Wendy Richardson – January 26 2020

Wendy is a playwright, actor and producer. She was a primary school teacher and community worker before taking up writing professionally in 1986. Wendy holds a Bachelor of Arts and wrote her first play, Windy Gully, at the age of 53 while studying for the degree as a mature age student. In 1990 she was awarded an Australian Arts Council Literary Fellowship to write Lights Out, Nellie Martin, which is published in Three Illawarra Plays together with The Last Voyage of the Gracie Anne and That Christmas of ’75 . In 2005 Wendy was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for services to the arts and community. She remains actively involved in her local community, volunteering once a week at the local Salvation Army store with her son, Mark, the sole survivor of her three children. Both Wendy’s sons were born with disabilities and she remains a strong disability advocate, recently lobbying for the reinstatement of a lift at Unanderra train station and performing all four roles in her monologue, Four Kembla Women, to raise funds for a new church hall with upgraded disability access. Wendy is currently planning to finish the trilogy she began for Theatre South, the first play being The Season of Emily Jane, the second This Other Eden, and the third play yet to be written.

Windy Gully
Currency Press, 1989; ISBN 9780868192451
Full length; 3 female, 4 male
Commissioned by the Theatre South Regional Theatre Company and premiering there in 1987, Windy Gully is about the mining community in Mount Kembla around the time of the Mount Kembla Mine disaster in 1902. The explosion, one of the worst disasters in Australian history, took place on 31 July 1902 killing 96 men and boys. Their bodies were buried in Wollongong Cemetery, Mount Kembla Cemetery and in an unmarked communal grave near a cricket field in Windy Gully. Songs and chants written by Wendy, including the eponymous song written 15 years earlier, are woven through the play. They are published in the Illawarra Unity journal.
“The huge and many faceted event that was the Mount Kembla mine disaster is distilled to two hours on the stage and the human dimension of it is made accessible to an audience.” – Des Davies, Director, 1987 premier

Slacky Flat
Multiple roles (16 year old boys and girls; men and women any age up to 90+)
Slacky Flat is set in Bulli where Slacky Flat became the site of a camp of temporary dwellings during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the period which saw the downturn of the steel industry at Port Kembla, recession in the Southern Mining Districts, and dole riots.
“Arguably Wendy Richardson’s best play, it follows the Macpherson family during the Great Depression …. Written in 1989, Slacky Flat still mirrors current events as unemployment soars and people are once again forced out of their homes and left to fend for themselves in tent cities and living on the street. [It] is as funny as it is touching and filled with music and real life stories told in the way only Wendy Richardson can.” – Phoenix Theatre production, 2017