When Leah Purcell inverted Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife into an iconoclastic Indigenous tale of gender, identity, racial violence and domestic abuse, she was consciously tackling one of the shibboleths of white Australian foundation literature.

Like much of his writing (and that of fellow bush bard AB “Banjo” Paterson), Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife is preoccupied with white pioneering travails to which Aboriginal people are incidental, with their inner lives left unchanneled – relegated to literary staffage, if you like, in the revered canon of the early bush/settler yarn.

Purcell, 49, a Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka Murri actor and writer from Murgon in rural Queensland, says: “I wanted to find a new way of telling an old story, one that appreciates who we are as Australians, and one that is looking at our Indigenous Australian historical experience … They [contemporaries] said it was ‘brave – cheeky – but good on you’. And I said, ‘We’ll see what happens. I don’t know the rules yet. And people have loved it.’”

Having written and starred in the acclaimed 2016 stage play – which won her $140,000 in literary prizes – and penned, directed and acted in the recently completed film inspired by Lawson’s 1892 short story (release date to be announced), Purcell’s novel about the isolated wife of the absent drover has just been published by Penguin Random House.

Purcell has always felt close to the Lawson story, despite its failure to portray the Indigenous frontier experience.

As a child, her Indigenous mother would read the short story to her, and the infant Purcell would interrupt with the famous declaration of the drover’s son: “Mother, I won’t never go drovin’ ...”

Capitalising on her research and the experiences of her family (the basis of the play and the screenplay), Purcell’s novel explores even further the legend of Molly Johnson: the wife of Lawson’s drover who is left alone on an isolated settlement while he is mustering.

True to Lawson, there’s a snake, a threatening bullock, a dog named Alligator – and the wife is handy with a shotgun. But the Aboriginal man in Purcell’s story, portrayed as a cheat in the original, here assumes the central role of Lawson’s allegorical snake. He initially presents as the malevolent murder suspect, but soon evolves into so much more.

The whereabouts of Purcell’s drover husband – a violent drunk, starkly at odds with the mythic pioneering Australian male – underpins the narrative tension. Purcell also affords complex dimension to the original Black Mary, “the whitest gin in all the land” – more faithful, it must be said, to the frontier’s harsh racial truth than any character Lawson wrote.

Purcell talks about the novel, her first, with the unassuming confidence of a writer willing to chance a hand at any new medium. Her creative energy is enviable and her passion unbridled, as she discusses acting on the Foxtel drama Wentworth while finishing both the novel and the screen adaptation.

She signed the book deal in 2018 but, she says, only started working on it earlier this year. “What I wanted to do was finish it before I started pre-production [for the Drover’s Wife film, in the Snowy Mountains].

“I was [acting on Wentworth] for about a week. So I’d have my computer and be constantly writing, and I’d say, ‘Tap on the window when you’re ready for my scene’.

“And what was exciting was, when I was writing the screenplay I’d go, ‘Oh I’ve got to remember to put that in the novel’ – and then when I was writing the novel I’d come across this backstory and I’d say, ‘Hang on a minute, that’s a bit of backstory for the character breakdown for the screenplay’ … then I went back and re-read Henry Lawson’s story, I went back to the play and said, ‘I can’t forget that line’. So, I borrowed and stole from each.”

The novel’s linear narrative offers a deeper exploration of relations between the local Indigenous people in the New South Wales alpine country – who she consulted extensively – and several generations of a white pioneering family.

The wounded Indigenous man, Yadaka – who stumbles onto the heavily pregnant Molly’s property where she is alone with her other children – is the harbinger of her identity, and party to a tender love that flourishes briefly, tragically, from their mutual loss.

The novel introduces the fancy, politically progressive Englishwoman, Louisa, and husband, Nate Clintoff, who migrate for his new job keeping peace in the frontier alpine town of Everton – an unruly Deadwood-style joint of racial tension, prostitution and drunkenness.

Purcell’s third-person narrative is energised throughout by evocative, superbly realised first-person internal monologues by key characters, including Louisa and Nate.

While Purcell says channelling Molly was second nature after the play, she found the prospect of writing Louisa daunting.

“I was a bit worried initially about how to give voice to Louisa ... you know, a white woman from London. I was a bit like, ‘What’s she got to say?’,” she says. “But once I got going I found it easier ... I just loved that process in terms of hearing what they all wanted to say and letting them go where they wanted to go.”

Another Indigenous writer, Bruce Pascoe, writes how Lawson “ignored Aboriginal people … one of the only times he mentioned them was to condemn them as cheats and scoundrels in The Drover’s Wife”.

They now have their voice thanks to Leah Purcell – on stage, in the novel and, soon, on screen.

• The Drover’s Wife by Leah Purcell is out now through Penguin Random House