No big hair! I was accused of emasculating men and defeminising Carmen

“I love big weather and I love skies. I always feel very drawn to places where you can be part of the environment,” says Four Winds Festival director Lindy Hume, the day after Sydney’s deluge scuppered our plans to eat South Coast oysters at Doyles at the Sydney Fish Markets.

The storm has passed and instead we are sitting outside in glorious sunlight pondering the brunch menu at Little Jean in Double Bay, an eastern suburbs favourite for its food, flowers and the convenient parking of the adjacent Woolworths’ carpark. All around us are well-groomed locals in designer brand-active wear; a dog walker passes the cafe at a clip, leading a platoon of equally well-groomed dogs. This prompts a chorus of barking from the less fortunate pooches, waiting patiently beside tables.

Lindy Hume at Little JeanCredit: Nick Moir

Hume has just returned from Tasmania, where she has been directing the biennial Ten Days on the Island Festival. After our brunch, she is driving south to complete preparations for her first Four Winds Festival at Bermagui, close to her home at Tathra. As it’s an outdoor festival, to be held in the Sound Shell at Barragga Bay over Easter, she is firmly focused on the possibility of inclement weather. The festival’s theme is “reconnection”, highly relevant in an area that has endured bushfires in 2016 and the summer of 2019/2020 before the pandemic hit which dried up tourism and saw the postponement of the 2020 festival.

The Barragga Bay Sound Shell is about 9 kilometres from the town the locals call “Bermy”. “It’s the most intimate outdoor amphitheatre that I have ever seen,” she enthuses.

Red-haired Hume is a woman who exudes positivity. “It’s in a spotted gum forest with a lake behind, it seats about 2000 people. It’s epic in the way that amphitheatres are, but it is sitting in this beautiful depression in the landscape looking up into the forest, gorgeous hills beyond...there is quite a lot of ambient sound... frogs and birds and rustling wind. We’re within sonic distance from the coast so on a still day you can hear the ocean. ” She laughs. Something she does often during our brunch. “Perhaps we should program an hour of listening beforehand!”

The past bushfires have come “frighteningly close” to the Sound Shell, which was designed by leading architect Philip Cox. “My understanding is that they had the press release ready to go.”

Hume is using the festival to celebrate the sense of community that exists in rural Australia. Although she grew up in Sydney’s inner west, she has lived on the South Coast since 2005, originally inland near Cobargo with her first husband. “I was visiting some dear friends who are oyster famers at Lake Wapengo and are wonderful foodies. One day I was just sitting there, at their table, and thought: I could live here. This could be a good life, and that’s what I decided to do.”

Zucchini and corn fritters, served with romesco, tahini yogurt, avocado and soft eggs, chia with coconut yogurt, served with red plums and strawberries and house granola.Credit: Nick Moir

Our food arrives on cue. Hume has chosen corn and zucchini fritters, served with romesco, tahini yoghurt, avocado and soft eggs. I’ve opted for 24-hour apple juice soaked chia with coconut yoghurt, served with red plums and strawberries and house granola. “This is really great,” she says. [Later we discover our helpful waiter, with an eye perhaps for publicity, has discounted the bill to thank us for coming in.]

The South Coast has proved a nourishing base as Hume has commuted to work around Australia and internationally. Her curriculum vitae is impressive. Director of the festivals in Perth and Sydney (“A very demanding job and ultimately probably not for me”), artistic director of the Queensland Opera the West Australian Opera and Melbourne’s OzOpera, the freelance director of opera productions in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the United States. She is also currently completing her PhD which, appropriately, is about developing creative work outside city areas.

In 2016 Hume moved to Tathra just before bushfires swept through the town. Fifteen houses in her street were destroyed. But while the forest on her property was burnt and the flames licked the backsteps, destroying the electrics, the carport and the septic tank, the house was saved by a heroic neighbour. “Craig from number 27 stayed and put out a lot of fires in the street and saved a lot of houses. He is a genuine, bona fide hero,” she tells me.

‘Craig from number 27 stayed and put out a lot of fires in the street and saved a lot of houses. He is a genuine, bona fide hero.’

Lindy Hume on the Tathra bushfires

Hume’s own creative journey began in a home full of music and with lessons in ballet and contemporary dance. “I was not a very good dancer but I was a jobbing dancer for a few years and that led me to the opera world, where I saw the various roles that might get me to where I really wanted to be. Which was to be the boss!” She laughs again. “So I flipped into choreography, assistant directing and then, fairly quickly in my early 30s, did an arts administration course then became the artistic director of WA Opera.”

“I know this sounds ridiculous,” she continues, “but I have never been particularly ambitious. I am just drawn to interesting projects. My nose has led me to various things. I fell in love with festivals after getting job as director of Perth Festival. You can tell a story over a suite of festivals, I had four there. That interested me; for me it is all about the narrative. What are we trying to say? What are we trying to do?”

At the end of 2019, Hume married Dr Dain Bolwell, a Tasmanian academic focused on international politics and sustainability, who she met online on “my one and only internet date”. She pulls out her phone to show me a picture of an undeniably handsome man. “That’s my Dain. He is very lovely. We are very happy.”

