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 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 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 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.
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 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 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
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 with Leck 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 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
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 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.
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, 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.
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?
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 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. 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 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 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
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 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 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 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,
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 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 and an MBA and we 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 wight. 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. Ah, 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, 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.
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 damaged kids is incredibly moving.
Tell us a bit about your mum.
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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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 archangel 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 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 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, 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 an 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 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 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 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 started 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. 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 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 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, Australing Gospel, A Family Saga is available at all good bookstores now. I'm pretty sure Justin Bieber's memoir might have been remainded.
Before we go.
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 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 down with award winning writer Michelle Deekretsa to discuss her new book, Theory and Practice.
I would say that when I have finished the book, I really felt a sense of axhilaration. I felt I had made something different.
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.
S