Lech Blaine

Who is Peter Dutton, and what happened to the Liberal Party? In Bad Cop, Lech Blaine traces the making of a hardman – from Queensland detective to leader of the Opposition, from property investor to minister for Home Affairs. This is a story of ambition, race and power, and a politician with a plan.

Dutton became Liberal leader with a strategy to win outer-suburban and regional seats from Labor. Since then we have seen his demolition of the Voice and a rolling campaign of culture wars. What does Peter Dutton know about the Australian electorate? Has he updated Menzies’ Forgotten People pitch for the age of anxiety, or will he collapse the Liberals’ broad church? This revelatory portrait is sardonic, perceptive and altogether compelling.

“Dutton doesn’t need to become prime minister to redraw the battle lines of Australian politics. His fight with Albanese over parochial voters was always going to drag the political conversation rightwards: on race, immigration, gender and the pace of a transition away from fossil fuels … Dutton’s raison d’être? Make Australia Afraid Again. Then he will offer himself as the lesser of two evils. A serious strongman for the age of anxiety.”—Lech Blaine, Bad Cop.

ORDER HERE

Events

Readings Bookshop – Lech Blaine in Conversation with Chloe Hooper

Date: Monday, 18 March 2024, 6:30pm (AEDT)

Venue: Church of All Nations – 180 Palmerston St, Carlton, VIC 3053

BOOK HERE

Avid Reader – Lech Blaine in conversation with John Birmingham

Date: Wednesday, 27 March 2024, 6pm for a 6:30pm start (AEST)

Venue: The Loft: 100 Boundary St, West End, QLD 4101

BOOK HERE

The Australian Institute online – Lech Blaine in conversation with Ebony Bennett

Date: Friday, 12 April 2024, 11 am

BOOK HERE

Gleebooks – Lech Blaine in conversation with David Marr

Date: Wednesday, 17 April 2024, 6pm for a 6:30 pm start

Venue: Gleebooks — 49 Glebe Point Road, Glebe, NSW 2037

BOOK HERE

ANU Meet the Author – Lech Blaine in conversation with Mark Kenny

Date: Thursday, 18 April 2024, 6pm

Venue: ANU Building 153 – Cultural Centre Kambri, Tangney Road, Acton

BOOK HERE

Sorrento Writers Festival – Digging Deep

Panel with Jan Cochrane-Harry, Robyn Davidson and Grace Tame about writing memoir

Date: Friday, April 26, 9am

Venue: Sorrento Community Centre, 860 – 868 Melbourne Rd, Sorrento

BOOK HERE

Sorrento Writers Festival – The Good, the Bad and the Underwhelming

Panel with Niki Savva and Troy Bramston about political leadership

Date: Saturday, April 27, 12pm

Venue: Sorrento Community Centre, 860 – 868 Melbourne Rd, Sorrento

BOOK HERE

Sorrento Writers Festival – Toward the 2025 election

Panel with Erik Jensen, Niki Savva and Amy Remeikis

Date: Sunday, April 28, 10:30am

Venue: Halcyon Hall, The Continental, 1/21 Ocean Beach Rd, Sorrento

https://sorrentowritersfestival.com.au/artfuel/program/256/show/australian-politics-toward-the-2025-election

Sydney Writers Festival – Curiosity Lecture

Date: Thursday, 23 May 2024, 2:15pm

Venue: Carriageworks, Bay 24, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh, NSW 2015

BOOK HERE

Sydney Writers Festival – The Secret Lives of Politicians

Panel with Niki Savva and Margot Saville

Date: Saturday, 25 May 2024, 3pm

Venue: Ashfield Town Hall

BOOK HERE

I’m unbelievably grateful to be the 2023 Judy Harris Writer in Residence. I will spend twelve months at the Charles Perkins Centre – situated at the University of Sydney – gleaning expertise about neurological illnesses and genetic editing. While writing my third book in a narrative non-fiction trilogy. It will be about genetics, the legacy of love, and running a 3-star motel in Bundaberg.

