As a barrister, there was one question I desperately wanted to ask Erin Patterson

Sydney Morning Herald

20-07-2025

There is a particular detail about the so-called 'mushroom trial' in Gippsland that I can't get out of my head. Police located and catalogued over 400 books in the home of the defendant, Erin Patterson. The forensic purpose of this analysis was revealed when prosecutor Nanette Rogers, SC, put to the defendant in cross-examination that not one of the books found in her home was devoted to the subject of mushrooms. The point was to demonstrate to the jury that Patterson's purported interest in foraging for fungi was a recent invention, and no more than a feint.
I am a barrister, albeit not of the criminal variety, and I wanted to throw on my robes and be permitted a cameo in Gippsland. I had a question for Patterson. Among the hundreds of books located in her belongings, is there a copy of Shirley Jackson's classic gothic novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle?
Jackson's macabre tale, told from the perspective of Mary Katherine (Merricat), offers a number of eerie parallels with the beef Wellington meal served in Leongatha. Six years before the story starts, Merricat's parents and younger brother have died of arsenic poisoning after sitting down to eat a meal prepared by her sister, Constance. Uncle Julian ingested poison, but survived, and lives with his nieces. Constance was charged with murder, but has been acquitted. Towards the end of the novel, Merricat confides: 'I said aloud to Constance, 'I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die'. Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled, 'The way you did before?' she asked. It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years. 'Yes,' I said after a minute, 'the way I did before'.'
No reason or motive for the murders is ever revealed. The reader is left to sit with the uncomfortable knowledge that Merricat has poisoned her family, but has not told us why.
Spotted among the regular attendees at Patterson's trial were Melbourne authors Chloe Hooper, Sarah Krasnostein and Helen Garner. Hooper is the author of The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (2009), a powerful book about the death in custody of Cameron Doomadgee, and Garner's books about trials and crimes, including This House of Grief: Story of a Murder Trial (2014) deserve their legendary status. Later, it was confirmed that the trio will soon release a book. No doubt it will be a poignant account of the deaths of Gail Patterson, Don Patterson and Heather Wilkinson and the trial of Erin Patterson. I cannot hope to emulate their writing, I have nothing more august to offer than this short piece: This House of Beef (Wellington).
But thinking about the family tragedy behind the mushroom trial has now caused me to dwell on a triumvirate of notorious cases of Victorian children murdered by their fathers that have intersected with my life: Darcey Freeman, the Farquharson boys, and Luke Batty.
My connection with the death of Luke Batty was direct and intimate. I was briefed to appear for his mother Rosie Batty in the 2015 inquest into the death of her son. The tragedy of Luke's murder at the hands of his abusive father haunts me to this day. During the inquest, I experienced but a fraction of the intense media scrutiny that the legal teams have endured during the Patterson trial. And I know how destabilising it can be.
Each day of the inquest there was a phalanx of cameras waiting for us outside the Coroners Court. I was pregnant with my daughter who is now 10 years old. My swelling belly, proof of the life within, felt utterly obscene in light of the tragedy that we were there to attempt to make sense of. By the time of the last sittings in December 2014, I was nearly six months pregnant. I was in the public bathrooms often – attending to the frequent urgent needs of a heavily pregnant woman aged 43. In those small, too close stalls, I could hear women milling near the wash basins tsk-tsking and tutt-tutting over the evidence that had been adduced before the break. I overheard some of them confide in one another that they had nothing to do with either the proceedings or the Batty family, but had taken leave to watch the inquest as a form of spectacle. I remember feeling overcome in the tiny bathroom and needing to move deftly to dodge the outstretched hands of matronly types attempting to touch my growing belly – as if the baby inside me were as much available for public consumption and commentary as the child whose awful death we were all there to bear witness to.