'Miss Hester Harper, middle-aged and eccentric, brings Katherine into her emotionally impoverished life. Together they sew, cook gourmet dishes for two, run the farm, make music and throw dirty dishes down the well. One night, driving along the deserted track that leads to the farm, they run into a mysterious creature. They heave the body from the roo bar and dump it into the farm's deep well. But the voice of the injured intruder will not be stilled and, most disturbing of all, the closer Katherine is drawn to the edge of the well, the farther away she gets from Hester.' (From the publisher's website.)
The Well
( dir. Samantha Lang
)
Australia
:
Southern Star Xanadu
,
1997
Z817969
1997
single work
film/TV
fantasy
(taught in 3 units)
Katherine works on an isolated farm run by Hester and Hester's father Francis. Unhappy because of her heavy workload, Katherine wants to leave. Hester doesn't want her to go, because she is attracted to her younger friend. She manages to convince Katherine to stay by promising to give her less work in the future. When old Francis dies, Hester sells the farm for cash, and she and Katherine move to a small cottage on the farm's edge, from where they plan a trip to Europe. A tragic accident and the theft of their money changes their plans.
'On a whim, middle-aged Hester brings the orphaned, adolescent Katherine into her home – it’s the start of a powerful friendship for both women. But when a sudden tragedy interrupts their seemingly idyllic outback life, it threatens to twist their unshakable bond to breaking point. A haunting thriller in the best traditions of Australian Gothic, The Well is a taut work of gnawing suspense as these two women navigate the emotional and psychological terrains of desire, memory and social isolation.'
Source: Melbourne Theatre Company.
Writing Disability in Australia:
See C.A. Cranston's dissertation 'Deformity as Device in the Twentieth-century Australian Novel'.
'The Gothic lends itself to critical examinations of disabled embodiment, yet this genre has ‘hitherto been largely ignored’ by disability studies scholars (Gregory 291). This essay redresses this omission by exploring disability in three Australian Gothic novels: Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1986), Sarah Kanake's Sing Fox to Me (2016), and Kate Grenville's Lilian’s Story (1985). On initial glance, The Well and Lilian’s Story conform to the use of disability in the Gothic as a metaphor for social and psychological deviance. However, closer inspection of these novels and Sing Fox to Me demonstrates their resistance to the Gothic’s typical use of disability in phobic ways. Hester’s disability in The Well enables her to transcend the gender prescriptions of her patriarchal Australian community, even if it is initially constructed as a physiological sign of her disturbing possessiveness over Katherine. Against the ‘dramatic and unforgiving natural settings’ of the Tasmanian Gothic (Bullock 72), Sing Fox to Me interweaves Samson’s experience of Down syndrome with perennial themes of the genre including familial haunting and the intersection of past and present. Similar to The Well, Lilian’s Story shows the politically transformative nature of disabled embodiment, wherein the titular character’s fatness and ‘madness’ allow her to achieve self-realisation while defying the gender norms of her time. Ultimately, the three novels suggest that the use of disabled characters in some contemporary Australian Gothic narratives is clearing space for less-stereotypical portrayals of corporeal and psychological variation in this genre.' (Publication abstract)
