January 22, 2025 • 30 mins
Lech Blaine’s debut book Car Crash, told the gripping story of his life in the aftermath of a horrendous road accident that killed several of his friends. Since then he’s written political essays and thoughtful journalism: for The Monthly, for the Quarterly Essay and beyond. This week, we’re bringing you Michael’s conversation with Lech at Canberra Writers’ Festival, where they discussed his latest book Australian Gospel: A Family Saga. The book details the outrageous true story of the tangled fates of two couples and the children trapped between them.
Reading list:
Car Crash, Lech Blaine 2019
Australian Gospel: A Family Saga, Lech Blaine 2024
Gunnawah, Ronni Salt, 2024
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram and Twitter
Guest: Lech Blaine
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Back in twenty ten, and you'll have to bear with
me here, Justin Bieber released a memoir for those keeping
score at home. It was called Justin Bieber Colin First Step,
two Forever, with the number two another colin my story.
I think you'll agree that is an objectively awesome title.
He was sixteen at the time, and you know there's
(00:22):
no question he'd achieved a lot in those sixteen years,
or that his fans were desperate to hear what was
going on in his inner life. But sixteen seems young
for a memoir. It's a topic on which people have
strongly formed I was going to say views, but prejudices
is closer to the truth. People don't think young people
should write memoirs. Almost a decade ago, former read This
(00:45):
guest Leslie Jamison debated with Benjamin Mosa about how young
is too young to write an autobiography in this piece
for The New York Times. They were debating a review
from a memoirrist in their thirties, so the standard seems
to be pretty variable. All of this came to mind
late last year when Australian journalist and writer, the very
(01:06):
talented Lech Blaine released his book Australian Gospel, a family saga.
It was one of the hits of the summer on
endless recommendation lists and one of those books that seemed
near ubiquitous on beach tails everywhere I went. Now, before
we go on, let me be very clear. I'm not
saying Lech Blaine is justin Bieber. That's important to note.
(01:30):
But here's the thing. He turns thirty three this year
and Australian Gospel is in a sense his second memoir.
His first. His debut book, Car Crash, told the gripping
story of his life in the aftermath of a horrendous
road accident that killed several of his friends. It was
powerful and compelling, beautifully written, and launched this talented writer
(01:54):
into the world of publishing. He followed it with police
essays and thoughtful journalism for the Monthly, for the Quarterly
Essay and beyond. There is no question the guy is
a crazy talent. But two memoirs by thirty three, what
are the odds that such a relatively young life could
hold enough material for a second book. As it turns
(02:17):
out pretty good. Lek wasn't done with his own story
in his childhood. For his parents and his siblings. There
was this wild, outrageous, at times tragic story that was
waiting to be told. I'm Michael Williams and this is Read.
This a show about the books we love and the
(02:38):
unlikely true stories behind them. I spoke to Leck at
last year's Canberra Writers Festival. Like so many family sagas,
Australian gospel is filled with a slew of unforgettable characters,
each with complicated backstories. So let's pick up the conversation
(03:01):
with Leck introducing us to some of the key players.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
So Michael and Mary Shelley were these incredibly beautiful socialites
in Sydney. Michael was from the North Shore and he
was blonde haired and blue eyed, and he went to
Knox Grammar and his first love was the actress Jackie Weaver,
and he was becoming seemed like he was on a
(03:25):
fast track to incredible success and wealth in his twenties,
and then suffered a nervous breakdown around the age of
twenty eight, and he after an incredible amount of both
drug use and sex outside of marriage because he was
incredibly promiscuous. He went to a psychiatric hospital in near
(03:50):
Botany Bay and met a woman named Carrie, who would
eventually change her name to Mary Shelley. And she was
also from incredible privilege that she was born in London,
taken to Sydney when she was eleven, grew up in
the Eastern suburbs. Her father was an incredibly successful restaurant,
Her and King's Cross, and she subsequently suffered a nervous
(04:13):
breakdown as well. And so this is how Michael and
Mary as she would eventually be known, met in a
psychiatric hospital and they fell in love with each other.
And in the process of falling in love and then
moving in with each other, they started reading the Bible,
and essentially Michael began to believe that he was the
archangel Michael in the Bible. And so they decided essentially
(04:37):
to pack everything up, get rid of all their things,
and hitchhiked to North Queensland and spread the Gospel of Jesus.
And they had a son named Elijah in nineteen eighty
and then to cut a long story short, because that's
already dragging on a little bit, and that's the tip
of the iceberg. They had three more children after Elijah
saw Joshua, who would eventually be placed with my parents.
(05:00):
Their names were changed to Stephen and John, and they
later had my sister Hannah in the bathtub of a
three star hotel in New Zealand where they were on
the run from social workers and police, and Hannah was
extradited at the age of one to pub in country Queensland,
which my parents are running and had all these foster kids,
(05:20):
and Mum felt pregnant with me about forty eight hours
after Hannah's arrival, and I was born in nineteen ninety two.
So that's where it all kind of like linked up,
and that's why I'm here and how able to be
a part of this story and be able to tell it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Leg I want to start in twenty seventeen when you
went on conversations with Richard Fidler and you told a story,
a story that ultimately forms the basis of Australian gospel.
Before that interview, how often had you told different versions
of that story?
