABC Library - click here.
Clarissa Kaye married James Mason in 1971.
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| AWW 18 sept 1968 p 15 |
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| Canberra Times 26 Aug 1968 p 15 |
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| Canberra Times 26 Aug 1968 17 |
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| ABC Report 1968/69 p 25-26 |
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| SMH 26 Aug 1968 |
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| SMH 29 Aug 1968 |
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| SMH 30 Aug 1968 p 6 |
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| SMH 4 Sept 1968 p 2 |
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| SMH 7 Sept 1968 p2 |
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| The Age 12 Nov 1968 p 4 |
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| SMH 17 Nov 1968 p 58 |
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| The Age 21 Nov 1968 p 30 |
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| The Age 21 Nov 1968 TV Guide |
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| The Age 22 Nov 1968 p 6 |
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| The Age 22 Nov 1968 |
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| The Age 22 Nov 1968 p 17 |
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| SMH 29 Dec 1968 p 67 |
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| SMH 30 Dec 1968p 6 |
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| The Age TV Guide 2 Jan 1969 p 2 |
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| SMH 20 Jan 1969 |
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| The Age 23 Jan 1969 |
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| The Age 23 Jan 1969 p 2 |
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| SMH 29 Jan 1969 p 4 |
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| The Age 12 June 1969 p 20 |
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| The Age 23 June 1969 p 3 |
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| The Age 23 oct 1969 p 33 |
Forgotten Australian TV Plays: The Drover’s Wife
by Stephen Vagg
June 28, 2021
Stephen Vagg’s series on forgotten Australian TV plays turns to one that perhaps is not a play, but is a notable achievement: a 1968 adaptation of Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife... the same short story that Leah Purcell has recently turned into a feature film (as well as a play and novel).
Henry Lawson has gone in and out of fashion with filmmakers over the years. Raymond Longford made movies based on Trooper Campbell and Taking His Chance in 1914; Beaumont Smith filmed Joe and While the Billy Boils in the 1920s; a segment of Three in One (1957) was based on The Union Buries Its Dead. Then in 1968, the ABC filmed Lawson’s short story The Drover’s Wife for television.
The Drover’s Wife was published in 1892. It’s a beautiful, if depressing, tale about a woman stuck looking after her four kids (one of them a baby) in an isolated rural shack while her husband goes droving to bring in cash; she has to deal with various problems (the weather, a snake, her kids), and reflects on her life. Lawson was a famous boozer and The Drover’s Wife certainly feels as if it was written by a depressive; the full text is here. It’s been adapted a number of times in many formats, including re-imaginings by other writers, a ballet, and Purcell’s works.
The 1968 television adaptation is an unconventional one, albeit very faithful to the text. It runs at roughly 42 minutes and contains very little dialogue, the soundtrack mostly consisting of narration (from Alan Ashbolt, who also produced). The titular character is played, superbly, by Clarissa Kaye, who would win an AFI for her performance; around this time Kaye also appeared opposite James Mason in Age of Consent (1969); the two shared a sex scene which went so well they were subsequently married in real life.
The Drover’s Wife was filmed on location in Hermidale in New South Wales (near Nyngen). It was shot entirely on film and looks stunning; Lex Alcock and Geoff Burton did the photography. “Robert Ellis” was production assistant (this was the Bob Ellis, who later referred to the production in a famed hatchet job on the ABC he did in 1971) and the director was Gian Carlo Manara, who had recently made the acclaimed documentary Living on the Fringe.
Reviews for the production were strikingly mixed, depending entirely on how they went with the dialogue-minimal-narration-heavy treatment – for instance, a daily TV critic for the Sydney Morning Herald called it one of the disappointments of the year, while the one for the Sunday Herald called it one of the best productions of the year. The good reviews were extremely good – it played at film festivals – and the ABC frequently repeated the program; it’s still available for sale now.
The Drover’s Wife is one of the best things the ABC did in the 1960s. I’m not sure that it constitutes a TV play (neither was the ABC, incidentally – they classified it as a ‘special project’ in their annual report) but I’m happy to pay it a little extra attention – it deserved it.
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