Speaker 1: Hey there, it's Ruby Jones. Each Sunday, we're sharing one
Speaker 1: of our favorite episodes from our sister podcast, Read This.
Speaker 1: The show features interviews with some of the best and
Speaker 1: most beloved writers from Australia and around the world. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to hear from star investigative reporter Louise Milligan,
Speaker 1: who's discussing her first novel, The Pheasant's Nest. Michael Williams
Speaker 1: is the host of Read This, and he's with me. Now, Hi, Michael,
Speaker 1: how are.
Speaker 2: You, Ruby Jones.
Speaker 3: I'm very well. How are you?
Speaker 1: I'm great?
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: So I imagine that most of our listeners will be
Speaker 1: more familiar with Louise Milligan's work as an investigative reporter,
Speaker 1: So just as a refresher, can you remind us of
Speaker 1: the true stories that she became famous for telling?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, lou Milligan is really one of the country's most
Speaker 3: celebrated storytellers and it's her work for Four Corners and
Speaker 3: more widely for the ABC. Is always kind of investigative
Speaker 3: in nature and always deeply compassionate about the name nature
Speaker 3: of victims of crime. It's one of her kind of watchwords.
Speaker 3: People might know her in particular for her book Cardinal,
Speaker 3: which won the Walkley Book Award, and that was her
Speaker 3: telling the George Pell story. And then she followed that
Speaker 3: up with another book called Witness, which was shining a
Speaker 3: light on the experience and pain of victim survivors going
Speaker 3: through our broken legal system. And in both of those,
Speaker 3: as in her journalism, she showed that she is the
Speaker 3: kind of expert chronicler of what it is to give
Speaker 3: voice to the voiceless when it comes to crime in
Speaker 3: our society.
Speaker 1: Okay, tell me a little bit about this first novel,
Speaker 1: The Pheasant's Nest and what someone like Louise can bring
Speaker 1: to the crime fiction genre.
Speaker 3: Well, all those qualities do come to bear in her
Speaker 3: first novel. Maybe the biggest surprise is how good she
Speaker 3: is and the kind of propulsiveness that you want from
Speaker 3: a good crime novel. You know, this is a book
Speaker 3: that does tell the story of a broken criminal justice system,
Speaker 3: does draw heavily on her journalistic experience and the conversation
Speaker 3: she's had with people touched by crime. But the book's
Speaker 3: a real romp, like, it's a real page turner, and
Speaker 3: that's one of the nicest things. And to hear her
Speaker 3: describe it, that impulse that compulsion to tell a good
Speaker 3: story is one hundred percent of product of an Irish
Speaker 3: Catholic upbringing.
Speaker 1: And I should mention that this episode it does mention
Speaker 1: sexual assault, so please take care while listening. Coming up
Speaker 1: in just a moment, Louise Milligan wears her heart on
Speaker 1: her sleeve.
Speaker 4: I remember when I sort of came of age. I
Speaker 4: suppose my mum is one of eleven, you know, the
Speaker 4: full Irish Catholic catastrophe. So mum was the third oldest,
Speaker 4: and the three older girls were each given younger children
Speaker 4: to look after because Nana just couldn't look after all
Speaker 4: the kids. And the third youngest, Michael, was always a
Speaker 4: really sort of interesting person, and he was a fitter
Speaker 4: and turner. He sort of left school, you know, none
Speaker 4: of them went to university or anything like that, very
Speaker 4: working class and whatever. But he went to America on
Speaker 4: a soccer scholarship and he ended up studying literature in
Speaker 4: New York, and he really sort of started off My
Speaker 4: love of Irish literature got me into Joyce and Yates
Speaker 4: and me I was already into Oscar Wild because I
Speaker 4: was a fan of the Smiths.
Speaker 2: So good.
Speaker 3: I was like a good gateway drug.
Speaker 2: Total gateway drug.
Speaker 4: Yeah, one of those people who sat on the floor
Speaker 4: of nightclubs, you know, pale makeup and black clothes and
Speaker 4: reading Oscar Wild very seriously.
Speaker 3: One of the things about a big family like that
Speaker 3: is the importance of telling stories. And one of the
Speaker 3: words that I most hate when journalists use it, but
Speaker 3: actually is most fitting for that kind of storytelling is
Speaker 3: a yarm like the idea of yarning being a really
Speaker 3: important way of connecting with other people. Has that always
Speaker 3: been the way for you?