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Funnily enough, very little. A lot of my closest friends
had no idea about the scope of the story, so
a lot of people who knew me well were hearing
it for the first time. Because growing up in a
family where all of my siblings were foster children, except
for me, so I was born last. It wasn't something
(06:19):
that I broadcasted publicly much growing up, and that was
not so much because I was ashamed of it, but
just because of how normal my upbringing seemed in the
sense that my siblings had always been there. So I
wasn't kind of going to school and talking about my
foster siblings. I was always talking about my siblings. And
(06:41):
then I think when the crux of the story in
terms of the stalking of my family was happening when
I was starting when I was ten, then it was
kind of like a privacy issue, like I actually couldn't
really talk about it in a way that might expose myself,
but like you know, partly rationally, but partly just out
(07:02):
of fear. And there probably was a bit of shame
about the fact, you know, my family was being stalked
by notorious Christian fanatics, and so that's not really water
cooler talk at primary school or at high school, and
after high school. I think it was something that I
grappled with privately, and even with my siblings, like who
(07:26):
were the biological children of these people? We weren't sitting
around talking about the crazy thing that had happened. My
mum was different. She was someone who probably leant on
me in that respect because I wasn't the person directly
exposed to the threat of these people, and so I
think I became an important person for her to be
(07:48):
able to talk to about it. And that's definitely drove
my desire to tell the story. Because in twenty seventeen
she was terminally ill, so she only had about a
year left to live. I wanted her to be able
to hear. I knew that the book was going to
take a lot longer, but I wanted her to be
able to hear the basis of that story told publicly
(08:08):
before she died.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
I want to come back to your mum in a bit,
just because she is the kind of crux I think
of this book in many ways. But there's a decision
very early on in the book that I want to
ask you about, which is that you have a family
tree has on one side the shelleys and on the
other side your parents. What it doesn't have is you
(08:33):
anywhere in it. You've made a decision to open a
book about your family and about the many complicating factors
in your family history, and you've deliberately decided to excite
yourself from the family tree.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Why. I guess everyone wants to do that occasionally, don't know.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Oh oh yeah, I'm not in my family tree, I
promise you.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
So that was something that I did think about a bit,
and I made the decision to leave myself out because
I had other foster siblings who were part of the family,
and I thought it would be too complicated to include
their biological parents and then it would have been like
a mess, and I didn't know how to quite work
that out. And I thought that the main thing that
you needed to know from that family tree was the
(09:16):
birth names of my siblings and their brother Elijah and
what they were eventually known as, So just as a
simple way throughout the story, because it can get quite
confusing when you've got Michael and Mary who referred to
their children as their birth names, and then my siblings Steven, John,
and Hanna, who are referred to by their names when
they were placed with the Blains. And so that was
(09:37):
the main reason. It wasn't kind of to sum everything up.
And yeah, I thought that I didn't want to leave
my sister Rebecca out of that family tree, so I
thought I'll leave myself out as well.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
There is, though you're assiduous in it, and it's there
in the two different sets of names. But in the
writing of the story, you take great care in a
way that I find deeply moved to allow for different
people's rationalization, justification understanding of the story. You have, on
the one hand, the Shelleys, who, through a series of
(10:13):
their own choices through incapacity, lose access to their own
children they've conceived. And then you have your parents who
are raising those children with love and care and support.
How hard was it to give both those stories equal
care in the writing of the book.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Well, it's interesting because when I first started thinking about
it and researching it as a book, which was twenty thirteen,
so eleven years ago, I was thinking about the book
as basically the story of the Shelleys, with my family
popping up, and so I sort of thought that Michael
(10:53):
and Mary and all of their craziness was the crux
of the story, and probably Michael really, because he's a
source of so much of the book, and it was
only through writing it. And this is a process over
a decade where my parents were coming more and more
to the forefront, and I was also thought of my
(11:16):
father as kind of being the direct foil for Michael,
and so that was a tango that I saw as
at the heart of the book, and the mothers gradually
emerged as I think the emotional heart of the book.
And I tried to respect the trauma that Mary had
suffered both in her previous life but also the trauma
(11:38):
of losing her children. And I think that my mother,
who had always said that she wanted to write a
book about it, but I don't think she like similarly
to me, I don't think she ever thought of herself
as the main character of the book, but eventually she
kind of became, I think, the main character in the book.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It's funny that idea of main character like Michael is
clearly someone who moved through the world believing himself to
be the main character of not just every story you
could think of, but something that you couldn't think of,
Like he was definitely centering himself. But part of what
comes through so beautifully in the book is the contrast
between the two couples and your parents as a kind
(12:16):
of counterpoint, not just a counterpoint to Michael and Mary,
but actually the embodiment of everything that Michael held in
disdain about Australia, about Australian culture, about modern life. Can
you describe your folks.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
For us, Yeah, that's a pretty good summary. So Michael,
his Christianity was a very weird thing because in all
of his copious amounts of writing, and I'm talking like
millions of words, like he was writing reports, and he
was incredibly intelligent. He had a chemical engineering degree and
an MBA and we started a PhD which he never
(12:54):
finished because he had a disagreement with the head of
the school, predictably, and so he didn't refer that much
to theological stuff, like except for the basic fact that
he was God's right hand man. A lot of his
writing was about his hatred of Australian culture, his hatred
of sport, his hatred of alcohol, his hatred of gambling.
(13:17):
And he a very very fastidious obsession with weight because
he was very slim and became even slimmer once he
became a Christian, started fasting all the time, and so
this was and then once his children were taken for
being underweight, he was obsessed with wight. And then my parents,
(13:38):
well Dad was a one hundred and thirty kilogram publican
and country Queensland, who loved sport, loved gambling and loved alcohol. Ah, So,
out of all the crazy things in the book, like
that has got to be one of the craziest is life.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Just like he's manifested. He's like Michael's worst nightmare come
to life as your dad.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
But then in another way, dad was kind of perfect
because he was probably one of the only people who
would be completely unafraid of a Christian preacher potentially turning up.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
He says to a bouncer he hires at the pub,
keep an eye out for, you know, undesirables, and the
bounce is trying to get to the bottom of it,
and he says, no, no, in particular, you're looking for a
Christian as skinny as half past six.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Is it skinnier than a minute to six?
