All posts by Michael Burge

Journalist, author, artist
My Story, Writers

Beyond every dead body

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I NEVER SET out to be a crime writer, it was something that crept up on me like the growing awareness of the killer in a whodunnit, and it all started with my early love of Agatha Christie novels.

The prospect of my debut novel Tank Water being consigned to the crime section of major bookshops was a little unsettling; but considering I was a debutante at the age of 51, I had little time to dissemble and embraced my place in one of the world’s highest-selling genres.

Crime has opened doors, not least the invitation to join the board of BAD Sydney, the writer’s festival that platforms journalists, academics, podcasters, broadcasters, film-makers and a myriad of professionals from the justice system.

It’s also led to reporting one of the more heinous crime waves that gripped the suburbs of Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong from the 1970s to the 2010s, an era known as the Gay-hate Decades.

I’m often asked whether I struggle with the brutality of murder when reporting or writing fiction in which the body count mounts up. Consideration around this is so common (and empathic) that I thought it wise to put myself through a challenge a few years ago, to check if I was becoming desensitised.

Pain and trauma

I sought the most disturbing real-life crime I could find, and it didn’t take long to land on Helter Skelter, the seminal book on the Sharon Tate and La Bianca family murders in California in 1969, said to be the highest-selling true-crime publication ever.

Written by trial prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry, this incredible work lays bare the sad and sordid case in a manner that did spark anxiety in me, mainly because the killers – the so-called Manson family – had been part of the popular hippie counterculture of the era.

But I got through it intact, in some ways relieved that I was still able to be shocked by exploring shocking crimes, yet not stymied in my own work.

What drives my interest in crime writing and interviewing crime authors, is that crimes – murders in particular – rarely exist in a vacuum without other themes of grief and justice.

Dead bodies do more than throw up murder suspects, they cause pain and trauma to loved ones and communities. For me, the best crime writing delves into this territory with sensitivity and courage, because it can lift a crime novel’s significance above mere entertainment.

The exploration of grief in crime novels is rare, and although they say order needs to be restored by the end of a classic whodunnit, life is rarely as neat.

I’m also captivated by those aspects of victim/survivor’s lives that show resilience and endurance, where the hope of justice can sometimes be stronger than justice itself, posing the question: is justice ever really attainable?

It’s a fascinating concept, justice, a word with almost no effective synonym, one that means different things to different people.

It meant something to Doris Tate, Sharon Tate’s mother, who worked tirelessly to ensure the voices of surviving families were heard in the Californian judicial system. Her statements during the parole hearings for the convicted former members of the Manson family stand as a critical enduring addendum to Helter Skelter.

Restoring order

Agatha Christie loved a little order restoration at the conclusion of her books, although she didn’t always wrap things up neatly. In her works, lovers survive death and destruction while impatient philanderers get their just desserts. Family members are reunited even while others are split asunder. Most baddies get it in the neck, but some get off scot-free.

This tension between crime and punishment is one of the hallmarks that drives BAD Sydney, the festival that explores what crime can tell us about ourselves.

BOOK NOW

For this year’s event I’m delighted to be hosting two sessions: Bush Justice and Queer Crossroads, both explorations of how law and due process have been lacking in some of Australia’s marginalised and remote communities.

See you there!

BAD Sydney takes place at the State Library of NSW from August 11-14, 2024. Book now.

Reviews, Screen, Take Another Look

Take Another Look: Bruce Beresford’s ‘grandly messy’ Paradise Road

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First stop in a new series of retrospective pop culture reviews examines why Australia’s best female ensemble since Picnic at Hanging Rock disappeared almost without a trace…

IN THE OPENING scene of Bruce Beresford’s WWII epic Paradise Road (1997) the dignity of the Imperial Japanese Army is torn to shreds by privileged white plantation growers and their wives, chatting during a military ball at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel in February 1942. 

Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close) and Topsy Merritt (Julianna Margulies) throw in a few reminders about the effectiveness of the attack on Pearl Harbour, yet even as bombs start interrupting the dancing, Western denial on the imminent fall of Singapore remains dangerously intact.

It’s an apt metaphor for a film that tanked at the global box office after critics swooped, leaving stakeholders baffled about exactly where Paradise Road failed to deliver.

The ingredients for success were all in place. Beresford had a proven track record on war movies like Breaker Morant (1980) and award bait such as Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Producer Sue Milliken had global success with period piece Sirens (1994). 

ENSEMBLE EFFORT Frances McDormand (left) and Cate Blanchett

The Australian film industry’s strongest female ensemble since Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) was headed up by multi Oscar-nominated Close and 1995’s best actress recipient for Fargo, Frances McDormand. Pauline Collins (Shirley Valentine), Margulies (ER), Jennifer Ehle (Pride and Prejudice), Elizabeth Spriggs (Sense and Sensibility) and a swag of established and emerging Australians (including Cate Blanchett in her feature debut) joined an international supporting cast working in four languages.

Production values were extremely high, particularly as a shipload of escaping women and children get scuttled by Japanese pilots and end up in a civilian internment camp in Sumatra. As they enter its barbed-wire gates, this band of socialites, plantation owners and nurses must cohabit with Dutch women, missionaries, nuns and Asians. Hard labour, starvation and brutal physical punishments await, as does the expectation to serve as “comfort women” for enemy officers.

After the hubris of Raffles, their dignity now lies in tatters.

But when Pargiter is overheard crooning a snippet of Elgar before lights out, British missionary Margaret Drummond (Collins, in a beautiful performance with her usual light touch) suggests a plan to raise morale with a vocal orchestra.

