How Did We Get it So Wrong?

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, July 21-22, 2012 

Where were you on the night Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of murdering her baby daughter? I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car, and when the news came over the radio I gave a cheer of approval. I was only twelve, and I like to think I’d have behaved better if I was older. But I doubt I would have. I had the same fever most other people had. I wanted her to be guilty. 

The fever lifted, eventually. All that impressive scientific proof of her guilt melted away. It had been bunkum from the start. Without that evidence, the prosecution case was little more than a theory that defied belief. In June this year, the Northern Territory issued a death certificate confirming that Azaria was taken by a dingo. This gave official sanction to something that every Australian in his or her right mind had already come to believe. The Chamberlains didn’t do it. 

The coroner’s verdict has closed the case in the official sense, but it hasn’t relieved us of the obligation to ask ourselves how we got things so drastically wrong. The Chamberlain affair was Australia’s Dreyfus case, our McCarthy hearings. It was a bacchanal of groupthink and mass credulity. How did it get so out of hand? How can we make sure it never happens again? 

Michael Chamberlain’s new book, Heart of Stone, lets you know how the calamity felt from the receiving end. Tragedy isn’t quite the right word for what the Chamberlains suffered. Their story sounds like a novel that Franz Kafka stopped writing because it was too nightmarish. First their baby girl was eaten by a dingo. Then Lindy was accused of murdering her with a pair of scissors, possibly as a religious rite, and Michael was accused of helping her to dispose of the body. They were both convicted, and Lindy was sentenced to life with hard labour. No wonder we were slow to accept that these people were really the victims of the nightmare, not the perpetrators. The magnitude of the injustice is almost too awful to contemplate. 

Heart of Stone is an uneven book, but it has the merit of telling you exactly what Michael Chamberlain thinks. There is no ghostwriter here to apply polish or spin. What you get is the unvarnished Michael Chamberlain. He is quirky, cranky, and a wee bit tedious on the theme of religion. But his book has a raw authenticity that most books of this kind lack. Chamberlain has a reputation for reining in his emotions. In this book he lets rip. He is an angry man, and he has every right to be. 

Mainly he is angry at the government and people of the Northern Territory. He believes that Territory authorities knew all along that a dingo did it, but blamed the Chamberlains so that tourists wouldn’t be scared away. “The truth,” Chamberlain says, was that “in the heart of their National Park, dingoes [were] allowed to kill children.” These are serious charges, but we must remember that Chamberlain is a fastidious man. He doesn’t say such things lightly. 

Chamberlain is angry at the press, too. He has kept a clippings archive since the early days of the case, and he makes copious use of it in this book. Journalists who made sloppy mistakes thirty years ago are named and quoted. So they should be. The injustice began with a lot of small mistakes, which took alarmingly little time to combine into a wildfire of rancorous error. Once that blaze was raging there was no stopping it. It became hard to think calmly about the facts, and anyway who wanted to? Feelings were enough. 

When the next trial of the century rolls around, we need to remember all that. If we can demonise the Chamberlains, we can demonise anyone. We believed they were guilty because they didn’t behave the way we expected innocent people to behave. Well, we know now that they were innocent. At the very least, the case should leave us with a less narrow understanding of the way innocent people act. 

Michael Chamberlain has some illuminating things to say, so it’s a pity his publishers have released his book in such ragged form. The text is littered with distracting typos. It has been edited either poorly or not at all. There are more than a few sentences that could have used radical surgery. There are references to politicians named Bob Catter and Chris Publick. Some sections don’t even seem to have been run through a spell-checker. Exhoneration? Aboroginal? 

I bet Chamberlain will be mortified that these errors slipped through, because he is a stickler for accuracy. When he mentions a car, he almost invariably specifies its make and model. Describing a brochure about dingoes, he feels obliged to inform you that it was printed in A3 format. Denying the charge that he was an obsessive car-cleaner, he reveals: “The reality was that vacuuming and using a little soap and Armoral [sic], a vinyl sheen product, was about the extent of my interior cleaning.” The man is honest and informative to a fault. He seems incapable of telling you anything less than the truth. Quite often he tells you more of it than is strictly necessary. 