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Skinnier than a minute to six. I'm like, that is
just beautiful. I mean that portrait of your dad that
comes through I love but the ways in which your
parents are kind of demonstrated as a kind of formidable team.
Your dad Tom is immediately loving but also just wants
(14:48):
to get on with things, whereas your mom, your mum's
level of care as evidence by the kind of notes
she takes and the writing she puts together when thinking
about what it is to foster damaged kids is incredibly moving.
Tell us a bit about your mum.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, so they were similar in the sense that they
both had quite traumatic upbrings, and that's something that I tried.
That's why I retraced in the book the competing narratives
of those four characters, because Dad might have seemed in
his later incarnation as being fairly one dimensional. And then
I think when you see what happened when he was
growing up, he lost both his parents and had a
(15:28):
horrific meatworks accident when he was sixteen and had left
school at thirteen, I think that that you started to
see that as being a coping mechanism for what had
been a pretty hard life, and so he used humor
as a way to cope with that. And I think
Mum also had a very poor traumatic upbringing. She was
kicked out a home at sixteen. There was always lots
of alcohol in the house, and Mum had a number
(15:50):
of nervous breakdowns. But she was blessed with this incredible
intellect which wasn't really nourished in any formal way. She
also left school at the end of grade ten. But
she was just a voracious reader. Even when she was
raising six or seven kids, she would read six books
a week, and so she had an incredible brain which
(16:11):
had never been able to be kind of encouraged during
her upbringing. But she deployed all of that intellect to
foster caring. And so she saw it not as just
an emotional crutch because she'd had four miscarriages, but she
saw it as like a vocation, and she did all
the reading necessary across you know, the legal realm, the
(16:33):
psychological realm, the literary realm, because she believed in stories,
and she believed in redemption for people from circumstances like hers.
And that's what made her the perfect foster care because nobody,
in her view was ever beyond redemption. And so I
(16:53):
think I was incredibly blessed to have that as a mother,
but also as a source of material because she, like Michael,
had just kept fastidious notes about and diary entries about
everything that happened. And so even before Michael and Mary
were in the picture, and so I was kind of
handed this incredible trove of information, and yeah, I guess
(17:16):
my job was to not be overwhelmed by the amount
of detail that I've been given by these people and
through my interviews, and really hone in on who they
were as people and just let the reader see them
and hear their voices, and just let them do their thing,
rather than me or my writing being the start of
the story.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
When we returned, Lek shares how his perception of the Shelleys,
and in particular Mary Shelley, has changed over the years,
and by writing this book in twenty twenty four made sense.
We'll be right back. So, as you said before, in
(18:01):
primary school, growing up, the idea of having all these
foster siblings was not unusual to you. That was just
the nature of your family. But at the point at
which the Shelleys lurched back into your lives and began stalking, harassing,
became a very active presence, that does seem to me
to be a fairly traumatic set of incidents for your
(18:23):
family to kind of circle around from that age. Can
you talk about the first time Mary came back on
the scene.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Yeah, I remember that whole period vividly because it was just,
you know, there's that saying that there's decades where nothing
happens and days where decades happens, and that was kind
of how it felt. I was actually crickety training, and
I remember getting back with Dad and there were just
police cars everywhere, and you know, we sort of thought
(18:51):
that someone had died, or that my brother John, who
would have been in a bit of trouble with the Laura,
had done something particularly crazy. And then it turned out
that Mary Shelley had rocked up to the house, and
so the Shelleys were allowed no direct contact with their children,
and they had no idea where we lived, and we
were kind of in witness protection in a way, and
(19:11):
it was a like earth shattering moment, like it wasn't.
It's hard to explain how viscerally afraid we were, because
I look back now as an adult and I've done
so much researching of the Shelley's and I see them
in three dimensional ways. But when with Michael in town
and with Mary and Tay like this is not long
(19:32):
after September eleven, I literally saw Michael Shelley as being
like I've been lard and rocking up to your house
in a white robe, Like That's how much fear he invoked,
both in me and my family, and I was the youngest,
and I was a particularly anxious kid, which I was
a trait that I inherited from my mother. Whereas my
sister Hannah, who they were threatening to kidnap, she was
(19:54):
much more like dad, and so she weathered that whole
situation with a lot more stois than I did. But yeah,
there was a very, very genuine view that they would
attempt to kidnap Henna.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
One of the things that struck me reading this book
is the ways in which Michael's marriage to Mary and
their relationship we would understand through a very different lens
now talking and thinking about it. I mean, it's a
classic model of coercive control, a model of a kind
of abusive relationship. How much was that something that was
(20:31):
always clear to you or how much of that was
a product of writing the book made you understand Mary's
fragility and lack of agency and so much of the story.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Yeah, it wasn't clear to me growing up at all.
