Hi There. It's Ruby Jones and it's time to settle in for another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by editor of The Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, we're going to hear from writer and journalist Leck Blaine, whom Michael spoke with late last year at Camera Writers Festival. As always, I'm joined by Michael to tell me a bit more about the episode.
Hi Michael, Hi Ruby.
So, Michael leck Blaine's new book, Australian Gospel A Family Saga, is a memoir and it traces this incredible story of Lex's family and his foster siblings. He is only thirty three years old, but this is actually his second memoir, isn't it.
Yes? When you put it like that, Ruby, it does seem like the most precocious thing in the world to have two memoirs by thirty three. But to be fair to let Blaine, he has lived a life and then some. The first book that he brought out up was called Car Crash and it was the story of his life in the aftermath of this horrendous road accident that killed several of his friends. It was a very powerful debut.
It got a lot of critical acclaim. Since then, he's mainly written political journalism stuff, a couple of quarterly essays, some writing for the Monthly and for elsewhere. But the second volume deals very much with a family story and the story of his parents and his foster siblings. And it's this wild, outrageous, irresistible story. So I don't begrudge him. Two memoirs by thirty three.
And a lot of people I know have been talking about this book. There's been a lot of praise for it over the summer. Why do you think it has had this really strong response.
Look, people love a charismatic cult leader type and that does appear here. There are all kinds of twists and turns. It reads like a kind of incredible true crime story in a way. It follows Michael and Mary Shelley, who were these missionaries who grew up in privileged North Sydney families and then after various challenges with both drugs and mental illness, dropped out and became roving Christians who would go around the countryside picking fights with people in all
kinds of extraordinary ways. They had a number of kids, and three of those kids were adopted by the Blaine family, Le's parents, and the story follows what happens when the birth parents and the foster parents collide, and the ways in which that was a kind of shadow across Lex's childhood. It's an extraordinary story.
Coming up in just a moment. The tangled branches of Lech Blaine's family tree, 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 with Lek introducing us to some of the key players.
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 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 Botany Bay and met a woman named Carry, who would eventually change her name to Mary Shelley. And she was also from incredible privilege. She was born in Lund and taken to Sydney when she was eleven, grew up in the Eastern suburbs. Her father was an incredibly successful restauranteur and King's Cross and she subsequently suffered a nervous 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 to pack everything up, get rid of all their things, and he chiked 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, and their names
were changed to Stephen and John. 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, and Mum felt pregnant with me about forty eight hours after Hanna'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.
Leck I want to start in twenty seventeen when you went on conversations with Richard Faidler 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?
Funnily enough, very little.
A lot of my closest friends had 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 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 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 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 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 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, and 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 before she died.
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
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.
Why. I guess everyone wants to do that occasionally, don't know.
Oh oh yeah, I'm not in my family tree.
I promise you.
So that was something that I did think about a bit, and I made the decision to lead 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 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 refer to their children as their birth names, and then my siblings Stephen, John, and Hannah, who are referred to by their names when
they were placed with the blains. And so that was 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.
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 moving 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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.
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.
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 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 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 in an MBA and he started a PhD, which he never 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, 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 weight, and then my parents, Well, dad was a one hundred and
thirty kilogram publican and country Queensland who loved sport, loved gambling and loved alcohol. So out of all the crazy things in the book, like that has got to be one of the craziest is life.
Just like he's manifested. He's like Michael's worst nightmare come.
To life as your dad.
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.
He says to a bouncer he hires at the pub, keep an eye out for 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.
Is it skinnier than a minute to six?
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 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 damage kids, is incredibly moving. Tell us a bit about your mum.
Yes, so they were similar in the sense that they both had quite traumatic upbringers, 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 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 of nervous breakdowns, but she was blessed with this incredible intellect, which wasn't really nourished in any formal ways. 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 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 crush 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 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 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 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.
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 primary school going 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 family to kind of circle around from that age. Can you talk about the first time Mary came back on the scene.
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 happened, and that was kind of how it felt. I was actually cricket training and I remember getting back with Dad and there were just police cars everywhere, and you know, we sort of thought 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 Shelley's 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 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 research into the Shelleys and I see them
in three dimensional ways. But when with Michael in town and with Mary and Tye like this is not long after September eleven, I literally saw Michael Shelley as being like a sa 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 much more like dad, and so she weathered that whole situation with a lot more stoicism than I did. But yeah, it was a very very genuine view that they would attempt to kidnap her.
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 that, 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 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 in so much of the story.
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 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 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 arch angel sent to 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 just how poisonous of an effect he had on the lives of many people, but particularly on the life of his third wife Mary.
If we can return for a second to your conversation with Richard Faidler in twenty seventeen. You know, at that point you've been researching and thinking about it as a book, 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 they've all got stories of the Shelleys one way or the other.
That was, Yeah, that was remarkable, and that added to my understanding of who these people were before they were the Shelleys or 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 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 explanation for it, but also knowing that the children 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.
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, 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.
How hard.
Is it with your siblings and their role in the story, how much ambivalence do they have about the telling of it.
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 in the stuff that I've found out. So through 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 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 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 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 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.
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've 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 it or know how to approach it. How different a writer are you now to the one you were when you start on this.
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 indible.
It was incredibly overwrought, incredibly overwritten. The shelleys were kind of monstrous figures. The fear interrepidation 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 to provide a narrative.
That is, it isn't dripping with fear interrepidation, that actually has the subtlety and the 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 the editorial processes, and it got me to the point where I if I had written that book even five years ago, it would be a very different story.
Let Blaine's incredible book, A Straaming Gospel, A Family Saga is available at all Good bookstores.
Now.
I'm pretty sure Justin Bieber's memoir might have been remained it.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This Next week, we'll be sharing Michael's conversation with two time Miles Franklin winner Michelle da Kretze. As always, if you want to dive in to read this, you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts. There are more than seventy episodes and the archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.