“Don’t you move, ya black bastard”
The play is based on one of the most famous works in Australian literature, a short story of the same title written by the legendary Henry Lawson. The play is more than a simple adaptation; it is a wholesale reimagining of the original work that transforms meaning through shifts in perception. The opening line of Lawson’s masterful tale gets directly to the point of the plot: “Snake! Mother, here’s a snake!” From that action-filled initiative, the narrative moves along a narrow narrative trajectory. The play, by contrast, opens things up considerably so that the snake becomes not inessential at all, but integrated into a more robust exploration of themes and concerns. To give a hint: the stage directions preceding this opening line describes the “black bastard” as “a badly injured Aboriginal man…lying on the ground…an iron collar around his neck.”
“Food is what I’ll be requirin’ and a little warmth of a comfortable bed.”
McNealy is characterized in the list of characters as a 60-year-old swagman, which is Aussie slang for a transient laborer. He arrives at the home of the drover’s wife as part of what might be termed a posse looking for the collared Aborigine on the grounds of having allegedly committed a series of horrific crimes. Crimes which he will later deny having committed. But it turns out that McNealy has perhaps come upon the drover’s wife for other reasons and one thing is clear: his intentions are not what he claims. This character does not appear in the original story. And the black man’s characterization and plot purpose has been significantly altered. The “warmth” of that bed means something more than he might be implying and the result is violence that alters the state of affairs between the drover’s wife and the escaped prisoner.
“Trust no-one with the stackin’ of my woodheap. Got a blackfella to do it once before, the bastard stacked it hollow and snake got in under! Made that night a living hell. It made its way inside. Had to put all my children up on the kitchen table out of harm’s way. All night I saw watchin’, waitin’ for that bastard snake to come out. Eventually it did. I went to watch it, but my dog got in the way, took the blow on his nose.”
And there is a complete summation of the original story told by Lawson. The play about the drover’s wife turns out not to be a literal adaptation of the events of the story at all. The reader familiar with Lawson’s tale will at this point realize they have been misled to a point and so the question becomes: to what end? If the story is not the one they know about the wife and the snake, then what is it now about? Why has the playwright decided to make her points writing to what amounts to a sequel rather than a remake?