This must be one of the bitterest ironies of the whole case. The Chamberlains as murderers? How did that notion ever get off the ground? They aren’t even capable of telling a lie. At what point, during their thirty years in the spotlight, has either of them said something deceptive or evasive or untrue? Most of us aren’t above rejigging the odd fact to make ourselves look good. The Chamberlains have never done that. Their story has never wavered. They have always tried to describe things exactly as they happened, even when that fetish for precision harmed their cause. 

Rilke defined fame as the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around one name. The Chamberlains had the worst kind of fame. They were famous for something they didn’t do. For years they were obscured under a mountain of misconceptions. Michael’s book clears the last vestiges of all that junk away. He reminds you that there were real people under there all along. Instead of our opprobrium, they deserved our sympathy and respect. Before it happened to the rest of us, the Chamberlain case was something that happened to the Chamberlains – and to Azaria, who was really here too, until she wasn’t.

After the post-human

Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis

Lionel Asbo, Martin Amis’s funniest and most satisfying novel in years, opens on a typically edgy note. Desmond Pepperdine, aged fifteen, is having an incestuous affair with his grandmother. The offence is mitigated, slightly, by the consideration that she is only thirty-nine. Desmond lives in the bleak London borough of Diston, where people breed early and die young – “a world of italics and exclamation marks.” He is the son of a black father he never knew, and a white mother who died when he was twelve. He lives in a council high-rise with his mother’s brother, a fearsome career thug named Lionel Asbo.

Asbo is the latest in a long line of Amis yobs, and he might be the scariest of the lot. An ASBO, in real British life, is an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Lionel Asbo (né Pepperdine) is served his first ASBO at the age of three – a national record. At eighteen he legally changes his surname to Asbo. Why? Because Lionel goes out of his way to do stupid things. He is also capable, when roused, of committing unspeakable acts of violence ... [read more] 

A Rake's Progress

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, March 3-4, 2012

Doing the biography of a living writer can’t be easy. Writers like to have control over things – especially over the contents of books. When Martin Amis “co-operated” with his new biographer, Richard Bradford, he didn’t do so unconditionally. He granted Bradford a series of interviews, and gave him the green light to approach certain other approved parties. But he stipulated that some people – including his mother and his ex-wife – would not be involved.  

Considering these restrictions, Bradford hasn’t done an entirely bad job. His book is lopsided, but it’s meaty. It contains a better class of information than it would have if he’d tried to proceed without Amis’s approval. It isn’t a first-rate biography by any means, but it has one crucial thing going for it. Martin Amis has lived a life you don’t want to stop reading about. 

His personal history seems implausibly heightened, like the plot of one of his novels. His father, Kingsley, was one of the liveliest writers of his generation. His mother was a free spirit who routinely let the kids ride around on the roof-rack of her car. He published his first novel at 24; became a rakish celebrity; worked his way through a roster of stunning and well-connected girlfriends. In his mid-twenties he inadvertently fathered a daughter whom he didn’t meet till he was in his mid-forties. His cousin, Lucy Partington, vanished during the 1970s; twenty years later it emerged that she had been abducted and murdered by the serial killer Frederick West. 

The story has been told before – most artfully by Amis himself, in the memoir Experience (2000). Bradford hasn’t retold it very elegantly, but he has augmented it with generous chunks of previously unavailable information. While his interviews with Amis himself have yielded nothing startling, some of Amis’s most articulate friends – including Clive James and the late Christopher Hitchens – have disclosed things they never would have if the project had lacked Amis’s blessing. 

Bradford deserves credit for getting their testimony down, but he has no knack for digesting his source material and converting it into a fluent narrative. He tends to bung down the quotes of his interviewees in verbatim slabs, some of which go on for nearly a page. At times the project veers close to oral biography.  

By letting his sources speak at such length, Bradford keeps reminding you how few of them there are, and how tightly clustered together they are on the Amis sympathy axis. Hitchens goes on the record, lavishly, about the disintegration of Amis’s friendship with Julian Barnes. He divulges the contents of a hostile private letter that Barnes wrote to Amis. This is juicy stuff, all right. But it is, palpably, just one side of the story. Whether Barnes was offered the chance to give his side I don’t know. If he wasn’t, he’s got a right to feel angry all over again. 

