The Drover's Wife: The Legend Of Molly Johnson (2022) - Movie Review

Something keeps telling me I shouldn’t be as down on Westerns as I have been in the past. The reason for its cultural and artistic appeal, even to this day, is out of a sense of moral ambiguity. Of a land untamed by man, unchained by law, where the only way to make things right is to right them for one’s self. Sure, its presence in American and even Australian folklore can feed into certain power fantasies that shouldn’t apply in societies that keep insisting that they are bound by rules of law… but as someone who tends to feel less safe, rather than more, whenever law enforcement officers are nearby, even I can understand the draw of that kind of story.

Of course, that runs into the problem of who has been holding the pen when writing those stories. It’s a period in time when men were damn-near encouraged to take the law into their own hands… but only the men, and even then, only some of them get the benefit of doubt in altercations with firearms. As I got into when I reviewed Sweet Country, there’s a thick vein of hypocrisy in our own country’s glorification of the image of the outlaw, as they were (and in many ways still are) willing to denigrate for embodying a different variety of that same image. This is the reason why Revisionist Westerns exist in the first place, and it’s why this particular one managed to grab my attention and keep it.

Here Out West (2022) - Movie Review

Even from an early age, prejudice along the lines of race or ethnic background never made much sense to me. Not because I’m any sort of profoundly enlightened individual or any such ponce like that; it’s more the result of what I understand to be the cultural makeup of where I was born and where I have spent the entirety of my life so far: Australia. It is, and I say with all the love I can muster for a geographical location, a mongrel nation. A former prison colony that has since become a hub for all manner of multicultural communities and existences, from the indigenous population that the ‘settlers’ fucked over, to our umbilical cord connection to Europe as a British colony, to our proximity to the rest of Asia. Our national identity (well, the parts of it that aren’t a result of our criminal ancestry) doesn’t make sense if not through the context of being the product of basically everywhere else on the planet, just filtered through the kind of laidback attitude that can take a word that is among the most visceral in the English language (cunt) and find a use for it in pretty much every single conversation.

And for as much as I understand how fraught that history of multiculturalism is, as we don’t have the best history when it comes to white Australians interacting with other cultures, that kind of ethnic melting pot is one of the reasons why, for all its faults, I still fucking love this country. And it’s one of the reasons why this particular film, an anthology co-produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, hits me right where I live. Almost literally, since the title and its setting are in Western Sydney, not that far from where I reside and work.