Apologies for the title. It’s just my fancy way of saying I went to the NSW Writers’ Centre History Festival, Writing The Past, today and am considering an affair with non-fiction. I’ve always loved and been loyal to reading fiction and literature but realised today that some stories are just too interesting to have been made up. Henceforth goes my affair with reading non-fiction/history/biography. Going to attempt to summarise today as succinctly as possible, which, as always, is actually impossible.

Crime and Politics Session

David McKnight and Tom Gilling spoke about writing crime and political history. McKnight shared with us his tactics for obtaining (sometimes illegally) and publishing information about former ASIO members in his book Australia’s Spies and their Secrets. Despite winning the 1994 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for the book, David was disappointed his book didn’t attract any outrage from ASIO. A just complaint.

If I stick to my non-fiction reading goals, I will add Tom Gilling’s forthcoming book to the reading pile. He is writing about the Mount Rennie Outrage, an incident in 1886 where a young woman named Mary Jane Hicks (seriously, how great is that name?) was gang-raped by a group of larrikins (not so great). Nine of the men that were tried were sentenced to death by hanging, but after appeals and public outrage, only four of them were hanged in the end. What’s interesting is that Hicks’ story soon became riddled with inconsistencies, which then fed into the press’s campaign to sully her name, casting her as a disreputable character and prostitute. So we’ve got a female rape victim who, after speaking out about her ordeal, is suddenly portrayed as a sex-crazed trollop. And there are people jumping to the defence of her rapists (although the execution of justice in this instance was so poor, that’s a whole separate issue). Seriously guys, where have we heard this before?

I was hoping Tom would talk about his book Bagman, about Queensland’s police corruption, so was disappointed. One idiotic member of the audience asked a question about omitting/changing certain names of criminals when writing crime history and had to have defamation explained to him. In school they teach us that there’s ‘no such thing as a stupid question’. I wish my grade six teacher Mrs. Crokidas had heard this guy’s question.

Sydney Stories

Con artist Jean McDonald

Anyway. The Sydney Stories session was particularly interesting for its inclusion of Peter Doyle on the panel. Peter shared photographic selections from his published research of police photographs from Sydney in the 1920s. But it was the combination of these photographs with the stories he told about various con-men and con-women that made the session so damn captivating.

There are questions such as, ‘how do you maintain the integrity of the family who was survived by the criminal?’ as well as Peter’s assertion that we’re fascinated with these imprinted characters of the past because of our own secret desire for black sheep members in our own family history. I don’t think this is a hard and fast rule. Then again, I’ve lost count of the amount of Irish-Australians who’ve tried to convince me they’re somehow distantly related to Ned Kelly. In their dreams.

Crooks Like Me is Peter Doyle’s second book of black and white police photographs, following City of Shadows: Police Photographs from 1912-1948. I bought Crooks Like Me because the other was sold out. Having only skimread it so far it wouldn’t be fair to review it just yet. But freaking hell these photos are amazing. Boys as young as sixteen, sentenced to jail for a year for theft; female con artists whose clever cons are explained in enough detail to make me want to try them out, if I had the guts. These aren’t mug shots. The faces vary from forlorn, to defiant, amused, hard, and sorry. But perhaps most frightening are the empty eyes that stare back from the pages in the chapter “Killed, Being Killed”.

One in particular, William Cyril Moxley, has startlingly pale eyes that are are shrewd and calculating. He doesn’t have the gaze of a stupid man. Moxley’s crime CV was long and chilling, including robbery as well as rape and murder. He lived on Arundel Road in Glebe which is so close to where I live that I can’t even tell you how close because of um, internet stalkers, and stuff. There’s something about reading about the history of the city you live in, whether you’ve lived here all your life or have recently made it home, that just makes you look at everything in such a different way.

Historical Fiction

Final session of the day was Historical Fiction with Ashley Hay and James Bradley. Much of the discussion revolved around research: James seemed to be of the notion that too much research can ruin a good historical novel. Fiction writers have an escape route if their book is not historically accurate . But it was also argued that there is an even greater need for accuracy, because you need to show some authority to your reader in order to have them believe the world you’ve created. This was the second time I’d heard James speak about his latest book The Resurrectionist, about the illegal body trade of 1820s London. He’s still as fascinated with cadavers now as he was last time.

But is writing historical fiction really relevant? I know I’m not a huge fan of it but I don’t necessarily believe that it is, as some believe, an escape from ‘real’ fiction, which is supposed to deal with the contemporary. There are always things we can learn about ourselves through the past, whether in a historical or fictional context. And, as Ashley Hay said, our treatment of the past is informed by our experiences of the present.

Days like these make my brain want to explode with all the new ideas that suddenly bloom from being surrounded by so many writers and recorders of history. It’s enjoyable and stressful at the same time, but has cemented in a couple of floating ideas I had of my own despite having never really considered writing about the past in any form.

If I’m going to *force* myself to read non-fiction this year, I think local crime history is going to be a very interesting place to start.