It isn’t that one longs to hear Amis get bad-mouthed. It’s that Bradford’s information comes from too few angles to give you a properly rounded account of the man. The pages dealing with the break-up of Martin’s first marriage, to the philosopher Antonia Phillips, are especially threadbare. Forget about getting both sides of that story: Bradford is hard-pressed getting just one.   

But those were the rules, and Bradford can’t be blamed for obeying them. What he can be blamed for, quite loudly, is the slapdash way he handles his material. Bradford has written three previous biographies, including one of Amis’s father. But there are times when you’d be willing to bet he’d never read a literary biography before, let alone written one. He has a weird way of dispensing essential information. 

On page 48, for example, Amis makes an unheralded reference to somebody named Rob. Bradford, not very helpfully, appends the word “Henderson” in square brackets. Four pages later we’re told what we should have been told straight away: that Rob Henderson was, for some time, Amis’s best friend. Rob sticks around in the narrative for several years. Then on page 102 Bradford casually, and without elaboration, announces that Rob, these days, is “dead.” He doesn’t feel the need to expand on that until page 363, where he discloses the cause of death: cancer, in 2001.     

Bradford seems temperamentally averse to saying the right things in the right order, or indeed at all. A biography of Amis, you might think, would be the right place for a clear account of the famous dental procedures he underwent during the nineties. But Bradford doesn’t seem all that interested in clearing the matter up. He quotes a newspaper report suggesting that Amis spent $20,000 having his molars replaced, but doesn’t say whether or not this is accurate. A while later he takes another brief pass at the question, and leaves you with the impression that Amis’s oral issues amounted to nothing worse than a pair of infected wisdom teeth. But Amis’s own memoir recounted, in excruciating detail, the surgical removal and replacement of nearly every tooth in his head. 

On the subject of Amis’s novels, Bradford can be illuminating. When he analyses portions of The Information (1995) in the light of Martin’s concurrent marriage breakdown, he is performing useful criticism, even if he does misremember a couple of plot details. (The hack novelist Gwyn Barry scores his first raging success with Amelior, not with Summertown.) 

Bradford forgets, though, that a biographical approach to Amis’s work can only get you so far. Amis is principally a satirist. He is interested – fearlessly – in the outside world. No doubt the novels contain wisps of his personal history, but that is not what they are about. A critic who plunges into the books in pursuit of Martin’s shadow risks seeing less in them than the average reader will, not more.    

Bradford, a couple of times, can be observed doing exactly that. Pursuing his notion that The Information is “a story about Martin Amis,” he cites the biographical fact that the father of one of Martin’s aristocratic girlfriends was fascinated by Martin’s velvet trousers. He then quotes a long scene from the novel in which an ageing aristocrat contemplates the trousers of Richard Tull, the book’s luckless anti-hero, and demands that he remove them. 

But the joke, in the novel, is that the trousers aren’t Richard’s; they’ve been lent to him by the old man’s daughter, and the old man has abruptly recognized them as his own. Instead of quoting the parts of the passage that make this clear, Bradford replaces them with ellipses. This is a bit naughty of him. It makes the passage sound more straightforwardly autobiographical than it really is.   

Bradford does some similar textual pruning when psychoanalysing Kingsley’s Girl, 20 (1971). He feels that one of the protagonist’s children resembles Kingsley’s rebellious older son, Philip, who by this time was well into his twenties. The character, says Bradford, “frequently tells members of the family and visitors to ‘fuck off’, refuses to go to school and urinates regularly on the bathroom floor.” So he does, but it’s a trifle misleading of Bradford not to mention that he is six years old. 

First-rate biographers do the simple things well. Zachary Leader’s Life of Kingsley Amis (2006) was a model of the genre: lucid, panoramic, reader-friendly. Leader, admittedly, had the luxury of writing about a figure who was no longer around to help or hinder him. But he also had the right temperament for the job. If he had any personal quirks, he kept them out of his book. Bradford puts his in. His book is okay as an interim biography. But when the job of definitive biographer is being filled, I have a feeling that Bradford will, as the early Amis might have phrased it, get aimed.

