It took twenty-five years for the first comprehensive feminist appraisal of the Chamberlain case to be published. This speaks volumes about the thrall in which Australia was held by the Chamberlain story. Adrian Howe writes: ‘It is as if the saga so overwhelmed the national psyche that it defied feminists, left-wing activists and most trained thinkers of any ilk to make sense of it.’ She does not exclude herself from this judgment. In fact, she describes her return to Lindy Chamberlain’s story and her collation of the other feminist critiques of the case as an act of expiation, making belated amends for having succumbed to the dominant media line and thus become complicit in the resulting miscarriage of justice.

Utilising the language and methodology of Foucault, Howe assembles a spirited critique of the Chamberlain trial by bringing together academic feminist perspectives with the voices of the general population who wrote to Lindy Chamberlain expressing their solidarity. The unlikely juxtaposition is legitimate according to Foucault, the distinction between ‘buried’ specialist knowledge and other knowledge that is disqualified as ‘non-conceptual’ being unsustainable. Rather, the knowledge of these subjugated ‘counter-publics’ should be united in insurrection against authorised knowledge. The practical implications of this approach are not always easy to swallow. Gut feeling accords greater recognition to the letters of support from men and women with experience of dingoes or midwifery, say, over those who simply state they ‘have always known’ Lindy Chamberlain was innocent, or those who identify her as a latter-day Job. Discordant minority opinions from the archive are excluded despite sharing a common history and repository with letters favourable to the Chamberlains. They are identified as belonging to the dominant narrative and therefore unworthy of further airing. Given that virtually no previous examination of the archive exists, the sense of being molly-coddled is difficult to shake.