Sydney Reviews

Director/Writer Cate Whittaker takes us on a docudrama history lesson in The Amazing Lucas Girls.

During the First World War, Australia was a roiling, boiling cauldron as traditionalists supporting England clashed with those opposing conscription and Australia’s entry into the fray. There was also a formidable swell of Suffragette support, two fronts coming together to form a political and social storm.

Whittaker focuses on the town of Ballarat, and the bloomer factory, Lucas, where women made women’s underwear and the company was run by the formidable Tilly Thompson, Australia's first female commercial traveller, and a marketing maven.

Tilly was an innovator but proudly cheered the boys off to war, signing her younger, under age brother’s papers so he could go off on a lark, see a bit of the world, and return home.

In contrast, her younger sister Clara despairs, and desperately tries to stop her fiancé Wilf and brother Frank following. Sadly, her fears are founded as Ballarat rapidly turns bereft at the death knell of the Telegram Boy’s bicycle bell, a sound effect refrain not quite refined.

As the conflict wears on, Clara courageously campaigns against conscription and Tilly decides on direct action to honour the fallen in their distraught and disintegrating district.

In 1917, Tilly proposed a campaign to create an Avenue of Honour and an Arch of Victory as a living monument to Ballarat's men who served during the First World War. With the firm's support, Tilly and the staff, affectionately known as the 'Lucas girls' raised over £10,000 towards the project. The Avenue of Honour remains the longest in the Southern Hemisphere and the first of its kind in Australia.

Amy Joyce as Clara and Jo Booth as Tilly give the much needed performance bounce in this rather perambulating pedestrian play, their sibling differences succumbing to sisterly support in times of true tragedy.

Liz Grindley provides gravitas as Mildred, Clara’s defacto mother in law while Nicholas Papademetriou, doubling as the town Mayor and the mysterious Corporal Stevens provides blustery bureaucracy and misogyny on the one hand, with a sense of mischief on the other.