Read more about the fellowship at the University of Sydney website. It was the subject of an episode on ABC’s Big Ideas called Love, Lost Minds and Mortality.

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/bigideas/sarah-holland-batt-lech-blaine-ageing-science-art-storytelling/102960610

Car Crash: A Memoir of the Aftermath has been published in Canada, America and the United Kingdom by Greystone Books. Publishers Weekly called it “an affecting portrait of a survivor”. I did an interview with BBC World Service about the experiences I wrote about in the book. I also shared five of my favourite books about trauma with Big Issue in the UK.

You can read my new piece about Robert Forster from the Go Betweens at the Sydney Morning Herald.

Robert Forster is one of Australia’s finest songwriters, and the co-founder of Brisbane’s greatest musical export The Go-Betweens. The piece explores the occupational hazards of rock and roll. I interviewed doyens of the music industry such as Lindy Morrison, Paul Kelly and Steve Kilbey.

But at the heart of the narrative is the platonic love between two men, the romantic love between a man and a woman, and the salvation of creativity in the face of a cancer diagnosis.

“Scott Morrison was on a slippery slope from the Promised Land to rock bottom. To win the 2019 election, he invented the focus-grouped “ScoMo” persona: a suburban strongman with a soft spot for fossil fuels, home-cooked curries and speaking in tongues. A vote for him was a protest against inner-city elites. But in pulling it off, the one-trick phoney might have built a coffin for the Coalition.”

So begins my 11,000+ word essay for The Monthly about the 2022 election campaign, which you can read here. I travelled around for six or so weeks to try and gauge what the hell was about to happen. I reckon it will genuinely go down as one of the most interesting in Australian history.

I wrote for The Guardian about my mother’s experience with a terminal illness in the aged care system.

“It is truly difficult to fathom the institutionalised cruelty of Australia’s aged care system. Politicians continue to make euthanasia elusive for people with neurodegenerative illnesses, while underfunding the nursing homes where many of them rot away.”

“It is much easier to look away. Life is hard enough without confronting the suffering of others. But we must bear witness to these indignities. The people most affected by neglect are incapable of protecting themselves. And one day they could be us.”

My Quarterly Essay about class, masculinity and the Australian larrikin is called TOP BLOKES. It will be published on September 13. It can be purchased via your local bookstore on online from Booktopia.

“What makes a top bloke? Does the myth of the larrikin still hold sway? And whatever happened to class in Australia? In this perceptive and often hilarious essay, Lech Blaine dissects some top blokes, with particular focus on Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, but stretching back to Bob Hawke and Kerry Packer. This is a riveting narrative of how image conquered politics, just as globalisation engulfed the Australian economy. While many got rich and entertained, look where we ended up.

Blaine shows how first Howard, then Morrison, brought a cohort of voters over to the Coalition side, “flipping” what was once working-class Labor culture. He weaves in his own experiences as he explores the persona of the Aussie larrikin. What are its hidden contradictions – can a larrikin be female, Indigenous or Muslim, say? – and how has it been transformed by an age of affluence? He makes the case that the time has come to bury a myth and for the nation to seize a new reality.”

CAR CRASH: A MEMOIR can be purchased from your local bookstore and online from Booktopia or Black Inc. Books. The audiobook version of CAR CRASH – narrated by actor Alec Snow – was released by Apple Books and Audible on the 1st of July.