When it wasn't clear to I don't think the rest
of my family. I think my mum had incredible sympathy
for Mary. That was something that she I think that
she understood even before maybe the more modern understanding of
what was happening to her. But that was one of
the beautiful things about writing the book, was giving Mary
(21:05):
a sense of humanity which I did not see as
a child or even as a teenager. And the level
of control that Michael exerted over her wasn't clear to
a lot of the people, even outside the Blains, who
might have been connected to Michael and Mary from their
previous lives. And so there were acquaintances and friends of
(21:26):
Michael who thought that Mary had been the one that
had brainwashed Michael into Christianity, which was just when you
actually retraced the timeline of events and the different versions
of events, was just completely clear that Michael was someone
who had not just brainwashed Mary with a shared belief
about the fact that he was an archangel sent to
(21:49):
Earth by God, but at multiple times throughout their lives
had derailed attempts by Mary to reach a compromise that
would have enabled her to have a regular contact with
her children, which is something that my parents definitely would
have allowed, and it's something that my mum directly offered,
and then Michael would come back in and when you
retrace the letters and the timing of everything. You see
(22:12):
just how poisonous of an effect he had on the
lives of many people, but particularly on the life of
his third wife Mary.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
If we can return for a second to your conversation
with Richard Fidler in twenty seventeen. You know, at that
point you've been researching and thinking about it as a
book or thinking about it as a story you want
to tell for some time. You have that conversation, and
one of the things that happens is people come out
of the woodwork in considerable numbers. They hear it, and
(22:45):
they've all got stories of the Shelleys one way or
the other.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
That was, Yeah, that was remarkable, and that added to
my understanding of who these people were before they were
the Shelleys, before they were these Christian fanatics. And that
was an incredibly healing moment for a lot of the
people that listened to it. Because while they were on
the you know, they stage kidnappings, they'd threatened to kill premiers,
they'd rocked up to Parliament, they've been kicked out, they'd
(23:13):
stalked world leaders, they'd stalked priests. There wasn't kind of
a publicly available narrative joining all that up, especially because
at the center of the story was children in foster care,
so it wasn't something that you could publicly identify. And
so I think that people hearing that story and hearing
an explanation for it, but also knowing that the children
(23:34):
of the shelleys, at least my three siblings, had happy
and stable lives, I think that that was something that
provided a lot of relief.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
It does point to, though, what must have been one
of the challenges of putting this book together, putting it
down on paper, bringing it out into the world, is
the number of people who have a sense of ownership
over this story, or adjacency to the story, or direct
you know, that thing about your responsibility to others. Again,
(24:06):
part of what is so moving about this book is
the care you take in not claiming for yourself anything
that you feel uneasy about doing that with, but also
allowing space for the other ways in which people's lives
have been touched by their stories.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
How hard.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Is it with your siblings and their role in the story,
how much ambivalence do they have about the telling of it.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
I think when I first talked about researching the story,
and I mean at the time, I kind of felt
like I was forty or fifty, but I was in
my early twenties, So I think that they were a
bit puzzled I would be remotely interested in kind of
researching it, let alone contacting their biological father. But even
then they are always supportive of that and incredibly interested
(24:59):
in the stuff that I've found out. So throughout that process,
I don't think that they were you know, they weren't
calling me up every day to check where I was at,
but they were incredibly supportive of my decision to write
about it. And now that I've finished it, and now
that they've read it, like they couldn't be more over
the moon, because partly because Michael and Mary have both
(25:22):
passed away and so they're not living in fear of
them anymore, and I've given them something which not only
tells their story and provides details that they never had
any knowledge of, which explains certain aspects of their personalities
and life experience, but it also disabuses some of that
fear in the same way that happened to me, And
(25:43):
you lose some of that anger once you start actually empathizing,
especially with Mary. And also because my parents have both
passed away and I've got thirteen nieces and nephews, and
I've kind of created this story which not in a
historical way. It's not like a work of history, but
it actually brings to life my parents in a way
(26:04):
that my nieces and nephews who will never get the
chance to meet them, will be able to meet them
on the page and actually be able to see them
and hear them, and they will also get the genesis
story of their parents in a way that you don't
necessarily sit around a kitchen table and tell a story
like this with this level of detail. But when you
(26:24):
read it, you feel it in a way that you
don't if you just if you're just hearing it. So
I think that for them, I think that's probably the
best part about about it all.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
For you, though, I mean, in a eleven year run
up to this book, and in the meantime, you've actually
established a career for yourself as a published writer, and
you found your voice and you found your craft. And
I'm curious about how necessary those steps were to get
to you to the point where you could actually finish
this book, or you could conceive of the shape of
(26:57):
it or know how to approach it. How different a writer.
Are you now to the one you were when you
started on this?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
I did do an essay based on it with the
Griffith Review in twenty seventeen. But I remember when I
first started writing in that summer in twenty thirteen, I
was writing the story like in the voice of Tolstoy,
and it was like going to be war in peace,
and so it was. It was incredibly overwrought, incredibly overwritten.
The shelleys were kind of monstrous figures. The fear interrepidation
(27:27):
was like dripping from every page. Whereas I think, not
just writing my first book, Car Crash, that was helpful,
but I think writing political essays and interviewing people and
just letting their voice shine through, which is it kind
of taught me not just about the structure of the story,
but how light of a touch you need to give
(27:50):
to provide a narrative. That is, it isn't dripping with
fear interrepidation, that actually has the subtlety and quietness. It
isn't shouting at you, It isn't telling you what to
think about anything. And so I think all those years
of writing those different things and then publishing a book
and then going through their editorial processes, and it got
(28:13):
me to the point where I if I had written
that book even five years ago, it would be a
very different story.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Let Blaine's incredible book, Australing Gospel, A Family Saga is
available at all good bookstores now. I'm pretty sure Justin
Bieber's memoir might have been remainded.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Before we go.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I wanted to let you know what I've been reading
this week, and I've picked up the latest piece of
Australian rural noir. It's a historical novel. It's set in
nineteen seventy four in the River Arena, and it's called Guanawah.
