What constitutes an Australian family? Is it nature or nurture that forms a person? Can love both harm and heal? Lech Blaine, author of the memoir Car Crash, explores these questions in his new book Australian Gospel: A Family Saga. It’s the true story of his remarkable family and its harrowing confrontation with a very different family, one that would stop at nothing to break the Blaines apart to restore their own.
After suffering a heartbreaking string of miscarriages, Tom and Lenore Blaine turn to the foster system to start a family. Siblings Steven, John and Hannah arrive at the Blaines’ home with a caveat: they are the children of Michael and Mary Shelley, itinerant, self-proclaimed Christian prophets, who have raised their children with a religious ferocity, restricting them to a diet that has left them malnourished, forcing social services to place them into foster care. The Shelleys love their children with a frightening zeal and would do anything to get them back. Michael previously kidnapped his oldest son Elijah from his foster home and is determined to do the same with Elijah’s siblings – who now live with the Blaines.
What follows is the collision between two set of parents whose values clash. The Blaines’ love for their children is simple and unconditional; the Shelleys’ love obsessional and all-devouring.
Michael holds Australian culture in contempt. He loathes the fair dinkum Aussie, our obsession with sport, alcohol and larrikinism. For Michael, the Blaines are the epitome of Australian mediocrity, brainwashing their children with values that corrupt the soul and thwart salvation. From the Blaines’ perspective, the Shelleys are delusional and dangerous, an ever-present threat to their own children they are raising to be loving and fearless. The Shelleys are desperate to save their children; the Blaines to protect them.
The author tells his family’s story with compassion and understanding. Michael and Mary hold eccentric beliefs, are afflicted with mental illness, yet have a biblical love for their children and each other. Mary, a diagnosed schizophrenic, suffers especially at the loss of her children.
Blaine draws parallels with the Stolen Generation and asks us to consider under what circumstances is it right to remove a child from their parents. The Shelleys repeatedly allude to the possibility of child sexual abuse; one wonders if they have their own dark history. Blaine details the extraordinary measures they take to find their children with a determination any loving parent could appreciate.
Blaine reserves his best writing for portraying his own family and what healthy, unconditional love looks like. Steven, John and Hannah, the Shelleys’ biological children, count Tom and Lenore Blaine as their real mum and dad, and Lech Blaine paints their idyllic childhood in loving detail. Here Blaine contrasts a love that is authentic and healing with one that is poisoned and grandiose.
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Australian Gospel is the story Lenore always wanted to write but could not. Lech, her only biological child, fulfills his mother’s wish in a narrative told with humour, compassion and an ever-present tension that haunts the reader from start to finish. When Lenore finally carried her pregnancy to term, she wished for a bookish daughter called Amy. Instead she got a superb writer as a son, one who tells her tale with love and respect. She would have been proud.
Australian Gospel: A Family Saga, Lech Blaine
Publisher: Black Inc
ISBN: 9781760643973
Format: Paperback
Pages: 363pp
Publication: 5 November 2024
RRP: $36.99
