Book Club - Lech Blaine’s Australian Gospel

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Lech Blaine is the author of the memoir Car Crash and the Quarterly Essays Top Blokes and Bad Cop. His new work is Australian Gospel.

Australian Gospel has the subtitle ‘A Family Saga’. It takes only a cursory glance at the back cover synopsis to understand why Australian Gospel works to reassure readers that this is a very real, very true story. The story contained between the covers and the ride Lech Blaine is about to take you on, well if it wasn’t true, you absolutely would not believe it.

Lech Blaine was born in 1992 and by the time he came along the story of Australian Gospel was already many decades old.

Australian Gospel is the story of Lech’s siblings. It’s a big family and Lech’s mum and dad Tom and Lenore fostered five children in the years before Lech was born. Three of those children, Lech’s brothers and sisters, happen to be the biological offspring of Michael and Mary Shelley.

Michael and Mary Shelley were charismatic Christians, or itinerant and chronic god botherers. The definition really depended on which side of their charms you happened to find yourself on and whether you were standing between them and something they wanted.

The Shelley’s wrought havoc across Australia and the Tasman throughout the 70’s right through till the 2000’s. Thanks to the kindness and good heart of his parents, Lech and their extended family find themselves in the Shelley’s crosshairs as they seek to reclaim the children who were removed for their safety.

Australian Gospel is a wild ride. In his prologue Lech hints at the mammoth task of research an interviews he undertook to bring the story to the page. As a result we are transported to an Australian growing out of the post war period and transforming into the modern country that likes to think it can take on the world (and most of the time can at least give it a shot in sports).

Lech’s prose is spare and as such is able to embrace the competing interests of a sprawling historical narrative and tense domestic fare. It’s a remarkable feat that the narrative can seamlessly jump between a bush prophet’s screed and a domestic drama with nary a blink.

And that could be it for this review; Australian Gospel is worth your time for its fascinating story and Lech’s engaging style. This is a cracking yarn, but it’s also more than just a cracking yarn.

Brimming beneath the surface of Australian Gospel and cleverly hinted at in its title is another, perhaps deeper reason to pick up a copy. Between the fanatical Michael Shelley preaching his own narcissistic version of the bible and Tom and Lenore Blaine’s quiet (and sometimes loud) search for the great Australian idyll, Australian Gospel gives us competing views of what the so-called lucky country could be.

Where Shelley derides Australia’s love of beer and sport, Tom Blaine embraces these as part of life’s purpose. Where Shelley coaxes and gulls all and sundry to get them to see him as the second coming, Tom Blaine gets on with the job and finds himself quietly adored by his children and community alike.

This is a fascinating book about a bizarre chapter in Australian history told through the eyes of a child (now man) who knows it as his family’s story. It’s a story about fear and hope that goes to the heart of who we are and how we love the people around us so that they feel more of the latter.

It is a family saga and in the telling it’s about the triumph of that family and the incredible story that got them there.