Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Each Sunday, we're sharing one of our favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This. The show features interviews with some of the best and most beloved writers from Australia and around the world. Today, we're going to hear from star investigative reporter Louise Milligan, who's discussing her first novel, The Pheasant's Nest. Michael Williams is the host of Read This, and he's with me. Now, Hi, Michael, how are.
You, Ruby Jones.
I'm very well. How are you?
I'm great?
Thank you.
So I imagine that most of our listeners will be more familiar with Louise Milligan's work as an investigative reporter, So just as a refresher, can you remind us of the true stories that she became famous for telling?
Absolutely, lou Milligan is really one of the country's most celebrated storytellers and it's her work for Four Corners and more widely for the ABC. Is always kind of investigative in nature and always deeply compassionate about the name nature of victims of crime. It's one of her kind of watchwords. People might know her in particular for her book Cardinal, which won the Walkley Book Award, and that was her
telling the George Pell story. And then she followed that up with another book called Witness, which was shining a light on the experience and pain of victim survivors going through our broken legal system. And in both of those, as in her journalism, she showed that she is the kind of expert chronicler of what it is to give voice to the voiceless when it comes to crime in our society.
Okay, tell me a little bit about this first novel, The Pheasant's Nest and what someone like Louise can bring to the crime fiction genre.
Well, all those qualities do come to bear in her first novel. Maybe the biggest surprise is how good she is and the kind of propulsiveness that you want from a good crime novel. You know, this is a book that does tell the story of a broken criminal justice system, does draw heavily on her journalistic experience and the conversation she's had with people touched by crime. But the book's a real romp, like, it's a real page turner, and
that's one of the nicest things. And to hear her describe it, that impulse that compulsion to tell a good story is one hundred percent of product of an Irish Catholic upbringing.
And I should mention that this episode it does mention sexual assault, so please take care while listening. Coming up in just a moment, Louise Milligan wears her heart on her sleeve.
I remember when I sort of came of age. I suppose my mum is one of eleven, you know, the full Irish Catholic catastrophe. So mum was the third oldest, and the three older girls were each given younger children to look after because Nana just couldn't look after all the kids. And the third youngest, Michael, was always a really sort of interesting person, and he was a fitter and turner. He sort of left school, you know, none of them went to university or anything like that, very
working class and whatever. But he went to America on a soccer scholarship and he ended up studying literature in New York, and he really sort of started off My love of Irish literature got me into Joyce and Yates and me I was already into Oscar Wild because I was a fan of the Smiths.
So good.
I was like a good gateway drug.
Total gateway drug.
Yeah, one of those people who sat on the floor of nightclubs, you know, pale makeup and black clothes and reading Oscar Wild very seriously.
One of the things about a big family like that is the importance of telling stories. And one of the words that I most hate when journalists use it, but actually is most fitting for that kind of storytelling is a yarm like the idea of yarning being a really important way of connecting with other people. Has that always been the way for you?
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely in Irish culture, but also Scottish culture, so my dad is Scottish and being able to be a good storyteller and a good singer as well are really important things in those cultures and you're brought up with it. And actually as a television journalist, you know, I always say, if you can get an Irish person into a story, you're going to be fine. They don't have that, you know, classically understated taciturn thing that Australians
often have. You know, Australians have that sort of tall, poppy, don't talk yourself up kind of vibe, whereas Irish people just just want to talk to you, you know, and joke telling, and you know all of that is like a huge part of the culture.
And putting yourself out there is absolutely fine. I'm like the Australian thing where you know that we respect the circumspect, the laconic that, oh I don't care too much or I'm not going to kind of be full wrote it, and there was something nice about a tradition that says, if something's funny, laugh loud, and if it's sad, have a good cry.
Absolutely and also a culture where you know, at the end of the night everyone gets up and has their turn to sing. You know, you just would never do that in a stay there.
I think four corners would be improved if at the end of the episode you had to belt out a number.