It's by Ronnie Salt, a local writer, very talented Seceue
so I don't know much about them, but the book
is a really terrific read, lots of fun and has
(29:05):
a mystery at its heart. If you love rural noir,
this is a good one. You can find Ganawa and
all the other books we have mentioned in this episode
at your favorite inde been bookstore. That's it for this
week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends,
rate and review us all the usual things. Put read
this out there in the world. Next week I'm sitting
(29:26):
down with award winning writer Michelle Deekretsa to discuss her
new book, Theory and Practice.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I would say that when I have finished the book,
I really felt a sense of axhilaration. I felt I
had made something different.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
the generous support of the AR Group. The show is
produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis
Evans and original compositions by Zaltman Fetcher. Thanks for listening,
See you next week.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
S
Back in twenty ten, and you'll have to bear with
me here, Justin Bieber released a memoir for those keeping
score at home. It was called Justin Bieber Colin First Step,
two Forever, with the number two another colin my story.
I think you'll agree that is an objectively awesome title.
He was sixteen at the time, and you know there's
(00:22):
no question he'd achieved a lot in those sixteen years,
or that his fans were desperate to hear what was
going on in his inner life. But sixteen seems young
for a memoir. It's a topic on which people have
strongly formed I was going to say views, but prejudices
is closer to the truth. People don't think young people
should write memoirs. Almost a decade ago, former read This
(00:45):
guest Leslie Jamison debated with Benjamin Mosa about how young
is too young to write an autobiography in this piece
for The New York Times. They were debating a review
from a memoirrist in their thirties, so the standard seems
to be pretty variable. All of this came to mind
late last year when Australian journalist and writer, the very
(01:06):
talented Lech Blaine released his book Australian Gospel, a family saga.
It was one of the hits of the summer on
endless recommendation lists and one of those books that seemed
near ubiquitous on beach tails everywhere I went. Now, before
we go on, let me be very clear. I'm not
saying Lech Blaine is justin Bieber. That's important to note.
(01:30):
But here's the thing. He turns thirty three this year
and Australian Gospel is in a sense his second memoir.
His first. His debut book, Car Crash, told the gripping
story of his life in the aftermath of a horrendous
road accident that killed several of his friends. It was
powerful and compelling, beautifully written, and launched this talented writer
(01:54):
into the world of publishing. He followed it with police
essays and thoughtful journalism for the Monthly, for the Quarterly
Essay and beyond. There is no question the guy is
a crazy talent. But two memoirs by thirty three, what
are the odds that such a relatively young life could
hold enough material for a second book. As it turns
(02:17):
out pretty good. Lek wasn't done with his own story
in his childhood. For his parents and his siblings. There
was this wild, outrageous, at times tragic story that was
waiting to be told. I'm Michael Williams and this is Read.
This a show about the books we love and the
(02:38):
unlikely true stories behind them. I spoke to Leck at
last year's Canberra Writers Festival. Like so many family sagas,
Australian gospel is filled with a slew of unforgettable characters,
each with complicated backstories. So let's pick up the conversation
(03:01):
with Leck introducing us to some of the key players.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
So Michael and Mary Shelley were these incredibly beautiful socialites
in Sydney. Michael was from the North Shore and he
was blonde haired and blue eyed, and he went to
Knox Grammar and his first love was the actress Jackie Weaver,
and he was becoming seemed like he was on a
(03:25):
fast track to incredible success and wealth in his twenties,
and then suffered a nervous breakdown around the age of
twenty eight, and he after an incredible amount of both
drug use and sex outside of marriage because he was
incredibly promiscuous. He went to a psychiatric hospital in near
(03:50):
Botany Bay and met a woman named Carrie, who would
eventually change her name to Mary Shelley. And she was
also from incredible privilege that she was born in London,
taken to Sydney when she was eleven, grew up in
the Eastern suburbs. Her father was an incredibly successful restaurant,
Her and King's Cross, and she subsequently suffered a nervous
(04:13):
breakdown as well. And so this is how Michael and
Mary as she would eventually be known, met in a
psychiatric hospital and they fell in love with each other.
And in the process of falling in love and then
moving in with each other, they started reading the Bible,
and essentially Michael began to believe that he was the
archangel Michael in the Bible. And so they decided essentially
(04:37):
to pack everything up, get rid of all their things,
and hitchhiked to North Queensland and spread the Gospel of Jesus.
And they had a son named Elijah in nineteen eighty
and then to cut a long story short, because that's
already dragging on a little bit, and that's the tip
of the iceberg. They had three more children after Elijah
saw Joshua, who would eventually be placed with my parents.
(05:00):
Their names were changed to Stephen and John, and they
later had my sister Hannah in the bathtub of a
three star hotel in New Zealand where they were on
the run from social workers and police, and Hannah was
extradited at the age of one to pub in country Queensland,
which my parents are running and had all these foster kids,
(05:20):
and Mum felt pregnant with me about forty eight hours
after Hannah's arrival, and I was born in nineteen ninety two.
So that's where it all kind of like linked up,
and that's why I'm here and how able to be
a part of this story and be able to tell it.
Speaker 1 (05:38):
Leg I want to start in twenty seventeen when you
went on conversations with Richard Fidler and you told a story,
a story that ultimately forms the basis of Australian gospel.
Before that interview, how often had you told different versions
of that story?