“Blaine’s native tongue, an ocker irreverence, gives his writing an amiable charm and reflects the styles of artists such as Tim Winton, Miles Franklin, and Helen Garner.” Australian Book Review

“It’s as a memoir of the long twilight of the Howard years that Car Crash is at its most bruisingly insightful. Queensland is in the economic roil of the mining boom … but despite the prosperity there’s no grand narrative for what the country could be, just the empty shell of “mateship”.” The Guardian

“As an anatomy of a car crash and its reverberations in an age of social media, Car Crash delivers from the first arresting page. But it is also much more than this … He adeptly delivers a family saga, a social history and a bildungsroman set at the turn of the twenty-first century in southern Queensland.” Inside Story

“In fittingly hard-boiled, visceral prose, Blaine not only excavates the surreal horror of the crash and the aftermath, but also the utter inadequacy of the flimsy rituals and conventions that our society employs to keep the chaos death unleashes at bay.” – The Age / Sydney Morning Herald

“Wielding both a razor-sharp command of language and a real gift for scene setting, Blaine revisits the trauma and recovery that unfolded … Evoking the best of Helen Garner’s coolly incisive non-fiction, Car Crash balances its tragic subject matter with gorgeous runs of prose, announcing a major new Australian voice.” – Apple Books

“On the back of such a book, Lech Blaine has developed a voice that suggests he may well be one of the best writers of his generation.” The New Daily

“Blaine’s buoyant voice keeps you engaged: its mordant, ocker-tinged humour counterweighs the book’s bleakness.” The Saturday Paper

“Lech Blaine is a preternaturally gifted young writer, still in his twenties. His prose shows an easy sophistication and surreal wit, constantly throwing out pleasant surprises.” North Melbourne Books

“Immediately compelling, energetic and intense – I tore through the opening pages with my heart racing. But the story soon expands into something much deeper and, ultimately, more moving.” Readings Bookstore

“Car Crash is an accomplished debut that dissects ideas of grief, mateship, survivor’s guilt, stifling masculinity and class in regional Australia, and will be appreciated by fans of Don Watson, Corey White and Chloe Hooper.” — Books+Publishing

In 2009, Lech Blaine walked away unscratched from a fatal head-on collision outside Toowoomba. CAR CRASH: A MEMOIR is a riveting true story about family, identity, friendship and grief after tragedy.

TIM WINTON: “Scarifying and unforgettable, Car Crash is a story of carnage and life-long consequences – not just from a single, sudden catastrophe but from the long, slow cataclysm of masculine confusion.”

TRENT DALTON: “A heart-soaring act of literary bravery where the ongoing cost of experience is exposed in every note-perfect sentence … Some books just have to be written. And some books just have to be read.”

BRI LEE: “I began this book with my guts in my mouth. Then, as I read on, I winced with recognition, I laughed a lot and my heart gradually broke open … There are strong sentences, clarity of intent and tone, wicked one-liners and a mastery of metaphor.”

CAR CRASH: A MEMOIR is about the son of a publican in country Queensland, who dreams of being a writer, rather than an athlete like his older brothers. The story covers a young man’s recovery from depression and his first love during a natural disaster.

KRISTINA OLSSON: “A poetic, unflinching meditation on the exuberance of youth and the trauma of survival. It shines with a fierce intelligence.”

BENJAMIN LAW: “Blaine’s journalism has long made me suspect he’s one of the best writers of his generation. Car Crash confirms it, without a doubt.”

BROOKE DAVIS: “This book is an astonishing insight into the wild work of grief, in all its dark corners, in all its bright illuminations.”

CAR CRASH: A MEMOIR will be published on March 30 2021. Pre-orders with free delivery are available at the Black Inc. Books website, or the book can be ordered via your favorite local bookshop. Inquiries about publicity for the book can be sent to Sallie at sallie@blackincbooks.com. Last year, the Canadian, American and British rights for Car Crash were acquired by Greystone Books.

ANNABEL CRABB: “Unbelievably compelling and great … Thoughtfully intense … A terrific book.”

RICK MORTON: “Car Crash is a phenomenal book. Beautiful and dark and compelling.”

For the February edition of The Monthly, I wrote a 9000-word essay about the unique charisma of Paul Pisasale, and the political disintegration of Ipswich under his leadership.

“Paul Pisasale was a criminal, wrapped in a capitalist, wrapped in a larrikin. His bizarre reign of lust and corruption was facilitated by a tsar-like willingness to attack those who resisted his cult of charisma.”

Read the story here, and subscribe to The Monthly today.