Australian Gospel: A Family Saga by Lech Blaine review – a sensational tale, skilfully told
In a quiet moment at the end of the first act of Australian Gospel, Lech Blaine’s mother Lenore, a “saviour of the small details”, sits at her desk and types up that day’s diary entry about life with her husband, Tom, and their three foster kids Steve, John and Trent. Hannah, the biological sister of Steve and John, hasn’t yet arrived on the scene, nor has another foster daughter, Rebecca. Lech, Lenore and Tom’s only biological offspring, hasn’t been conceived. The household hasn’t yet been upended by the violent harassment of Michael and Mary Shelley, the biological parents of Steve, John and Hannah.
Australian Gospel tracks the relationship between the Shelleys and the Blaines over several tumultuous decades. Lenore told her family that one day she’d be the one to write the story of the “Shelley Gang”. She didn’t live to do so, and Australian Gospel is dedicated to her. Fair enough, as Lenore’s records of family life provide Blaine (the author of 2021’s Car Crash: A Memoir) with a rich fund of small details to draw on. As well as working through his mother’s files, Blaine interviewed hundreds of people whose paths crossed the Shelleys’, including his siblings and parents. He sifted through court records, foster care reports and newspaper archives in order to understand the events and relationships that form the narrative arc of Australian Gospel.
What a sensational story it is, and hard to summarise without making the book sound like a crass potboiler overstuffed with colourful characters and melodrama. The bare bones go something like this: the Shelleys are itinerant missionaries who renounce their posh upbringings to crusade against contemporary decadence, losing custody of their children along the way. Their various court appearances – to answer charges of vagrancy, harassment, stalking and trespass – were tabloid fodder during the 1980s and 1990s.
Related: Highways and Byways by Jimmy Barnes review – compassionate collection from a master yarnsmith
The Blaines are working-class publicans who move around regional Queensland with their growing family of foster kids and dalmatians, accompanied by a huge crowd of cousins, comrades and friends. In their atheist egalitarianism, joie de vivre and love of sport, they epitomise everything the Shelleys despise about Australian culture. When the Shelleys discover their kids are living with the Blaines, they terrorise the family in a campaign to regain custody of their children.
The Shelleys turn up to the house, threaten Tom and Lenore, frighten the kids; one afternoon, Hannah finds Mary lying in her bed. The family moves house, and successfully seeks restraining orders against the Shelleys, but the harassment doesn’t stop. The Shelleys turn up uninvited at Tom’s pub and in Steven’s university lectures, and generate an unending torrent of abusive correspondence. They send letters to everyone in Queensland with the surname Blaine, telling them Tom is a paedophile, and orchestrate the kidnapping of another child fostered with a different family. They harass politicians, church leaders and doctors. There are celebrity cameos, marriages, unfair deaths, a few births and a ton of marvellous small details.
It is to Blaine’s enormous credit that he tells this sensational story with compassion, intelligence and great wit. Australian Gospel is a captivating work of narrative nonfiction, at once a tremendously moving story of family life, and a profound meditation on family-making and the legacies of love, grief and trauma that get passed from one generation to the next.
The Gospels offer four competing accounts of the life of Jesus Christ. Early on, Blaine tells us that he worked on his book in an office with “four cork boards on the walls”: “The Gospel of Michael. The Gospel of Mary. The Gospel of Tom. The Gospel of Lenore.” Australian Gospel tells the story of these four parents and their kids in a way that seeks to accommodate their irreconcilable perspectives. And so there’s room in the book not just for Mary and Michael’s poisonous behaviour but for their devotion to their children, and their heartbreak at being separated from them.
In a note at the end of the book, Blaine acknowledges that many of the accounts he relied upon contradict each other. Australian Gospel is, he insists, a work of creative nonfiction, not history or journalism. To some readers this might sound like a cop-out. To me, it reveals an honest reckoning with how a story like this, thick with love and conflict, can be told, especially by an author who is deeply attached to its protagonists.
Many messiahs compete for the reader’s attention in Australian Gospel – and yet the impulse of Blaine’s book is assiduously anti-messianic. Here is an author who knows that moral clarity can be a fig leaf for hypocrisy, and worse. In Australia, Blaine writes, “there was a thin line between the winners and the losers; the good Samaritans and the criminals; the saints and the sinners”.
Even after witnessing years of their vile harassment of his parents and siblings, Blaine resists using his power as a narrator to pass vengeful judgment of the Shelleys. He doesn’t crib expertise to explain or rationalise why the Shelleys acted as they did, or the Blaines for that matter. The reader of Australian Gospel is not bludgeoned with potted digressions on attachment theory or the history of out-of-home care in Australia, for example.
In keeping his attention on the small details, Blaine makes sure the story he is telling about his family isn’t mistaken for a universal truth. His siblings “won the foster care lottery” when they were placed with Tom and Lenore; many kids in care are not nearly so lucky. Blaine can observe that awareness of the dire impact of forced child removal on Aboriginal families has shifted public discourse on foster care, without latching his family’s story on to the systemic injustice experienced by the stolen generations.
When Australian Gospel closes, Tom and Lenore have both died, as have Michael and Mary. We are left with a series of vignettes of the adult lives Steven, John and Hannah have made for themselves with their partners and children. While working a student job as a cleaner, Hannah is congratulated by a condescending woman for being “just remarkable”: “The drunken socialites of the eastern suburbs were gobsmacked that a foster girl from country Queensland wasn’t a junkie or an alcoholic.” Hannah and the Blaine siblings know that their thriving wasn’t pre-ordained by the God of their biological parents, and wasn’t a matter of good character or genetics either. Hannah tells the socialites: “I had a great upbringing.”
In this, Australian Gospel is a welcome antidote to the Australian mythology of lucky strivers and exceptional individuals who achieve social mobility through force of will and a few good breaks. It’s a book that affirms the importance of the social bonds that form through families and communities, in sports clubs, unions and pubs.
We’ve become perhaps too accustomed to hearing family values invoked by conservatives and reactionaries. The Michael Shelleys of this world are more than ready to summon the patriarchal imperatives of blood and destiny in order to rule over their families and judge others. Many families remain unsafe for women and children. And yet Blaine here proposes a progressive vision of family life that follows the model created by his brave, rambunctious, generous parents. It’s an incredible yarn, and mighty well told – and for all that, the standout accomplishment of Australian Gospel is its reparative insistence that loving, joyful families can be made in the most unlikely circumstances.
Australian Gospel: A Family Saga by Lech Blaine is out 5 November through Black Inc. ($36.99)
