I was incredibly honoured to win The Age Book of the Year for Australian Gospel. The judges wrote: “The book is hysterically funny and deeply poignant. Lech Blaine is an exceptionally gifted storyteller, alive to all the nuances of character and the circumstances that shape the lives of people.”
You can read more about it here. Unfortunately, I still haven’t learned what to do with either my face or my hands during photo shoots, as proven by the front page of The Age the following day.
I dedicated both the book and this particular victory to my mother Lenore. She bequeathed me with a sweet tooth, hazel green eyes, flat feet, bad hand-eye coordination, and an addiction to literature. I accepted the prize on the first night of Melbourne Writers Festival. Here is an extract from my speech:
“Dad used to say I’d been kissed on the dick by good luck. He was right. What a godsend as a writer to be the son of Lenore and Tom Blaine. Australian Gospel wouldn’t exist without the sacrifices that they made as foster carers. It definitely wouldn’t exist without the love of reading and writing Mum passed onto me.
Tonight, she is the real winner. Thanks to everyone who has read the book and helped to spread The Gospel of Lenore. I don’t take your support for granted.”
After a month on sale, Australian Gospel is going to a reprint. I’m grateful to everyone who bought a copy or came to one of the events. You can order the book online here. Or better yet you can get the book from your local bookshop. Many of them have been doing it tough this year, and they provide enormous support to Australian authors. The audiobook is available from Audible here.
“Lech Blaine has written the most remarkable family saga with Australian Gospel. The reader constantly has to remind themselves they are, in fact, reading a work of stunning, hilarious, harrowing non-fiction and not an Australian fiction classic.” – Trent Dalton, Sydney Morning Herald Best Books of 2024
I’m going to donate $1 from the sale of each book to the Pyjama Foundation, a charity that provides mentorship and literacy programs to foster kids. The Project did a story on Australian Gospel, which you can watch below:
I did an interview with The Guardian, which you can read here. I had a chat with David Marr on Late Night Live, which you can listen to here. I went back on ABC’s Conversations program, which you can listen to here. I’ve also been lucky enough to get some really insightful reviews. Quotes with links below.
“It is to Blaine’s enormous credit that he tells this sensational story with compassion, intelligence and great wit. Australian Gospel is a captivating work of narrative nonfiction.” – Catriona Menzies-Pike, The Guardian
“A bloody good yarn … At the heart of this book lies, well, a whole lotta heart. Lech Blaine’s family love one another ferociously.” – Luke Johnson, The Conversation
“The Blaines feel like an ur-family of the national mythos: Patrick White’s Parkers or Christina Stead’s Pollits, overlaid with humble heroism … The bottomlessness of the Blaines’ compassion and forbearance – not just sainted Lenore, but bolshie Tom and the siblings as well – made this flinty-hearted reader emotional.” – Michael Winkler, Australian Book Review
“Ultimately, this is a surprisingly heartwarming story about love: how a lack of it can irreversibly derail someone’s life but how, in turn, a life can be saved by it.” – Katherine Smyrk, ABC’s Best New Books
“Journalist Lech Blaine’s family memoir Australian Gospel tells a compelling story at a breathless pace … It’s a story that will stay with its readers for a long time.” – Mark Dapin, The Australian
“It is the two intertwined stories that makes Australian Gospel: A Family Saga such a propulsive, compelling tale … It is full of hope, humanity and the everyday joys and struggles of family life.” – Luke Horton, The Saturday Paper
“Despite the nightmare-inducing creepiness of the Shelleys, Blaine’s writing maintains a light and sometimes comical tone. This emotionally charged book reads partly as a thriller and partly as a literary memoir.” – Nadia Heisler, Books+Publishing
“What an extraordinary family story Lech Blaine tells … That the family survived is a testament to Blaine’s remarkable parents.” – Jason Steger, Sydney Morning Herald
Michael and Mary Shelley were glamorous Sydney socialites, who became Christian fanatics and kidnappers. Three of their children – Steven, John and Hannah – were secretly placed into foster care with my parents, Lenore and Tom Blaine. The Shelleys were apocalyptically irritated to discover that the children of God had been fostered by working-class Queensland publicans.
“The fat, liquor-swilling Blaines brainwashed our children into boring, sports-obsessed Australians, with no intellect or finesse!” wrote Michael Shelley in his manifesto.
Dad used to say: “Jesus really opened a can of worms, mate.” Mum used to say: “I’m going to write a book about the Shelley Gang one day.” Due to illness, she never got the chance. So I wrote it for her. It has taken me eleven years to finish. I interviewed hundreds of people. Now whittled down into a family saga about the tangled fates of two couples and the children trapped between their beliefs.
The book is called Australian Gospel. You can get it here or at your local bookshop. I’m donating $1 from the sale of each book to the Pyjama Foundation, a charity that provides mentorship and literacy programs to foster kids.
Here’s some early endorsements:
“The astonishing tale of a foster family created and held together by ferocious love, laughter and courage. What makes a real family? Whose rights should triumph in battles over a child? Which inheritances can we escape, and which will haunt us forever? All this is explored in an irreverently joyful family saga you’ll never forget.” – Charlotte Wood
“Wild applause. Brave, funny and true.” – David Marr
“This is the new benchmark for the quintessential Australian epic. I lost count of how many times I laughed and cried. If I was a believer, I’d say that Lech Blaine’s writing is godlike. Then again, it’s something better than that; enchantingly human.” – Grace Tame
“Fact is stranger than fiction but it never arrives fully formed. We need writers like Blaine to do that for us. Here he delivers a rollicking, insightful and moving account of the everyday heavens and hells we make for ourselves, and each other.” – Sarah Krasnostein
“An extraordinary true story, beautifully told.” – Tim Minchin
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.
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.
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.”
Lech Blaine 