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Funnily enough, very little. A lot of my closest friends
had no idea about the scope of the story, so
a lot of people who knew me well were hearing
it for the first time. Because growing up in a
family where all of my siblings were foster children, except
for me, so I was born last. It wasn't something
(06:19):
that I broadcasted publicly much growing up, and that was
not so much because I was ashamed of it, but
just because of how normal my upbringing seemed in the
sense that my siblings had always been there. So I
wasn't kind of going to school and talking about my
foster siblings. I was always talking about my siblings. And
(06:41):
then I think when the crux of the story in
terms of the stalking of my family was happening when
I was starting when I was ten, then it was
kind of like a privacy issue, like I actually couldn't
really talk about it in a way that might expose myself,
but like you know, partly rationally, but partly just out
(07:02):
of fear. And there probably was a bit of shame
about the fact, you know, my family was being stalked
by notorious Christian fanatics, and so that's not really water
cooler talk at primary school or at high school, and
after high school. I think it was something that I
grappled with privately, and even with my siblings, like who
(07:26):
were the biological children of these people? We weren't sitting
around talking about the crazy thing that had happened. My
mum was different. She was someone who probably leant on
me in that respect because I wasn't the person directly
exposed to the threat of these people, and so I
think I became an important person for her to be
(07:48):
able to talk to about it. And that's definitely drove
my desire to tell the story. Because in twenty seventeen
she was terminally ill, so she only had about a
year left to live. I wanted her to be able
to hear. I knew that the book was going to
take a lot longer, but I wanted her to be
able to hear the basis of that story told publicly
(08:08):
before she died.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
I want to come back to your mum in a bit,
just because she is the kind of crux I think
of this book in many ways. But there's a decision
very early on in the book that I want to
ask you about, which is that you have a family
tree has on one side the shelleys and on the
other side your parents. What it doesn't have is you
(08:33):
anywhere in it. You've made a decision to open a
book about your family and about the many complicating factors
in your family history, and you've deliberately decided to excite
yourself from the family tree.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
Why. I guess everyone wants to do that occasionally, don't know.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Oh oh yeah, I'm not in my family tree, I
promise you.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
So that was something that I did think about a bit,
and I made the decision to leave myself out because
I had other foster siblings who were part of the family,
and I thought it would be too complicated to include
their biological parents and then it would have been like
a mess, and I didn't know how to quite work
that out. And I thought that the main thing that
you needed to know from that family tree was the
(09:16):
birth names of my siblings and their brother Elijah and
what they were eventually known as, So just as a
simple way throughout the story, because it can get quite
confusing when you've got Michael and Mary who referred to
their children as their birth names, and then my siblings Steven, John,
and Hanna, who are referred to by their names when
they were placed with the Blains. And so that was
(09:37):
the main reason. It wasn't kind of to sum everything up.
And yeah, I thought that I didn't want to leave
my sister Rebecca out of that family tree, so I
thought I'll leave myself out as well.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
There is, though you're assiduous in it, and it's there
in the two different sets of names. But in the
writing of the story, you take great care in a
way that I find deeply moved to allow for different
people's rationalization, justification understanding of the story. You have, on
the one hand, the Shelleys, who, through a series of
(10:13):
their own choices through incapacity, lose access to their own
children they've conceived. And then you have your parents who
are raising those children with love and care and support.
How hard was it to give both those stories equal
care in the writing of the book.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
Well, it's interesting because when I first started thinking about
it and researching it as a book, which was twenty thirteen,
so eleven years ago, I was thinking about the book
as basically the story of the Shelleys, with my family
popping up, and so I sort of thought that Michael
(10:53):
and Mary and all of their craziness was the crux
of the story, and probably Michael really, because he's a
source of so much of the book, and it was
only through writing it. And this is a process over
a decade where my parents were coming more and more
to the forefront, and I was also thought of my
(11:16):
father as kind of being the direct foil for Michael,
and so that was a tango that I saw as
at the heart of the book, and the mothers gradually
emerged as I think the emotional heart of the book.
And I tried to respect the trauma that Mary had
suffered both in her previous life but also the trauma
(11:38):
of losing her children. And I think that my mother,
who had always said that she wanted to write a
book about it, but I don't think she like similarly
to me, I don't think she ever thought of herself
as the main character of the book, but eventually she
kind of became, I think, the main character in the book.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
It's funny that idea of main character like Michael is
clearly someone who moved through the world believing himself to
be the main character of not just every story you
could think of, but something that you couldn't think of,
Like he was definitely centering himself. But part of what
comes through so beautifully in the book is the contrast
between the two couples and your parents as a kind
(12:16):
of counterpoint, not just a counterpoint to Michael and Mary,
but actually the embodiment of everything that Michael held in
disdain about Australia, about Australian culture, about modern life. Can
you describe your folks.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
For us, Yeah, that's a pretty good summary. So Michael,
his Christianity was a very weird thing because in all
of his copious amounts of writing, and I'm talking like
millions of words, like he was writing reports, and he
was incredibly intelligent. He had a chemical engineering degree and
an MBA and we started a PhD which he never
(12:54):
finished because he had a disagreement with the head of
the school, predictably, and so he didn't refer that much
to theological stuff, like except for the basic fact that
he was God's right hand man. A lot of his
writing was about his hatred of Australian culture, his hatred
of sport, his hatred of alcohol, his hatred of gambling.
(13:17):
And he a very very fastidious obsession with weight because
he was very slim and became even slimmer once he
became a Christian, started fasting all the time, and so
this was and then once his children were taken for
being underweight, he was obsessed with wight. And then my parents,
(13:38):
well Dad was a one hundred and thirty kilogram publican
and country Queensland, who loved sport, loved gambling and loved alcohol. Ah, So,
out of all the crazy things in the book, like
that has got to be one of the craziest is life.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Just like he's manifested. He's like Michael's worst nightmare come
to life as your dad.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
But then in another way, dad was kind of perfect
because he was probably one of the only people who
would be completely unafraid of a Christian preacher potentially turning up.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
He says to a bouncer he hires at the pub,
keep an eye out for, you know, undesirables, and the
bounce is trying to get to the bottom of it,
and he says, no, no, in particular, you're looking for a
Christian as skinny as half past six.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
Is it skinnier than a minute to six?
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Skinnier than a minute to six. I'm like, that is
just beautiful. I mean that portrait of your dad that
comes through I love but the ways in which your
parents are kind of demonstrated as a kind of formidable team.