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely in Irish culture, but also Scottish culture,
Speaker 4: so my dad is Scottish and being able to be
Speaker 4: a good storyteller and a good singer as well are
Speaker 4: really important things in those cultures and you're brought up
Speaker 4: with it. And actually as a television journalist, you know,
Speaker 4: I always say, if you can get an Irish person
Speaker 4: into a story, you're going to be fine. They don't
Speaker 4: have that, you know, classically understated taciturn thing that Australians
Speaker 4: often have. You know, Australians have that sort of tall, poppy,
Speaker 4: don't talk yourself up kind of vibe, whereas Irish people
Speaker 4: just just want to talk to you, you know, and
Speaker 4: joke telling, and you know all of that is like
Speaker 4: a huge part of the culture.
Speaker 3: And putting yourself out there is absolutely fine. I'm like
Speaker 3: the Australian thing where you know that we respect the circumspect,
Speaker 3: the laconic that, oh I don't care too much or
Speaker 3: I'm not going to kind of be full wrote it,
Speaker 3: and there was something nice about a tradition that says,
Speaker 3: if something's funny, laugh loud, and if it's sad, have
Speaker 3: a good cry.
Speaker 4: Absolutely and also a culture where you know, at the
Speaker 4: end of the night everyone gets up and has their
Speaker 4: turn to sing. You know, you just would never do
Speaker 4: that in a stay there.
Speaker 3: I think four corners would be improved if at the
Speaker 3: end of the episode you had to belt out a number.
Speaker 4: Look, I have to tell you, Michael, I'm not bad
Speaker 4: at a show too.
Speaker 3: I have no doubt. I suspect that when those cameras
Speaker 3: go off, there's a bit going on there. I'm curious
Speaker 3: about the relationship between, for lack of a better word,
Speaker 3: repression of one's voluble nature, one's show tunes, one's storytelling
Speaker 3: on the one hand, and the role that plays. I
Speaker 3: guess in a career like journalism, where you want to
Speaker 3: be taken seriously, where you want to be trusted, where
Speaker 3: being authoritative relies on gravitas. And I'm curious about whether
Speaker 3: that's something that you felt constrained by as you've come
Speaker 3: up in your career.
Speaker 4: I am not a journalist who you know, is very
Speaker 4: serious all the time. I do wear my heart on
Speaker 4: my sleeve, and I think that that enables me to
Speaker 4: empathize with people. And you know, people have often said
Speaker 4: to me, how do you get these people over the line?
Speaker 4: You know? Sometimes I've had situations where I've secured interviews
Speaker 4: with people who were being offered money by the commercials,
Speaker 4: And how do you do that? Just by being decent
Speaker 4: and kind? So yeah, I mean, I think that stereotype
Speaker 4: of the journalist who doesn't show anything it is a
Speaker 4: very male idea and it's not who I am.
Speaker 3: Is that something that you had to learn to have
Speaker 3: the confidence in for yourself? Though? I mean, I imagine coming
Speaker 3: up through things like cadet chips and then newsrooms that
Speaker 3: very masculinous tradition, those kind of expectations and constraints, there
Speaker 3: would have been attempts to impose them on you, even
Speaker 3: if you're resistant them.
Speaker 4: Oh, there was certainly an idea that don't get ahead
Speaker 4: of yourself Milligan, you know, like and I actually thought
Speaker 4: think that was quite good in a way, because when
Speaker 4: I was coming through journalism, I did a law degree,
Speaker 4: and a lot of the people who started around the
Speaker 4: same time as me did, and those people who had
Speaker 4: been high achievers at school and that sort of thing.
Speaker 4: But that doesn't necessarily make you a good journal Being
Speaker 4: a good journal you have to have humility, and any
Speaker 4: sense of having tickets on yourself was absolutely beaten out
Speaker 4: of you. And so I quite liked that. And I
Speaker 4: think some of the things that happened back then you
Speaker 4: couldn't get away with now in terms of managers. You know,
Speaker 4: there'd be complaints to HR. But it made you, i
Speaker 4: don't know, not have an overinflated sense of your place
Speaker 4: in the world, you know, especially when I wouldn't. This
Speaker 4: doesn't apply to me, but a lot of the people
Speaker 4: who were coming through, because they were people, you know,
Speaker 4: with law degrees and who were high achievers at schools
Speaker 4: and stuff like that, they were coming from private schools,
Speaker 4: They were coming from quite a lot of privilege, with
Speaker 4: an expectation that, you know, life is going to go
Speaker 4: pretty well for them, whereas the generation before us were
Speaker 4: people who often didn't go to university, had done cadetships,
Speaker 4: were sort of hard drinking, smoking, you know, sort of
Speaker 4: like you know, getting the yarns sort of people. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I think it was a good balance for my generation.