Less Fun than it Looks

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, March 24-25, 2012 

Is there a job in the world that isn’t much less fun than it looks? From a distance, being a Wiggle would appear to be a pretty cushy gig. Roll out of bed at around ten, slip on the coloured shirt for a mid-day show, mingle backstage with some celebrity milfs, then spend the remainder of the day reclining in a hot-tub full of cash. 

Anthony Field, the Blue Wiggle, has written a book that unveils the less glamorous reality: the bad hotels; the terrible food; the backstage arguments, one of them culminating in the throwing of a toy drum kit; the grim logistics of coping with irritable bowel syndrome on the road. Field isn’t complaining, mind you: he keeps stressing that the joy of the live shows makes it all worthwhile. But he leaves you feeling that he and his fellow Wiggles have thoroughly earned their success. 

Field earned his while suffering from a diabolical array of health problems that threatened, at one stage, to curtail his wiggling for good. He pulled himself back from the brink, thanks to an exercise and dietary regime he details in the book’s second half. But it’s the first half, describing how he got to the brink in the first place, that makes for more compelling reading. 

Field played in the Sydney band The Cockroaches as a youngster. An uncomfortable fit as a rock and roller, he eventually quit to finish a degree in early childhood education. This would prove one of the shrewdest career moves made by an entertainer since Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. During his final year at university, Field formed a children’s group with two other teaching students – Murray Cook and Greg Page – and the ex-Cockroach Jeff Fatt. The Wiggles were born. (A fifth Wiggle, Phillip Wilcher, played on their first album but left soon afterwards.) 

The group’s early struggles were not all that different from an emerging rock band’s: there were meetings with boneheaded executives, efforts to crack the American market, gruelling tour schedules. Sometimes they played three 90-minute shows a day. Could Keith Richards manage that? 

Probably not, if he had to spend two hours in the backstage toilet every time he ingested something mildly toxic. Field, during his darkest years, was so unhealthy that he made Keith look like Michael Phelps. His problems, according to his own incomplete list, included “hernias, back ailments, broken bones, food sensitivities, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, potentially fatal infections, circulation issues, and exhaustion.” 

Let's pause now to get a few things straight about the Wiggles’ collective health issues. Field is not the Wiggle who left the group to deal with a mysterious fainting illness. That was the Yellow Wiggle, Greg Page, who quit back in 2006, and was reinstated earlier this year, causing his replacement to be controversially stripped of the yellow shirt. (Field’s book, alas, was completed too early to tackle the Wigglegate imbroglio.) 

Nor is Field to be confused with the Purple Wiggle, Jeff Fatt, who had a pacemaker installed in 2011. No: Field is the one who has suffered from just about everything else. He is excellent at evoking what it’s like to live with chronic pain. Fellow sufferers will find some of his observations scarily accurate. “Pain,” he says, “becomes a habit that’s hard to break.” 

Field broke it when he met a holistic chiropractor named James Stoxen. In the book’s second half Field lays out, complete with photographs, the exercise routines with which Stoxen helped him morph from an overweight, pain-racked pill-popper into the chiselled, tattooed specimen depicted on the book’s front cover. (Sidebar question: now that even the Wiggles are getting tattoos, can we agree that the tattoo has officially lost its bad-boy connotations? Who’s getting one next? Kevin Rudd?) 

The book, it must be said, does get rather bogged down exploring the Stoxen philosophy. Stoxen views the body as a giant spring. He carries around a bedspring in his bag to demonstrate this principle. He believes that the spring is divided into seven “floors” or levels. He abhors shoes, and advocates walking around barefooted whenever possible. For all I know, he may be right about these things. But his intonations do sound, prima facie, like those of many other self-help gurus who have gone before him. 

Still, there is no doubt that his techniques have worked for Field. Nor can you question the genuineness of Field’s desire to spread the word. He knows he sounds like an evangelist, but feels that the good news must be shared. His fervour is contagious. At one point I seriously considered rustling up a set of witch’s hats (where do you buy a witch’s hat?) and giving his programme a try. I know how his young fans feel. Field has enthusiasm, and that can’t be faked. Somehow he never lost it, no matter how debilitating his problems got.