Latest news with #WeHaveAlwaysLivedintheCastle
Sydney Morning Herald
20-07-2025
- Sydney Morning Herald
As a barrister, there was one question I desperately wanted to ask Erin Patterson
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.
The Age
19-07-2025
- The Age
As a barrister, there was one question I desperately wanted to ask Erin Patterson
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.
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford review – wild trouble in a child's world
This debut looks back at a summer birthday party in rural New England in the late 1980s. The narrator, never named, is perhaps seven years old at the time, and part of a group of 10 cousins, 'give or take', who are left to their own devices as the adults turn inwards, talking about family troubles and controversies centred on the life of the grandmother, Beezy. We are in 'horse country': 'split-rail fences and birch and pine woods and a few old houses landed like dice rolling way off the playing board into their own shaded grottos for ever'. The narrator recalls their part as the watchful child: the one who notices that adult conversation 'just rowed across the surface' under which lie the mysteries that might shape a child's life. From an upstairs window the children see a large creature, '15 per cent bigger than a big cat', moving rapidly from the treeline. While the kids are distracted, the youngest, Abi, who is three years old and has a broken arm in a cast, runs outside in pursuit and disappears. The eldest, Travis, who is 12 and Abi's brother, leads them out into the strange world beyond the house to search for her, with awful and lasting consequences. Bamford conjures, in vivid, amplified language, how children fluidly and unpredictably make sense of the world through the little that they know and the much that they see, unmoored from the rigidity of adult apprehension, so often trapped in convention and cliche. 'The shadows of the house were the black sails of sailboats, meaning that the side of the house was the ocean's surface and we were walking on the sky, maybe even along the horizon …' The child's vision, shadowed as in a Grimms' fairytale, comes through the adult narrator's voice, suggesting that the grownup has not entirely left childhood behind. Unguided and 'alone at sea', the children head into peril, where their mistakes begin to leave marks: 'we were filled with dread topped with a scummy layer of remorse'. They look for adult help, only to come up against a 'sturdy wall' of unnoticing. The children begin 'tugging, whispering, whining', but the grownups are 'transfixed on the bright star of past transgressions and nothing we could do seemed to unfix them'. The storytelling voice of the novel is not so much that of an unreliable narrator as an account of the unreliability, limits and instability of memory, of our versions of what happened and how we become who we are. In this way, Idle Grounds recalls not only the atmosphere of Robert Aickman's strange tales but his observation that 'Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.' It might be labelled for convenience as a gothic novel, and it has clear antecedents, not least in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but like all the best genre fiction it makes its own singular and potent space for the reader. The novel is unsettlingly, sharply funny at times, with carefully built-up layers of dis-ease delivered in a comic deadpan; demonstrating, as the narrator observes, that 'humour is braided with misfortune'. Bamford is clearly aware of what EF Benson knew, that the fear that takes hold in bright sunlight can be the deepest of all. Stories of divorce and the disappointments of maturity emerge, along with a hazy account of the family house the narrator's parents grew up in, in which all that went wrong with grandmother Beezy 'had travelled backwards to infect all the stuff that had happened before, all the way back to their births and before that even, and everything tasted a little bit like sadness'. Bamford shows that what we do and who we are as adults makes the world in which children act and grow – especially those stories in our childhoods from which we have not escaped. Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at Delivery charges may apply.