They married in his garden in Hobart and followed with a party in Tathra. ”It was an old, probably rather Victorian courtship, as we got to be friends and corresponded as I had gone to the UK for work.” The couple now divide their time between Tasmania and the South Coast and Bolwell’s knowledge of sustainability has influenced Hume to stop eating intensively farmed Australian salmon. “Trout is all right and it’s nicer anyway.”

I ask Hume, as one of Australia’s leading opera directors, about the issues of sexism on display in many of the great operas, including Opera Australia’s recent productions of Tosca and Bluebeard’s Castle. Although she hasn’t seen these particular productions, I touch a nerve. “It drives me insane. Just don’t. Just don’t,” she repeats. “These should never have been directed by a man for a start. Look at the material and don’t!”

Hume says while it can seem “tricky”, it is entirely possible to tackle even classical stories, such as Cinderella, from a feminist perspective. She is about to tackle The Marriage of Figaro in New Zealand. “That’s an interesting one. [Philosopher] Martha Nussbaum has written on the feminist perspective of Susanna and the Countess and even Cherubino as a trans character and [discussed] the way they drive the narrative, as well as the aggression of the men versus the humanity of the women.

“There are whole swathes of the repertoire that just need to be directed by woman. These are magnificent works that observe the human condition in so many ways and my argument is that by addressing the work and the music from a theoretical feminist construct is that you are allowing the work to live for an audience. This isn’t having to lock them away.”

‘It drives me insane. Just don’t. Just don’t. These should never have been directed by a man for  a start. Look at the material and don’t!’

Lindy Hume on sexism in the great operas

Thirty years ago she directed what has become an internationally acclaimed production of Carmen. ”I presented her as a feminist ahead of her time who, as it is written, absolutely calls the world out as she sees it, those men objectifying her and all the cigarette girls.” It comes as no surprise that Hume received hate mail from men “who said I had ruined Carmen and she deserved what she got. The thing that most upset them was [their belief] that I had emasculated the men and defeminised the women. Carmen didn’t have big tousled hair and earrings.”

As a female director, she tries to find the moral centre of the story. “In a weird way, what I try to do is look for the empowerment narrative for each of those characters. To understand the archetype. But I always frame it within the boundaries of making it work for audiences. You need to present a thesis that is compelling and attractive to as many audiences as possible. I don’t mind confrontation or provocation, but my job is to make them theatrically appealing.”

Lindy Hume sings the praises of regional Australia.Credit: Nick Moir

As a seasoned festival director, Hume believes she is more “nuanced” and intuitive than when she started. A festival is “alive”. “You can program all you like but sometimes you can just discover those shimmering moments where the environment, the story, the landscape, the weather come together. I’ve scheduled some little spaces in the program, [to accommodate] these shimmering moments, which might capture the zeitgeist. As this is about reconnection, it would be right to remember the year that has gone without wallowing or dragging people away from the moment. Just to say this is a community.”

In terms of the Four Winds Festival, she says: “An alternate title for the festival, based on a piece by local musician Heath Cullen is: things are looking up,” she says. “It has a gorgeous, determinedly optimistic sense that no matter how much we stupid humans try to ruin everything, the world is still abundant enough....it is so abundantly optimistic that it made me cry when I heard it.. .I just thought it was the right tone to set”.

The festival is anchored by a free event on Good Friday that starts with the local Yuin people’s walawaani (welcome), spearheaded by Shakeela Williams and Lou Bennett with local Indigenous choirs, dancers and artists, followed by a performance of Things are Looking Up, by a coterie of internationally recognised musicians who, coincidentally, live in the inland hills near Candelo.

“There must be more professional musicians per capita in Candelo than anywhere else in Australia! They are such a generous spirited group of artists, there is a lot of sharing, supporting each other. It’s about a respect for environment, landscape, sustainable practices but also for making amazing music.

“I guess what I wanted was a very strong local welcoming voice. Something about regional communities which is extraordinarily hospitable and welcoming and authentic.”

Aside from the many local performers, the festival will host a few “big guns”, with the Sydney Dance Company on its first visit to the South Coast, performing an expanded version of choreographer Rafael Bonacela’s Cinco backed by a live chamber orchestra drawn from members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellowship, William Zappa’s acclaimed three-part, nine-hour performance of Homer’s The Illiad (Out Loud) and composer Nigel Westlake’s Compassion, performed with Melbourne singer-songwriter Lior and orchestra.

Time is ticking. I am aware that Hume has to depart. Is there anything else she wants to mention? She pauses. There is.

“The thing I would like to say about myself and why I am so excited about the festival is that it feels to me that regional Australia is the future in so many ways. It is not just a work choice, it is a philosophical choice. Making the radical choice to base myself in rural Australia has only opened up the world to me in the most wonderful way and deepened my sense of my artistic practice by being part of a community and, as a non-Indigenous person, allowed me to connect with the local Indigenous people. I see this as a part of one’s progress in life.”

The Four Wind Festival runs from Good Friday to the end of Sunday at the Barraga Bay Sound Shell, Bermagui, fourwinds.com.au

Little Jean

1/1 Kiaora Lane, Double Bay. Phone (O2) 9328 0201

Daily, 7am to 9pm. (Some hours may vary over Easter).