Look, I have to tell you, Michael, I'm not bad at a show too.
I have no doubt. I suspect that when those cameras go off, there's a bit going on there. I'm curious about the relationship between, for lack of a better word, repression of one's voluble nature, one's show tunes, one's storytelling on the one hand, and the role that plays. I guess in a career like journalism, where you want to be taken seriously, where you want to be trusted, where
being authoritative relies on gravitas. And I'm curious about whether that's something that you felt constrained by as you've come up in your career.
I am not a journalist who you know, is very serious all the time. I do wear my heart on my sleeve, and I think that that enables me to empathize with people. And you know, people have often said to me, how do you get these people over the line? You know? Sometimes I've had situations where I've secured interviews with people who were being offered money by the commercials, And how do you do that? Just by being decent
and kind? So yeah, I mean, I think that stereotype of the journalist who doesn't show anything it is a very male idea and it's not who I am.
Is that something that you had to learn to have the confidence in for yourself? Though? I mean, I imagine coming up through things like cadet chips and then newsrooms that very masculinous tradition, those kind of expectations and constraints, there would have been attempts to impose them on you, even if you're resistant them.
Oh, there was certainly an idea that don't get ahead of yourself Milligan, you know, like and I actually thought think that was quite good in a way, because when I was coming through journalism, I did a law degree, and a lot of the people who started around the same time as me did, and those people who had been high achievers at school and that sort of thing.
But that doesn't necessarily make you a good journal Being a good journal you have to have humility, and any sense of having tickets on yourself was absolutely beaten out of you. And so I quite liked that. And I think some of the things that happened back then you couldn't get away with now in terms of managers. You know, there'd be complaints to HR. But it made you, i don't know, not have an overinflated sense of your place
in the world, you know, especially when I wouldn't. This doesn't apply to me, but a lot of the people who were coming through, because they were people, you know, with law degrees and who were high achievers at schools and stuff like that, they were coming from private schools, They were coming from quite a lot of privilege, with an expectation that, you know, life is going to go pretty well for them, whereas the generation before us were
people who often didn't go to university, had done cadetships, were sort of hard drinking, smoking, you know, sort of like you know, getting the yarns sort of people. Yeah, and I think it was a good balance for my generation.
I do think there's a lot in that notion you mentioned of humility and the relationship between humility and being a custodian of other people's stories. I mean, a big part of what makes you one of the countries foremost journalists in your books of nonfiction really kind of capture this is the ways in which you've honed your craft to take other people's stories and find ways to honor them, to do them justice, and to connect them with a readership.
And that challenge of believing in your own value in terms of being in the room and being able to do it, but knowing how to be sent to yourself seems to me to be at the heart of what you do. Yeah.
I mean, my parents are the most decent people that you ever want to meet. My dad is a classic social justice Catholic, and they will give you the clothes off their back. They will do anything to help someone and That's what I was sort of brought up with.
And I've always been attracted to telling the stories of people who are otherwise voiceless, people who don't have all the privileges that I have, and particularly people who have been, you know, victims of one sort of trauma or another, giving them the ability to have a voice, but in a very respectful way and in an empathetic way.
How much of making the move to fiction was about an escape, about telling a propulsive story, and how much of it was shining a light, as you have in your journalism, on the ways in which these stories aren't told, or the gaps that exist in the way that they're told.
