'In every city of the world there are cold case crimes that, if they’re allowed to remain unresolved for long enough, haunt the landscape. It’s as if these silent victims are saying - we are not at rest, don’t forget us.’
- Matthew Condon, The Night Dragon
It was quite a thrill to host one of the first sessions of the 2024 Byron Writers Festival and talk about True Crime with two brilliant writers. Gideon Haigh has written over 50 books and won a Ned Kelly Award for true crime amongst other notable awards, and Matthew Condon is an award-winning journalist and the author of more than 15 works of both fiction and non-fiction including his last five focusing on organised crime in Queensland.
Condon feels compelled to listen to the voices of victims and write forcefully on their behalf while Haigh doesn’t see himself as a True Crime writer at all - rather a history writer who happens to hone in on certain murders or missing people.
Both plunge deep into historical research, and into the backgrounds of their characters, following every lead available to find out how they ended up where they did. In many ways they are also detectives, filling in the gaps left by people who may be hiding the truth. I imagine them creating storyboards with photographs and interconnected threads like those we see in movies, inviting us as readers to also enter the realm of the detective.
'A paradox of true crime…, is that it gains moral force from our revulsion of violence against the innocent, even as it often treats the innocent as marginal, recruiting them, as it were, chiefly to die, sympathetically but expeditiously; they should be just human enough so as not to delay our pleasure in vicarious detection'.
- Gideon Haigh 'A Scandal in Bohemia'
Condon's books investigate institutionalised crime and corruption in the Sunshine State of Queensland. The Night Dragon is the fourth in his series of true crime books. It's a gut churning piece of non-fiction detailing the events surrounding the torching of the Whiskey A-Go-Go nightclub in Brisbane back in the 70’s by a bunch of crazed killers in cahoots with the Queensland Police. The protected psychopath at the centre of the sordid story is the man they dubbed The Night Dragon.
Condon's research takes him into seriously dangerous territory with top level police and hit men who for obvious reasons don't want to be exposed. He once had an interesting encounter with some of the old school policemen who called him in for a chat.
Hear the details in my interview with Matthew Condon.
It’s a terrible fact that women are most often the victims of male violence. Haigh refers to an excerpt from The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax by Sherlock Holmes who ruminates; “One of the most dangerous classes in the world…is the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless, and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others. She is helpless. She is migratory….She is lost, as often as not, in a maze of obscure pensions and boarding houses. She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes.”
Why do men kill women? Both historically and in almost epidemic proportions in our society today? It's a question worth asking in order to address this most serious of sinister and criminal of behaviours.
The men Haigh's book, A Scandal in Bohemia, are a refined group - they’re the artistic intellectuals of Melbourne’s Meldrumites who entranced 25 year-old teacher Molly Dean who was brutally murdered on 21 November 1930. Mollie and her artist lover Colin Colahan become Characters in George Johnston’s My Brother Jack. At the time of her murder Molly was trying to write a novel called Monsters Not Men. The manuscript disappeared. One can only imagine what was in that book. Was it a True Crime story? Did it implicate the murderer?
The monster in Condon's book The Night Dragon is a particularly psychopathic character named Vincent O’Dempsey who is now in jail for life. He and his male accomplice raped and murdered Barbara McCulin, 34 and her two daughters Vicki ,13 and Leanne, 11 on Jan 16, 1974. O'Dempsey was 78 when he was incarcerated for the final time but he spent decades at liberty. Has justice been served?
And what of the 15 people who died in the Whiskey au Go Go fire which is also detailed in The Night Dragon? The murder files have a 100 year non-publication order placed over them and won’t be legally viewed until 2073. There will be another coronial inquest but will we ever know the full truth?
'About every story, then, there is always something more to know. Who knows when the past might have more to reveal? You just have to hope to be around when it happens.' - Gideon Haigh
On a lighter note, I also chaired a session with the infectiously optimistic Kon Karapanatiotidis, an inspirational activist chef who delighted audiences with stories from his new cook book Philoxenia, A Seat at My Table.
Karapanatiotidis believes that food is deeply political. At just 28 years of age he founded the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre while he was teaching students at TAFE. He started it as a class project, a food bank in Footscray, Melbourne, and it has grown into a powerful charity and voice for refugees. To this day he shares a daily meal with 60 different cultures, faiths and languages.
Philoxenia means being a friend to a stranger, and that is the philosophy behind A Seat at My Table. The thing that shines through most is LOVE! Karapanatiodidis writes that his mother Sia, with whom he co-wrote the book, “loves so fiercely, and no more than through her cooking. It is her gift to her children that has triumphed over poverty, racism, and hardship….there is nothing like food made by someone who loves you unconditionally. It is food that tastes like home."
The vegetarian Greek diet is seen as one of the healthiest in the world and is linked to a reduced risk of Parkinson’s, alzheimers and type 2 diabetes. This delicious book contains many home-spun recipes for classic Greek dishes like dolmades, spanakopitas and galaktodboureko while celebrating the culinary history of plant-based recipes that goes back to the philosopher Pythagoras. In fact, before 1847, vegetarians were known as being on a Pythagorean diet, and the great Greek philosopher is quoted throughout the book, along with other Greek legends.
Salt is born of the purest parents: the sun and the sea - Pythagoras
The Greeks are a resilient people. They survived invasions by the Persian Empire, and 400 years of occupation by the Ottoman Empire. Karapanatiotidis details the struggles of his own grandparents who were tobacco and potato farmers and survived two world wars. His paternal Grandfather endured Nazi occupation and his maternal grandfather escaped Fascism after being accused of being a communist. His parents sought refuge in Australia after fleeing from the war in Greece only to be abused and told to go back to where they came from.
'How can a prosperous country call itself civilised when it denies those seeking procession the basic succour needed to survive?' Karapanatiotidis asks with good reason.
He remains incredibly engaged in the refugee situation in Australia and is deeply critical of our treatment of asylum seekers. He was smuggled in to Manaus Island in the middle of the night to document human rights abuses there and is donating 100% of proceeds from this book to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. Kon believes that migrants and refugees use food to disarm their oppressors and that each meal is "a tribute to our cultural roots and ancestors”.
“We do not need tougher borders or higher walls we need longer tables where everyone can have a seat.” - Phyloxia, A Seat at My Table