Speaker 3: I do think there's a lot in that notion you
Speaker 3: mentioned of humility and the relationship between humility and being
Speaker 3: a custodian of other people's stories. I mean, a big
Speaker 3: part of what makes you one of the countries foremost
Speaker 3: journalists in your books of nonfiction really kind of capture
Speaker 3: this is the ways in which you've honed your craft
Speaker 3: to take other people's stories and find ways to honor them,
Speaker 3: to do them justice, and to connect them with a readership.
Speaker 3: And that challenge of believing in your own value in
Speaker 3: terms of being in the room and being able to
Speaker 3: do it, but knowing how to be sent to yourself
Speaker 3: seems to me to be at the heart of what
Speaker 3: you do. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, my parents are the most decent people that
Speaker 4: you ever want to meet. My dad is a classic
Speaker 4: social justice Catholic, and they will give you the clothes
Speaker 4: off their back. They will do anything to help someone
Speaker 4: and That's what I was sort of brought up with.
Speaker 4: And I've always been attracted to telling the stories of
Speaker 4: people who are otherwise voiceless, people who don't have all
Speaker 4: the privileges that I have, and particularly people who have been,
Speaker 4: you know, victims of one sort of trauma or another,
Speaker 4: giving them the ability to have a voice, but in
Speaker 4: a very respectful way and in an empathetic way.
Speaker 3: How much of making the move to fiction was about
Speaker 3: an escape, about telling a propulsive story, and how much
Speaker 3: of it was shining a light, as you have in
Speaker 3: your journalism, on the ways in which these stories aren't told,
Speaker 3: or the gaps that exist in the way that they're told.
Speaker 4: Well, I definitely wanted to write the story from the
Speaker 4: point of view of the victim, survivor. I didn't write
Speaker 4: this as crime fiction. I just wrote the books that
Speaker 4: I wanted to write. And I guess it has a
Speaker 4: crime in it, so it's sort of slightly in the
Speaker 4: crime fiction category. But a lot of crime fiction, the
Speaker 4: often female victim is sort of disembodied almost we don't
Speaker 4: really know much about her, and it's about the police,
Speaker 4: and it's about the twists and turns and all of
Speaker 4: that sort of thing. I wanted to kind of subvert
Speaker 4: that and to make the survivor at the center, because
Speaker 4: I have through my work spoken to hundreds of survivors
Speaker 4: of sexual crimes, and I didn't want them to be
Speaker 4: a victim in the sense of someone that you just
Speaker 4: kind of feel sorry for. I wanted her to be strong. So,
Speaker 4: for instance, she absolutely hates her kidnapper. She thinks he's
Speaker 4: a complete idiot, and that sense of annoyance actually gives
Speaker 4: her some power, and it also gives her the opportunity
Speaker 4: to kind of use her gallows humor, which has got
Speaker 4: her buy as a journalist and which gets us all
Speaker 4: by as journalists. And so you know, that comes into
Speaker 4: the book quite a bit. So I guess that definitely
Speaker 4: informed what I was doing. I first started writing this
Speaker 4: book back in twenty fifteen, and that was not that
Speaker 4: long after I had covered the case of Jill Maher,
Speaker 4: the Irish Australian woman who worked at the ABC was
Speaker 4: not a journalist but was tragically murdered. And I had
Speaker 4: been the first person to interview Jill's husband, Tom, who
Speaker 4: was a lovely guy, and there was some suspicion around
Speaker 4: Tom at the start, and I was thinking about writing
Speaker 4: a novel about what if Jill Maher didn't die? And
Speaker 4: I think part of that was because I was so
Speaker 4: affected by her death, like so many people were in Melbourne.
Speaker 4: She had that ultimate sense of being someone that everyone
Speaker 4: could relate to, and so it was almost, in some
Speaker 4: ways a bit of a tribute to her and to
Speaker 4: Tom and to her family. And then I got really
Speaker 4: caught up with my journalism and basically I wrote three chapters,
Speaker 4: put it away for seven years, wrote my first book, Cardinal,
Speaker 4: my second book, Witness. You know, got sued by the
Speaker 4: Attorney General.
Speaker 2: The list goes on as.
Speaker 3: A new standard couple of years in anyone's life.
Speaker 4: They've all been there, got a cross examined by Robert Richter,
Speaker 4: you know, all of those things. Seven years went by,
Speaker 4: and then I came back to it when I was
Speaker 4: at a time where I was feeling quite low and
Speaker 4: I needed another I needed an outlet, and this novel
Speaker 4: really became therapy for me.
