Alana Valentine - Letters to Lindy

Alana Valentine s most recent award nomination is the Nick Enright Prize for Drama (NSW Premiers Literary Awards, 2017) for Ladies Day. She is the recipient of two Errols (Tasmanian Theatre Awards, 2017) for The Tree Widows, which was awarded Best Writing (Professional Production) and the overall Judges Award for her creative integration of community, culture and heritage. Alana was also nominated for an Errol for Best Director (Professional Production) for The Tree Widows. In 2017 Alana is again working with Bangarra Dance Theatre as dramaturg on Bennelong, after successful collaborations on their productions Patyegarang and ID. Barbara and the Camp Dogs, co-written with Ursula Yovich, will be produced by Belvoir in December 2017. In November 2017, Venus Theatre Company (USA) will world premiere Alanas play The Ravens. An extensive national tour of Letters to Lindy is planned for 2018. Alanas website is www.alanavalentine.com.

Foreword

People have been coming to me for the last thirty-five years and saying, We really must do something with the letters in the library, theyre fascinating. And so Id say, Yes, you can have a look at them and see what you think.

Once people started reading the collection of letters they would think, Oh, Ive got to do this. But then the size and scale of it would overwhelm them and theyd never get any further. They always came back and went, Ugh, thats such a job. Too big for me.

The last person who requested access was Alana Valentine, and she didnt say Thats such a job, I cant touch that. She just kept saying, Thats so interesting, can I look at more of them? She did, and then she showed them to me and interviewed me about how they were filed.

I read this play and I went all the way through it and I thought, yeah its okay but probably not finished yet. And I think I laughed once and I didnt cry at all. Not a thing was changed since that first reading but when I saw it on stage I laughed and cried all the way through it. I think Reagan, who saw it with me, did much the same thing.

I dont know how many of you are aware that there is very little in that play, only one scene I think, which is not actual quotes, either from me or quotes from the letters. The only scene thats an amalgamation is the librarians scene, which gives you more of a feel for what people still think today.

I think Ms Valentine has done a brilliant job. It is probably the most powerful thing that has been done on my story and the most true to the behind-the-scenes of what I lived through.

This was a slice of my life. It will not impact you as it has me, but it will leave its mark all the same. I hope if nothing else you will reflect on the strength and impact that words carry.

Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton
December 2016

INTRODUCTION

There are three things that have divided this nation
Conscription, Whitlam and Lindy Chamberlain.

The words are spoken by an unnamed librarian in Alana Valentines finely-wrought play Letters to Lindy as he stacks some of the 20,000 letters that Lindy Chamberlain received during her ordeal of being tried, incarcerated, then exonerated of killing her baby Azaria.

The words, delivered matter-of-factly towards the end of the play, serve as an historical epitaph to an intimate and epic docu-drama spanning more than 30 years, from Azarias death near Uluru in 1980 to the 2012 coronial ruling that finally ended the legal saga.

The starting point of Valentines passionate inquiry came in the form of 199 boxes of correspondence at the National Library of Australia; a staggering archive from which the playwright has constructed an intricate, truthful and deeply human account of a case which captured the publics imagination from the moment Lindy Chamberlain uttered the words, A dingos got my baby. For here was an apparent murder mystery combining potent myths of the Australian outback, Aboriginal folklore, baffling cult-like characters and elements of Greek tragedy. It was a time when the worst excesses of tabloid sensationalism fuelled an unthinking, sometimes brutal, spectator sport. Australia hadnt seen anything like it.

Letters to Lindy bears witness to good and evil of varying hues as it astutely juxtaposes the private and public. Thousands of Australians were compelled to write to Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton in the wake of baby Azarias death. Many were compassionate and consoling; others hostile and threatening. Remarkably, Chamberlain-Creighton kept them all; the cards, letters, poems and prayerseven, perversely, a single black bootie with a red ribbon. (Meryl Streep, who portrayed Lindy in the film Evil Angels, received a matching bootie from the same anonymous source.) One of the letters hailed Azaria as a herald of the second coming of Christ. There were also death threats.

Having 20,000 letters on hand provided Valentine a fertile resource, but making sense of it all and creating a work for the stage that is lucid, thoughtful and absorbing has enormous challenges. Crucially, it requires the trust of its protagonist, leaps of faith, playfulness and purpose. It is here where the authenticity of private reveries about struggle and sacrifice make Letters to Lindy a memorable and precious work.

The play opens in the present with Chamberlain-Creighton sifting through archive boxes with a sure and steady hand, a device enabling a variety of stories to flow and flashbacks to be re-enacted. It is akin to the opening of a cold case and, even though we know how it ends, the directness and hard truths of Letters to Lindy feel as though information is being unearthed for the first time.

From the archive, or what Valentine calls a community, there emerge telling insights into the attitudes of Australian society, the nature of celebrity, a prevailing sense of judgement versus justice, and the grief of a woman who did not conform to expectation. As memories are stirred of the fateful night at the Uluru campsite when Lindy Chamberlain discovered that a dingo had taken her baby, Valentine fills the stage with figures and voices befitting a Greek chorus; an assemblage of first-hand witnesses and second-guessing armchair critics who salivate at the prospect of Chamberlains demise. Says a figure in the play: Youre so bloody hard no tears have ever come out of your eyes.

The audience hears the voices of admirers, sympathisers and hatersthe nasty ones as Chamberlain-Creighton lightly condemns themthe majority of whom are ordinary people with no stake in the case. There are, however, notable exceptions, including the British forensic expert James Cameron and the Sydney Morning Herald journalist Malcolm Brown, who reported on the case from the outset and formed a close relationship with the Chamberlains. Indeed, Brown became a voice of reason and reassurance amid the melodrama and lynch-mob hysterics.

FOR MANY YEARS Alana Valentine has proved herself to be a rigourous, open-minded, keenly-observant chronicler of Australian society. In a number of instances, the playwright is not merely a detached observer but a champion of the underdog; of people deemed outsiders or outcasts. As evidenced in her plays