These three noted authors – all of whom had written about criminal trials previously- were not the only ones transfixed by the Erin Patterson trial. Just as had occurred with Lindy Chamberlain 40 years earlier, it seemed that everyone in Australia had a view over whether 49-year old Erin Patterson had deliberately poisoned her former in-laws and their relatives using deathcap mushrooms or whether it was an inadvertent and tragic accident. Beef Wellington and mushrooms became a running, if somewhat uneasy joke, and reports of the trial went around the world.
And who better to look at it than these three women? Helen Garner, who after a noted career in fiction-writing turned to courtroom reporting with Joe Cinque’s Consolation (my review here) and This House of Grief (my review here), approaches a trial with her own moral weighing-scales in hand, interrogating not only what she is hearing but what she thinks she would do in similar circumstances. Chloe Hooper was the author of two books centering on court cases: The Tall Man about the death of indigenous man Mulrunji while in police custody in 2004, and the trial of Chris Hurley, the police officer accused of Muylrunji’s death in custody (my review here) and The Arsonist, the police case and resultant trial of Brendan Sokaluk, the man found guilty of intentionally lighting the Churchill fires on Black Saturday 2009 (my review here). Sarah Krasnostein is probably better known for her book The Trauma Cleaner (my review here) which does not have a legal focus, but I have recently read, and been very impressed by Krasnostein’s lengthy essay in November 2023 in the Monthly “Peace in the Home: The Trial of Malka Leifer”, about child abuser Malka Leifer. This essay earned her a Walkley Prize.
The subtitle of the book is ‘Conversations on a triple murder trial’ and this is exactly what it is: a series of conversations recorded in the car to and from Morwell to sit in on the trial. As the trial goes on and all three can no longer attend together, telephone conversations take place from motel rooms to the others in Melbourne. Their conversations reflect the personality and authorial concerns of each of the writers: Chloe Hooper conceptualizes the trial in terms of fairystories and archetypes reflecting her first book A Child’s Book of True Crime, while Sarah Krasnostein brings her lawyer’s mind to what she is witnessing. Helen Garner, who has admitted that, with age, the idea of writing a whole book is beyond her, contributes her own reflections on moral culpability interspersed with some rather odd, off-centre observations of things around her. I confess at times to feeling that they were like a Greek chorus, or dare I even say, Macbeth’s witches (!!), commenting from a distance and without personal ramifications. Apparently, there were plans, since abandoned, for it to form the basis for a podcast and in the days of True Crime podcasts where the narrator becomes part of the action, they are operating in a crowded field. The book does have the fingerprints of haste as well – having to get ahead of the deluge of books that will no doubt follow the trial- but it gave you the feeling of sitting in the back seat of the car, talking things over, trying to make sense of a crime so strange and unbelievable.
I’m not sure that this book will stand the test of time: its approach is probably too immediate and its appeal too wrapped up in the current-day reputations of the authors. But for us now, having read the newspaper articles and seen the television interviews and reports of the trial, it’s like having a good gossip with friends.
My rating: 8.5/10
Read because: curiosity. What else?
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 