Speaker 3: When we return, Louise reveals how her work as an
Speaker 3: investigative journalist informs the characters in her novel We'll be
Speaker 3: right back. Tell me about Kate Delaney. She's the main
Speaker 3: character of your debut novel, Pheasant's Nest, And I'm really
Speaker 3: keen to dig into the idea about whether it's liberating
Speaker 3: to work in fiction or whether it's just a separate
Speaker 3: set of challenges. And I want to start with Kate
Speaker 3: because she is someone who's biographical details. It's a world
Speaker 3: you know very well, so you're able to illustrate a
Speaker 3: number of things very efficiently.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, she is like me, an Irish Australian journalist.
Speaker 4: She's a newspaper journalist. She's not me. She has very
Speaker 4: much her own character. She's an only child who has
Speaker 4: lost her parents. She's someone and this I really relate
Speaker 4: to being a migrant as a small child. There's a
Speaker 4: sense of being an outsider, a misfit, especially as sort
Speaker 4: of a bookish one, and that creates a grit in her.
Speaker 4: And also she has this mother who really sort of
Speaker 4: wants the best for her, and for instance, every morning
Speaker 4: lays out all the newspapers on the table like a
Speaker 4: general with maps, and you know, plunks her in front
Speaker 4: of the ABC and wants this only child to be someone.
Speaker 4: And she's someone who's had some traumas, but she's someone
Speaker 4: with a really really big heart. And a big personality.
Speaker 4: When she walks into a room, you can't help but
Speaker 4: notice her. But sometimes that puts people off as well.
Speaker 4: She's not perfect by any means. She can be quite
Speaker 4: a snob, but she's endearing. I wanted to create a
Speaker 4: character that was really unforgettable, that people really wanted the
Speaker 4: best for. And the same applies to her boyfriend, Liam,
Speaker 4: who is a medical negligence lawyer who she's met on
Speaker 4: a story. They are both people who were misfits on
Speaker 4: the playground. They are talking, but they're sort of like
Speaker 4: endearing at the same time, they're sort of Yeah. I
Speaker 4: just wanted people to care about these characters, and you know,
Speaker 4: at the end of the book wish that they were
Speaker 4: still in the reader's life.
Speaker 3: Often journals make the leap to fiction not very well badly. Yes, yeah, no,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be honest. Yeah. And I was trying
Speaker 3: to think about what worked for me so well in
Speaker 3: your novel and and made you the exception to that rule.
Speaker 3: One of the things is character and detail and minor character.
Speaker 3: I think often there's something a little functional about the
Speaker 3: way characterization happens in a novel from someone who's not
Speaker 3: used to thinking in those terms, and there's something about
Speaker 3: the humanity of even the kind of brief walk on
Speaker 3: roles that you do. You have not to be reductive,
Speaker 3: but a good cop and a bad cop in the
Speaker 3: course of the novel, or one who is held back
Speaker 3: from doing his job well because of his personal failings
Speaker 3: as a character, and another one who is doing his
Speaker 3: job well despite the trauma that he's seen. And that
Speaker 3: kind of detail and character seems really important to you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I think with both of those cops. The
Speaker 4: cop who fails, he does so for sort of the
Speaker 4: right reasons, in a way. He has been watching domestic
Speaker 4: violence play out in technicolor detail in his work for years.
Speaker 4: He's a gay man who loves his sisters and his
Speaker 4: mother and loves women and is absolutely horrified by the
Speaker 4: way that men feel that they can do terrible things
Speaker 4: to women, and so he lands on Liam, the boyfriend.
Speaker 4: He also finds Liam, you know, he's a bit of
Speaker 4: a hipster. He finds him annoying. This guy's a cop.
Speaker 4: He's like very sort of straight laced, and he just yeah, So.
Speaker 3: That's the thing, the pettiness and the spite, which is
Speaker 3: absolutely accurate. We all do it. Snap judgments whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but the way in which you demonstrate that despite not
Speaker 3: being a bad cop per se, not being a bad person,
Speaker 3: but just being a human being, means that he doesn't
Speaker 3: do his job well.
Speaker 4: He doesn't do it well. And then the other one,
Speaker 4: Peter Dan Brosio, he is based on, you know, snatches
Speaker 4: of a lot of police that I have worked with
Speaker 4: who have PTSD, and his PTSD is quite crippling, to
Speaker 4: the point where he has to go off work on sick,
Speaker 4: as he calls it, for a while. And to some extent,
Speaker 4: he's slightly based on a police officer that I knew
Speaker 4: who got to the point where he was putting tinfoil
Speaker 4: on his windows because the insurance company would film him
Speaker 4: when he went outside to the bins and so on.