Your dad Tom is immediately loving but also just wants
(14:48):
to get on with things, whereas your mom, your mum's
level of care as evidence by the kind of notes
she takes and the writing she puts together when thinking
about what it is to foster damaged kids is incredibly moving.
Tell us a bit about your mum.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, so they were similar in the sense that they
both had quite traumatic upbrings, and that's something that I tried.
That's why I retraced in the book the competing narratives
of those four characters, because Dad might have seemed in
his later incarnation as being fairly one dimensional. And then
I think when you see what happened when he was
growing up, he lost both his parents and had a
(15:28):
horrific meatworks accident when he was sixteen and had left
school at thirteen, I think that that you started to
see that as being a coping mechanism for what had
been a pretty hard life, and so he used humor
as a way to cope with that. And I think
Mum also had a very poor traumatic upbringing. She was
kicked out a home at sixteen. There was always lots
of alcohol in the house, and Mum had a number
(15:50):
of nervous breakdowns. But she was blessed with this incredible
intellect which wasn't really nourished in any formal way. She
also left school at the end of grade ten. But
she was just a voracious reader. Even when she was
raising six or seven kids, she would read six books
a week, and so she had an incredible brain which
(16:11):
had never been able to be kind of encouraged during
her upbringing. But she deployed all of that intellect to
foster caring. And so she saw it not as just
an emotional crutch because she'd had four miscarriages, but she
saw it as like a vocation, and she did all
the reading necessary across you know, the legal realm, the
(16:33):
psychological realm, the literary realm, because she believed in stories,
and she believed in redemption for people from circumstances like hers.
And that's what made her the perfect foster care because nobody,
in her view was ever beyond redemption. And so I
(16:53):
think I was incredibly blessed to have that as a mother,
but also as a source of material because she, like Michael,
had just kept fastidious notes about and diary entries about
everything that happened. And so even before Michael and Mary
were in the picture, and so I was kind of
handed this incredible trove of information, and yeah, I guess
(17:16):
my job was to not be overwhelmed by the amount
of detail that I've been given by these people and
through my interviews, and really hone in on who they
were as people and just let the reader see them
and hear their voices, and just let them do their thing,
rather than me or my writing being the start of
the story.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
When we returned, Lek shares how his perception of the Shelleys,
and in particular Mary Shelley, has changed over the years,
and by writing this book in twenty twenty four made sense.
We'll be right back. So, as you said before, in
(18:01):
primary school, growing up, the idea of having all these
foster siblings was not unusual to you. That was just
the nature of your family. But at the point at
which the Shelleys lurched back into your lives and began stalking, harassing,
became a very active presence, that does seem to me
to be a fairly traumatic set of incidents for your
(18:23):
family to kind of circle around from that age. Can
you talk about the first time Mary came back on
the scene.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
Yeah, I remember that whole period vividly because it was just,
you know, there's that saying that there's decades where nothing
happens and days where decades happens, and that was kind
of how it felt. I was actually crickety training, and
I remember getting back with Dad and there were just
police cars everywhere, and you know, we sort of thought
(18:51):
that someone had died, or that my brother John, who
would have been in a bit of trouble with the Laura,
had done something particularly crazy. And then it turned out
that Mary Shelley had rocked up to the house, and
so the Shelleys were allowed no direct contact with their children,
and they had no idea where we lived, and we
were kind of in witness protection in a way, and
(19:11):
it was a like earth shattering moment, like it wasn't.
It's hard to explain how viscerally afraid we were, because
I look back now as an adult and I've done
so much researching of the Shelley's and I see them
in three dimensional ways. But when with Michael in town
and with Mary and Tay like this is not long
(19:32):
after September eleven, I literally saw Michael Shelley as being
like I've been lard and rocking up to your house
in a white robe, Like That's how much fear he invoked,
both in me and my family, and I was the youngest,
and I was a particularly anxious kid, which I was
a trait that I inherited from my mother. Whereas my
sister Hannah, who they were threatening to kidnap, she was
(19:54):
much more like dad, and so she weathered that whole
situation with a lot more stois than I did. But yeah,
there was a very, very genuine view that they would
attempt to kidnap Henna.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
One of the things that struck me reading this book
is the ways in which Michael's marriage to Mary and
their relationship we would understand through a very different lens
now talking and thinking about it. I mean, it's a
classic model of coercive control, a model of a kind
of abusive relationship. How much was that something that was
(20:31):
always clear to you or how much of that was
a product of writing the book made you understand Mary's
fragility and lack of agency and so much of the story.
Speaker 2 (20:42):
Yeah, it wasn't clear to me growing up at all.
