At 18, with a baby, Leah Purcell fled violence with her mother’s book. It became her life’s work

When her mother Florence died at the age of 60, actor Leah Purcell kept two of her prized possessions: a book of Henry Lawson short stories bound in red leather and a purse full of old family photos.Purcell packed these keepsakes into her yellow Datsun Sunny alongside her baby daughter, Amanda, and at 18 fled an abusive relationship and her home town of Murgon, in rural Queensland. In 1988, she had fallen pregnant at 17, turned 18 in August, given birth to her daughter in September and lost her mother in October. Bound for Brisbane, she was determined to set her life on a new course and pursue her dream of a career on stage.As a child who hated reading, it was an odd choice to keep a book she’d scribbled in the margins of, to the horror of Florence, an avid reader. But it contained The Drover’s Wife, a childhood favourite she’d beg her mother to read and knew so well she could recite the last line by heart.Decades later, that battered old book and those faded family photos would become the backbone of Purcell’s body of work as a playwright, actor, novelist, filmmaker and director. Now add librettist to that list – an opera adaptation of her award-winning play The Drover’s Wife opens at the Sydney Opera House next month following a critically acclaimed Queensland premiere in May.“I’d never in my wildest dreams have thought that when I left Murgon and took that little book, I’d ever turn it into a play, a film, a novel and now an opera,” says Purcell, a Goa, Gunggari and Wakka Wakka Murri woman, like her mother. “It was just something that me and my mum shared.”Lawson’s story, published in The Bulletin in 1892, is the tale of a woman left alone with her four children, and the drama that unfolds when a black snake enters their bush hut while her husband is droving.As a single mother of seven, Florence no doubt knew the loneliness of the drover’s wife portrayed by “the people’s poet” Lawson. Purcell’s father, Les Haack, was a white man, a boxing trainer and the town’s butcher, but Purcell was not allowed to acknowledge him as her dad. He had another family, a white family, who lived on the other side of town.From him, she learnt how to pack a punch. “I always had a good right hook,” she jokes about the sport her boxing father taught her and her brothers.St. Agni x Witchery shirt. Nique trousers. Dinosaur Designs earrings,