Well, I definitely wanted to write the story from the point of view of the victim, survivor. I didn't write this as crime fiction. I just wrote the books that I wanted to write. And I guess it has a crime in it, so it's sort of slightly in the crime fiction category. But a lot of crime fiction, the often female victim is sort of disembodied almost we don't really know much about her, and it's about the police, and it's about the twists and turns and all of
that sort of thing. I wanted to kind of subvert that and to make the survivor at the center, because I have through my work spoken to hundreds of survivors of sexual crimes, and I didn't want them to be a victim in the sense of someone that you just kind of feel sorry for. I wanted her to be strong. So,
for instance, she absolutely hates her kidnapper. She thinks he's a complete idiot, and that sense of annoyance actually gives her some power, and it also gives her the opportunity to kind of use her gallows humor, which has got her buy as a journalist and which gets us all by as journalists. And so you know, that comes into the book quite a bit. So I guess that definitely
informed what I was doing. I first started writing this book back in twenty fifteen, and that was not that long after I had covered the case of Jill Maher, the Irish Australian woman who worked at the ABC was not a journalist but was tragically murdered. And I had been the first person to interview Jill's husband, Tom, who was a lovely guy, and there was some suspicion around Tom at the start, and I was thinking about writing
a novel about what if Jill Maher didn't die? And I think part of that was because I was so affected by her death, like so many people were in Melbourne. She had that ultimate sense of being someone that everyone could relate to, and so it was almost, in some ways a bit of a tribute to her and to Tom and to her family. And then I got really caught up with my journalism and basically I wrote three chapters, put it away for seven years, wrote my first book, Cardinal,
my second book, Witness. You know, got sued by the Attorney General.
The list goes on as.
A new standard couple of years in anyone's life.
They've all been there, got a cross examined by Robert Richter, you know, all of those things. Seven years went by, and then I came back to it when I was at a time where I was feeling quite low and I needed another I needed an outlet, and this novel really became therapy for me.
When we return, Louise reveals how her work as an investigative journalist informs the characters in her novel We'll be right back. Tell me about Kate Delaney. She's the main character of your debut novel, Pheasant's Nest, And I'm really keen to dig into the idea about whether it's liberating to work in fiction or whether it's just a separate set of challenges. And I want to start with Kate
because she is someone who's biographical details. It's a world you know very well, so you're able to illustrate a number of things very efficiently.
Yeah, I mean, she is like me, an Irish Australian journalist. She's a newspaper journalist. She's not me. She has very much her own character. She's an only child who has lost her parents. She's someone and this I really relate to being a migrant as a small child. There's a sense of being an outsider, a misfit, especially as sort of a bookish one, and that creates a grit in her.
And also she has this mother who really sort of wants the best for her, and for instance, every morning lays out all the newspapers on the table like a general with maps, and you know, plunks her in front of the ABC and wants this only child to be someone. And she's someone who's had some traumas, but she's someone with a really really big heart. And a big personality. When she walks into a room, you can't help but notice her. But sometimes that puts people off as well.
She's not perfect by any means. She can be quite a snob, but she's endearing. I wanted to create a character that was really unforgettable, that people really wanted the best for. And the same applies to her boyfriend, Liam, who is a medical negligence lawyer who she's met on a story. They are both people who were misfits on the playground. They are talking, but they're sort of like
endearing at the same time, they're sort of Yeah. I just wanted people to care about these characters, and you know, at the end of the book wish that they were still in the reader's life.
Often journals make the leap to fiction not very well badly. Yes, yeah, no, I'm going to be honest. Yeah. And I was trying to think about what worked for me so well in your novel and and made you the exception to that rule. One of the things is character and detail and minor character.
I think often there's something a little functional about the way characterization happens in a novel from someone who's not used to thinking in those terms, and there's something about the humanity of even the kind of brief walk on roles that you do. You have not to be reductive, but a good cop and a bad cop in the course of the novel, or one who is held back from doing his job well because of his personal failings as a character, and another one who is doing his
job well despite the trauma that he's seen. And that kind of detail and character seems really important to you.
Yeah, well, I think with both of those cops. The cop who fails, he does so for sort of the right reasons, in a way. He has been watching domestic violence play out in technicolor detail in his work for years. He's a gay man who loves his sisters and his mother and loves women and is absolutely horrified by the way that men feel that they can do terrible things to women, and so he lands on Liam, the boyfriend. He also finds Liam, you know, he's a bit of
a hipster. He finds him annoying. This guy's a cop. He's like very sort of straight laced, and he just yeah, So.
