Malus, Carol Patterson’s debut novel to be launched tomorrow, is about personal and public corruption in our island home and the elite cartels who perpetrate it.
The novel’s title embraces both the genus of the cultivated plant that gave us the “Apple Isle” moniker, and an identical Latin word with a different root that means (and sounds) bad or evil. As every Tasmanian knows, an apple’s bright, shiny exterior is no guarantee of goodness within.
Malus is set in 1993 but harks back to nature controversies of earlier decades, examining the troubled relationship between our home’s natural wonders and the powerful vested interests seeking constantly to exploit them.
Passionate, opinionated Hugh Dell was a powerful presence in the Mercury newsroom when I joined the paper as a cadet journalist in 1964. He left a few years later to become a Labor staffer, just before Angus Bethune’s Liberals spoiled Labor’s party by winning the 1969 election.
Labor had instigated the flooding of Lake Pedder, Tasmania’s celebrated wilderness jewel with its startling white beach, for the Gordon hydro scheme. The 1972 campaign that brought Eric Reece’s Labor back to power also raised the awkward possibility that the flooding was illegal, a wrinkle that Reece and his skilful fixer, Merv Everett, quickly ironed out in parliament by means of a “doubts removal” bill.
When Dell learned from a disgruntled MP of a bribe to put Labor back in power and deals to give special treatment to gambling and land interests, he spilled the beans at a party conference. The shockwaves reverberated for decades. Two police investigations, the latest ending in 2018, came to nought, but they failed to explain a host of loose ends.
Anyone who’s contemplated exposing bad behaviour by powerful people senses the whistleblower’s lonely, draining experience. An 81-year-old Dell remained defiant in a 2017 interview with the Mercury’s Simon Bevilacqua, but he was suffering life-threatening illness. He died in 2019.
In 1993 this newspaper was housed in the building opposite Hobart’s Town Hall. At the back of the reporters’ room was the Mercury library, where the paper’s stories were clipped and filed daily along with black and white photographs. That library resource was just bits of paper, but they seem solid and substantial against the abstract electronics of Google, soon to replace them.
For me the library was also a refuge from the manic newsroom, where library staff – Mrs Ward, Chris, Ros and others whose names escape me – treated reporters with humour and humanity.
For a time Carol Patterson was one of those librarians. Like me she has lived through all the above – Hughie Considine, a character in the novel, is based on Dell – but unlike me she also won a post graduate degree in environmental studies. She really knows the ropes.
The central theme of Malus is another, darker form of corruption. The protagonist Shan, a single mother, was a child in the 1950s. Back then sex was never talked about, something done by grown-ups under covers behind closed doors. Children learned to hide their own sexual feelings and experiences.
When a teenage Shan is invited by stylish classmate Frankie to the Weston family’s posh apple-growing property in the Channel, named Malus, she is ill-prepared to deal with Max, the shadowy upstairs resident who, with the complicity of others in the family, lures her into repeated visits to his room.
This was the world of the entitled. In adult life, seeking to know who among the Westons had been on her side and who were not, Shan discovers that the family had shielded a predator who in turn had secured for mother and daughter a toehold in high society. Shades of Jeffrey Epstein.
She also uncovers the source of a recurring nightmare: suppressed memories of the last day of her childhood “holiday” at Malus. Those memories of violence against animals, a sexual assault, a death – crimes long concealed by the Westons – were revealed in a cinematic finale.
This powerful and complex allegory pays eloquent tribute not so much to heroes as to ordinary folk trying to live in harmony with an extraordinary planet. People who understand that our natural, wild home is not our plaything any more than the young Shan was a plaything of her assailant.
Or in the author’s words, expressed as Shan’s thoughts near her story’s end, “To perpetrators you are nothing, nature is nothing, so nothing is lost, that was the ethos of rape. Nothing is gained but death and destruction…”
All are welcome to the launch of Malus, from 5 pm tomorrow at Irish Murphys in Hobart’s Salamanca Place, celebrated with an unmissable conversation between the author and the legendary Gillian Unicomb.