“It’s just humming,” complains the camp’s serial spoilsport and comic relief Mrs Tippler (Pamela Rabe), “anyone could do that.”

Which is the point. The pulsating, otherworldly voices make even the Japanese guards hold fire when ordered to break up the first performance of the fledgling ensemble, which requires no language to work its magic. 

Wasn’t dinkum

The real shame of the film’s failure to connect with a wide audience is that the Women’s Vocal Orchestra of Sumatra was real. Pargiter was based on Singapore-born chorale conductor Norah Chambers (1905-1989), and Drummond on British missionary and poet Margaret Dryburgh (1890-1945), both interns of the civilian camp at Palembang, Sumatra. Yet even Close wasn’t sure why Beresford chose to fictionalise these characters.  

Australian critics were lukewarm. There was a sense that the storyline, purported to be well-researched from intern diaries and interviews, just wasn’t dinkum, in part because of the atrocities it omitted.

International critics admired the “grandly messy” production but disliked the lack of narrative, pointing to the “predictable” aspects of the “sprawling” and “linear” story. 

CLOSE CONDUCTING Glenn Close (centre) as orchestra leader Adrien Pargiter

Yet revisiting it recently I finally discerned what’s at work in this deeply moving film. The key is in the conducting, not just Close’s determined and noble portrayal of orchestra leader Pargiter, but Beresford’s.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he’s had a long career as a director of opera. Adapting the wealth of stories about real-life women caught up in war into a 120-minute screenplay required compressing facts into a grand lyrical narrative, in which the exotic setting feels operatic.

So war crimes are punctuated by hummed music and poetry, not big speeches; but when we get those, Close’s English accent is delivered almost as recitative. Emotional instrumental refrains run from Raffles right to the impenetrable jungle, where ever-increasing numbers of handmade crosses mark the lives cut cruelly short by war. Privileged women in reduced circumstances are like a chorus, with plenty of rueful pathos between the big arias, particularly in the hands of stalwarts Wendy Hughes and Penne Hackforth-Jones.

This is no Orange is the New Black (2013-2019), female-driven prisoner stories with 91 episodes to foreground the lives of every ensemble member; Paradise Road is high tragedy shaped by Beresford’s broad baton strokes.

In the release of death or liberation for the camp interns, he conducted a grace note that fell flat in the late 1990s, too close to real events to get away with anything but the complete truth. Watching it in an era that’s in need of all the grace we can get, the way this movie restores the dignity of sworn enemies with “just humming” is sublime.

Paradise Road is streaming on SBS On Demand, ABC iView, Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

Production stills by Jasin Boland.

Books, My Story

New novel coming to light

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ONE OF THE best day jobs I ever had was working as a tour guide at Jenolan Caves, the renowned limestone formation in the World Heritage-listed Greater Blue Mountains region of New South Wales, Australia.

Sixteen years since I earned my guiding boots, I’ve landed an international book deal for a novel that emerged from the thousands of steps I took through the tunnels and chambers of the oldest-known open cave system in the world.

Titled The Watchnight, this historical crime novel is inspired by real people and events and cuts through 150 years of tourist tales to recreate a time when the caves sat on the colonial frontier, a place settlers viewed with suspicion, not wonder. 

Extrapolating a story from this intriguing place has been a long-term challenge. When I trained as a guide in late 2008, there was little written material on hand for new recruits. I was left, like many before me, to glean the stories of the caves from my more experienced peers in the guides’ office.

CAVE FRONTIER Devil’s Coach-house, Fish River Caves, by Lucien Henry, 1883 (Art Gallery of NSW)

What drove me were the stories few wanted to talk about, particularly the lives of Jenolan Caves’ traditional owners, the Burra Burra clan group of the Gundungurra people; the cattle farmers who gradually occupied the same countryside; the Wesleyan Methodist community of the nearby region once known as Fish River Creek, now Oberon, and the role of women in early cave exploration.

Crime was never far from the colonial experience of this region. The massacres and random killings of Aboriginal people and reprisals against settlers, now referred to as Australia’s Frontier Wars, included widespread violence against women, both Indigenous and settlers. The occupation of the land was not possible without the importation of convicts to build roads and towns, a mounted police force to impose British law, and Christian missionaries to impose ethical standards.

It’s from within this volatile battleground that The Watchnight emerged.

Cave Girls

I undertook years of research as The Watchnight came together, and wrote a few articles along the way about my explorations into Jenolan’s past. The first saw me capture the many tales about a young cave explorer called Katie Webb (and her gang of ‘Cave Girls’), whose discovery of a chamber in the Chifley Cave in the 1880s has long been a source of speculation.

A never-before-published collection of letters by English crime writer Agatha Christie was a source of great delight when it appeared in 2013, since it detailed her visit to Jenolan in the 1920s. I published an article about the links between her world tour with husband Archie, their slightly fraught jaunt to Jenolan Caves, and her notorious 11-day disappearance in 1926 back in England.

My guiding days ended in 2012 when I moved interstate, but I was lucky enough to return in 2017 for a private tour of the Arch Cave with a former colleague, in search of historical signatures, including one of early female cave explorer Jane Falls.

The Watchnight’s heroine Oona Farry is inspired by Jane’s explorations, and those of other real-life figures in Jenolan’s history.

BUY

This story is unique because it explores crime, punishment and forgiveness in the context of charismatic faith; tackles stories of the Frontier Wars that don’t often get aired in fiction, particularly toxic masculinity, and emphasises female, LGBTIQ+ and Indigenous empowerment at a time when they were not afforded much agency.