That's the thing, the pettiness and the spite, which is absolutely accurate. We all do it. Snap judgments whatever. Yeah, but the way in which you demonstrate that despite not being a bad cop per se, not being a bad person, but just being a human being, means that he doesn't do his job well.
He doesn't do it well. And then the other one, Peter Dan Brosio, he is based on, you know, snatches of a lot of police that I have worked with who have PTSD, and his PTSD is quite crippling, to the point where he has to go off work on sick, as he calls it, for a while. And to some extent, he's slightly based on a police officer that I knew who got to the point where he was putting tinfoil on his windows because the insurance company would film him when he went outside to the bins and so on.
They were trying to prove that he was not really injured. But he's also a very soft character. And having got to know a lot of police, they often get a bad rap, you know, they're often put into a box about what sort of person is a police officer. And I have spent a lot of time with police at their most vulnerable, and they they're the sort of people who they are incredibly loyal. So if you help them, they will remember for years. They will lay out the
red carpet for you for years as a journalist. But I guess a lot of people don't really understand them. And it's very kind of lonely. And that's sort of what's happening with this guy. And his life is just really sort of unraveling. You know. He finds himself having a lap dance with a stripper who's got dental braces and black roots and blonde hair, and he sleeps on the couch at work and there are two minute noodles stuck down the side of the couch and he's really
just existing. But what I wanted with him was someone who just needed to get a win, and he just wants to find Kate Delaney. And because and I mean, this was something that I could sort of inject my knowledge of journalism. Because Kate Delaney is a journalist in this sort of media kind of conception of celebrity, the crime media conception of celebrity. She goes from being a sort of a moderately well known newspaper reporter to a beautiful, like one of Australia's most well known journalists.
Of course, the story's custom made one of us, one.
Of us, and if one of us is missing, then you know, the police commissioners saying to Dan Brosio, you better bloody find this woman because this is going to be a disaster. You know, it's in the papers every day, and that all the slickly presented commercial television reporters are doing breathless live crosses about it, and it's this sort of race against time, and he is feeling that so keenly.
The books ondenly just come out, so maybe too soon, But do you think about the various cops of your aquaintance, lawyers, journalists, victim survivors who are going to read this and be spotting themselves on the pages or looking for the shadows and echoes of their own stories.
Look, I am sort of a magpie and so I'm pulling little bits and pieces from places. There is only one person in the book who is an actual person, and she's now dead, and that was my great maternal Auntie Chrissy. But she's called Auntie Maggie in the book. She's pretty much exactly as she was Apart from her. Everyone else they have elements, but they're not the person.
Would Kate Delaney at the end of the night belt out show tunes.
I think she probably would.
And what would her go to be.
I mean, my go to is doun Ka Shane by Wayne Newton, very.
Strong, good, that's you, that's your inner Ferispuela right there one.
Yeah, I think she'd probably like that too.
I can see you swinging the microphone with Gusto.
That's don't even get me started.
I'm very tempted. I'm tempted to try it, like cue up the track, get it going, We're gonna This is a book about many serious and difficult things and horrible things, but at the same time, there's still room for Luise milligand to have a song, and that's pretty important. Holding those two things is equally true.
Yeah, Adaman, Look, one of the things that I was really really wanting to do was have a lot of levity in the book, because you know, I didn't want it to be a punish I wanted it to be a book. Book that doesn't patronize the reader, that is intelligent, but at the same time it isn't painful to read.
And know you're going again like you've got the fiction bug. You can't resistant In the same world.
I am writing a second book and it is partially set in Ireland and it is connected.
Excellent.
Yeah, so I'm really excited about it.
Louise Mulligan's first novel, Pheasants Next, is widely available now.
Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with Malcolm Knox and Mary Beard. And if you don't want to wait until next Sunday to dive in to Read This, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts