Just So Stories

Penguin Australia

March 2026

• ISBN: 9781761341977
• RRP: $29.99

This one may have waited a while but it is all the more timely for having done so as I can share it to mark 2026 NAIDOC Week on this 50th anniversary of the event. This is particularly so because of this being a collaboration between two such incredibly talented First Nations creators. Multi-talented Leah Purcell, writer/actor/playwright/director/activist, alongside Dub Leffler, illustrator/writer/animator/mixed media artist, who is hands down one of the most gifted artists and all-round deadly man of my acquaintance.

Almost exactly 134 years ago Henry Lawson, the Voice of the Bush, published the dramatic short story The Drover’s Wife in which he outlined the incredible and terrible resilience, isolation and courage of the pioneer women of Australia. One of my greatest joys from the years when my much-loved Fairy Godmother and Favourite Aunt (FG&FA) Aunty Shirl was living about 40 kms out of Mudgee NSW was the close proximity to Lawson country, including The Loaded Dog pub just along the road. Having grown up with a Father Bear who adored the bush balladeers, especially Lawson and Banjo Paterson, reciting their poems was one of my regular party pieces.

Their work lives on but the wonderful Leah Purcell brought The Drover’s Wife to an entire new generation with her book and subsequent film, which innovated upon and fleshed out Lawson’s original concept providing Indigenous feminist truth-telling of the darker side of those times with not only the lot of the pioneer women but the blak history. White men really do have so much for which to answer.

Now this beautifully and sensitively created picture book brings yet another side of this history to a young audience – that of the children of those times.

Danny is the oldest in his family and at 12, he’s on the cusp of ‘manhood’ according to the bush conventions of the time and will be expected to go out droving like his father, gone for 3 months of the year. But this doesn’t sit well with the boy who already knows his father, drunk more often than not when he is at home, is not what he aspires to be. He wants to be a help to his mother with the younger children and their place.

When a stranger arrives, there is always consternation. When that stranger is an Aboriginal man, Danny is even more perturbed as he knows nothing of the Indigenous people who are being harried and violently dispossessed of their traditional lands. He is initially greatly afraid but as he comes to know Yadaka and learns from him, in the ways a good father would teach a son, Danny realises that the blackfellas are not all as they are reckoned and that a man can be both wise and a warrior, gentle and generous, strong and supportive and, most of all, a man can think for himself and choose his own path.

This tackles Lawson’s original story, which certainly gave us an accurate if incomplete snapshot of life for those isolated women in the bush, with a new twist as it takes that image far beyond to encompass the fuller picture of life for those wives and their children, as well as the tragedy of our First Nations peoples and reiterates the importance of connection to Country, Lore and kinship.

Leah’s writing is perceptive and insightful and, as always, Dub’s illustrations are evocative and convey so much of the emotion beyond the text. I would expect to see this one on forthcoming awards lists and it is very emphatically one to be included in your Australian history units with embedded cross-cultural perspectives. It is very easily a 5 🖤💛❤️🪃👣rating and one of my top picture books of the year thus far.

𓆈𝑾𝒊𝒓𝒂𝒅𝒋𝒖𝒓𝒊𓆉

I respectfully acknowledge that I work on stolen land of the Gubbi Gubbi people. I acknowledge that sovereignty was never  ceded and pay my respects to Elders past and present.

 Always was, always will be.