When it wasn't clear to I don't think the rest
of my family. I think my mum had incredible sympathy
for Mary. That was something that she I think that
she understood even before maybe the more modern understanding of
what was happening to her. But that was one of
the beautiful things about writing the book, was giving Mary
(21:05):
a sense of humanity which I did not see as
a child or even as a teenager. And the level
of control that Michael exerted over her wasn't clear to
a lot of the people, even outside the Blains, who
might have been connected to Michael and Mary from their
previous lives. And so there were acquaintances and friends of
(21:26):
Michael who thought that Mary had been the one that
had brainwashed Michael into Christianity, which was just when you
actually retraced the timeline of events and the different versions
of events, was just completely clear that Michael was someone
who had not just brainwashed Mary with a shared belief
about the fact that he was an archangel sent to
(21:49):
Earth by God, but at multiple times throughout their lives
had derailed attempts by Mary to reach a compromise that
would have enabled her to have a regular contact with
her children, which is something that my parents definitely would
have allowed, and it's something that my mum directly offered,
and then Michael would come back in and when you
retrace the letters and the timing of everything. You see
(22:12):
just how poisonous of an effect he had on the
lives of many people, but particularly on the life of
his third wife Mary.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
If we can return for a second to your conversation
with Richard Fidler in twenty seventeen. You know, at that
point you've been researching and thinking about it as a
book or thinking about it as a story you want
to tell for some time. You have that conversation, and
one of the things that happens is people come out
of the woodwork in considerable numbers. They hear it, and
(22:45):
they've all got stories of the Shelleys one way or
the other.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
That was, Yeah, that was remarkable, and that added to
my understanding of who these people were before they were
the Shelleys, before they were these Christian fanatics. And that
was an incredibly healing moment for a lot of the
people that listened to it. Because while they were on
the you know, they stage kidnappings, they'd threatened to kill premiers,
they'd rocked up to Parliament, they've been kicked out, they'd
(23:13):
stalked world leaders, they'd stalked priests. There wasn't kind of
a publicly available narrative joining all that up, especially because
at the center of the story was children in foster care,
so it wasn't something that you could publicly identify. And
so I think that people hearing that story and hearing
an explanation for it, but also knowing that the children
(23:34):
of the shelleys, at least my three siblings, had happy
and stable lives, I think that that was something that
provided a lot of relief.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
It does point to, though, what must have been one
of the challenges of putting this book together, putting it
down on paper, bringing it out into the world, is
the number of people who have a sense of ownership
over this story, or adjacency to the story, or direct
you know, that thing about your responsibility to others. Again,
(24:06):
part of what is so moving about this book is
the care you take in not claiming for yourself anything
that you feel uneasy about doing that with, but also
allowing space for the other ways in which people's lives
have been touched by their stories.
Speaker 2 (24:22):
How hard.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Is it with your siblings and their role in the story,
how much ambivalence do they have about the telling of it.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
I think when I first talked about researching the story,
and I mean at the time, I kind of felt
like I was forty or fifty, but I was in
my early twenties, So I think that they were a
bit puzzled I would be remotely interested in kind of
researching it, let alone contacting their biological father. But even
then they are always supportive of that and incredibly interested
(24:59):
in the stuff that I've found out. So throughout that process,
I don't think that they were you know, they weren't
calling me up every day to check where I was at,
but they were incredibly supportive of my decision to write
about it. And now that I've finished it, and now
that they've read it, like they couldn't be more over
the moon, because partly because Michael and Mary have both
(25:22):
passed away and so they're not living in fear of
them anymore, and I've given them something which not only
tells their story and provides details that they never had
any knowledge of, which explains certain aspects of their personalities
and life experience, but it also disabuses some of that
fear in the same way that happened to me, And
(25:43):
you lose some of that anger once you start actually empathizing,
especially with Mary. And also because my parents have both
passed away and I've got thirteen nieces and nephews, and
I've kind of created this story which not in a
historical way. It's not like a work of history, but
it actually brings to life my parents in a way
(26:04):
that my nieces and nephews who will never get the
chance to meet them, will be able to meet them
on the page and actually be able to see them
and hear them, and they will also get the genesis
story of their parents in a way that you don't
necessarily sit around a kitchen table and tell a story
like this with this level of detail. But when you
(26:24):
read it, you feel it in a way that you
don't if you just if you're just hearing it. So
I think that for them, I think that's probably the
best part about about it all.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
For you, though, I mean, in a eleven year run
up to this book, and in the meantime, you've actually
established a career for yourself as a published writer, and
you found your voice and you found your craft. And
I'm curious about how necessary those steps were to get
to you to the point where you could actually finish
this book, or you could conceive of the shape of
(26:57):
it or know how to approach it. How different a writer.
Are you now to the one you were when you
started on this?
Speaker 2 (27:03):
I did do an essay based on it with the
Griffith Review in twenty seventeen. But I remember when I
first started writing in that summer in twenty thirteen, I
was writing the story like in the voice of Tolstoy,
and it was like going to be war in peace,
and so it was. It was incredibly overwrought, incredibly overwritten.
The shelleys were kind of monstrous figures. The fear interrepidation
(27:27):
was like dripping from every page. Whereas I think, not
just writing my first book, Car Crash, that was helpful,
but I think writing political essays and interviewing people and
just letting their voice shine through, which is it kind
of taught me not just about the structure of the story,
but how light of a touch you need to give
(27:50):
to provide a narrative. That is, it isn't dripping with
fear interrepidation, that actually has the subtlety and quietness. It
isn't shouting at you, It isn't telling you what to
think about anything. And so I think all those years
of writing those different things and then publishing a book
and then going through their editorial processes, and it got
(28:13):
me to the point where I if I had written
that book even five years ago, it would be a
very different story.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Let Blaine's incredible book, Australing Gospel, A Family Saga is
available at all good bookstores now. I'm pretty sure Justin
Bieber's memoir might have been remainded.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Before we go.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
I wanted to let you know what I've been reading
this week, and I've picked up the latest piece of
Australian rural noir. It's a historical novel. It's set in
nineteen seventy four in the River Arena, and it's called Guanawah.
It's by Ronnie Salt, a local writer, very talented Seceue
so I don't know much about them, but the book
is a really terrific read, lots of fun and has
(29:05):
a mystery at its heart. If you love rural noir,
this is a good one. You can find Ganawa and
all the other books we have mentioned in this episode
at your favorite inde been bookstore. That's it for this
week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends,
rate and review us all the usual things. Put read
this out there in the world. Next week I'm sitting
(29:26):
down with award winning writer Michelle Deekretsa to discuss her
new book, Theory and Practice.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
I would say that when I have finished the book,
I really felt a sense of axhilaration. I felt I
had made something different.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
the generous support of the AR Group. The show is
produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis
Evans and original compositions by Zaltman Fetcher. Thanks for listening,
See you next week.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
S
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