Letters to Lindy

Everyone thought they know the truth about Lindy Chamberlain.   I always thought she did it. 

Why we all had such a mass prejudicial obsession about her case – and all those casually brutal dingo jokes – is touched on in Alana Valentine’s new play Letters to Lindy.

True to Valentine’s verbatim process, the text is fastidiously drawn from a huge archive of letters carefully stored and annotated by Lindy and, when Lindy speaks to the audience, from interviews with Valentine. Lindy’s story has, of course, already been much too mediated by others.

The play begins with the vilest of letter-writers spitting their venom through the windows of Lindy’s home – a detailed, modest domestic interior from James Bowne. 

Inside, Lindy (Jeanette Cronin) explains how these boxes of letters around her (the vast majority were supportive) are a treasured link to her daughter Azaria, lost that night at Uluru in 1980. 

Glenn Hazeldine, Phillip Hinton and Jane Phegan ably play this mad rush of letter writers, Australians of all sorts who shared their protest, theories, admiration and self-obsessions from across the country.   

Director Darren Yap has each performer directly address their letter to Lindy, avoiding the static inaction inherent in monologues.  Some are more compelling than others.  But centre in the rich mosaic is Lindy, reacting and linking, as the play runs chronologically through her trial and wrongful imprisonment, her release and, only in 2012, her ultimate vindication.

Confined by the verbatim process, the exploration of our national obsession with Lindy is only buried in the subtext – her unusual religion, her silences and cool demeanour, her irony.  These analytical limits are frustrating for a while and Cronin, true surely to the offbeat reserve of the real Lindy, is not easy to read. 

All broad accent and grimacing, Cronin only chooses to reveal her heart towards the end.  But it’s a profoundly moving end, a closure and calming forgiveness not for Lindy, of course, but for us, the bigots that we were – and on other matters, still are.

Martin Portus

BUY THE SCRIPT HERE.

Photographer; Lisa Tomasetti