The Drowner is set in the gold-crazed mining boom of the fledgling Swan River colony of a century ago. Then, the greatest obstacle in the scramble for riches was lack of water.
Fast forward to today, and Western Australia is experiencing a resources boom to rival the 1890’s -- and in a drought-stricken environment. Water has never been more
important.
Robert Drewe’s multi-award winning novel mingles history, myth, adventure, romance
and technology with a modern cinematic and poetic imagination. Using the remarkable story of the visionary leader JOHN FORREST and the engineering genius C
Y O’CONNOR, this tale chronicles one of history’s most remarkable engineering feats – the pushing of water uphill for a vast distance. O’Connor’s extraordinary challenge was to build a pipeline to pump water from the coast to the arid goldfields.
Forrest confidently raised 3 million pounds from London to underwrite the project – a
staggering $27 billion in today’s money.
The focus of the story is a young engineer WILL DANCE, who arrives from England to assist O’Connor in his ambitious quest. Will’s father is a Drowner, famous in the Wiltshire Downs for creating and guiding waterways and saving farmer’s crops. Will arrives in Australia with the breathtakingly beautiful actress ANGELICA, the daughter of renowned thespian HAMILTON LLOYD.
The goldfields of the fledgling colony of Western Australia’s are a melting pot of humanity attracted by the incredible allure of gold and the chance to escape previous lives. We meet INEZ GOSPER, a former Victorian socialite now nursing the typhoid-ravaged prospectors; DR JEAN-PIERRE MALEBRANCHE, the bordello-loving physician determined to uncover the cause of typhoid; AXEL BOEHM, the mysterious German photographer with a fascination for Inez; FELIX LOCKE, the American undertaker and frustrated poet; and last but not least, the pivotal figure of MAHOMET MAHOMET, the Afghan cameleer.
As the pipeline lurches through doubt and crises, tragedy befalls the project. The climatic scheduled opening of the waterway enmeshes the characters in final ironic twists.
The Drowner is an epic story and a capital-“R” Romance in the vein of The English Patient. It is a film of dreams, passion, riches and mankind’s most basic need – water.