Speaker 4: They were trying to prove that he was not really injured.
Speaker 4: But he's also a very soft character. And having got
Speaker 4: to know a lot of police, they often get a
Speaker 4: bad rap, you know, they're often put into a box
Speaker 4: about what sort of person is a police officer. And
Speaker 4: I have spent a lot of time with police at
Speaker 4: their most vulnerable, and they they're the sort of people
Speaker 4: who they are incredibly loyal. So if you help them,
Speaker 4: they will remember for years. They will lay out the
Speaker 4: red carpet for you for years as a journalist. But
Speaker 4: I guess a lot of people don't really understand them.
Speaker 4: And it's very kind of lonely. And that's sort of
Speaker 4: what's happening with this guy. And his life is just
Speaker 4: really sort of unraveling. You know. He finds himself having
Speaker 4: a lap dance with a stripper who's got dental braces
Speaker 4: and black roots and blonde hair, and he sleeps on
Speaker 4: the couch at work and there are two minute noodles
Speaker 4: stuck down the side of the couch and he's really
Speaker 4: just existing. But what I wanted with him was someone
Speaker 4: who just needed to get a win, and he just
Speaker 4: wants to find Kate Delaney. And because and I mean,
Speaker 4: this was something that I could sort of inject my
Speaker 4: knowledge of journalism. Because Kate Delaney is a journalist in
Speaker 4: this sort of media kind of conception of celebrity, the
Speaker 4: crime media conception of celebrity. She goes from being a
Speaker 4: sort of a moderately well known newspaper reporter to a beautiful,
Speaker 4: like one of Australia's most well known journalists.
Speaker 3: Of course, the story's custom made one of us, one.
Speaker 4: Of us, and if one of us is missing, then
Speaker 4: you know, the police commissioners saying to Dan Brosio, you
Speaker 4: better bloody find this woman because this is going to
Speaker 4: be a disaster. You know, it's in the papers every day,
Speaker 4: and that all the slickly presented commercial television reporters are
Speaker 4: doing breathless live crosses about it, and it's this sort
Speaker 4: of race against time, and he is feeling that so keenly.
Speaker 3: The books ondenly just come out, so maybe too soon,
Speaker 3: But do you think about the various cops of your aquaintance, lawyers, journalists,
Speaker 3: victim survivors who are going to read this and be
Speaker 3: spotting themselves on the pages or looking for the shadows
Speaker 3: and echoes of their own stories.
Speaker 4: Look, I am sort of a magpie and so I'm
Speaker 4: pulling little bits and pieces from places. There is only
Speaker 4: one person in the book who is an actual person,
Speaker 4: and she's now dead, and that was my great maternal
Speaker 4: Auntie Chrissy. But she's called Auntie Maggie in the book.
Speaker 4: She's pretty much exactly as she was Apart from her.
Speaker 4: Everyone else they have elements, but they're not the person.
Speaker 3: Would Kate Delaney at the end of the night belt
Speaker 3: out show tunes.
Speaker 4: I think she probably would.
Speaker 3: And what would her go to be.
Speaker 4: I mean, my go to is doun Ka Shane by
Speaker 4: Wayne Newton, very.
Speaker 3: Strong, good, that's you, that's your inner Ferispuela right there one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think she'd probably like that too.
Speaker 3: I can see you swinging the microphone with Gusto.
Speaker 2: That's don't even get me started.
Speaker 3: I'm very tempted. I'm tempted to try it, like cue
Speaker 3: up the track, get it going, We're gonna This is
Speaker 3: a book about many serious and difficult things and horrible things,
Speaker 3: but at the same time, there's still room for Luise
Speaker 3: milligand to have a song, and that's pretty important. Holding
Speaker 3: those two things is equally true.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Adaman, Look, one of the things that I was
Speaker 4: really really wanting to do was have a lot of
Speaker 4: levity in the book, because you know, I didn't want
Speaker 4: it to be a punish I wanted it to be
Speaker 4: a book. Book that doesn't patronize the reader, that is intelligent,
Speaker 4: but at the same time it isn't painful to read.
Speaker 3: And know you're going again like you've got the fiction bug.
Speaker 3: You can't resistant In the same world.
Speaker 4: I am writing a second book and it is partially
Speaker 4: set in Ireland and it is connected.
Speaker 3: Excellent.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I'm really excited about it.
Speaker 3: Louise Mulligan's first novel, Pheasants Next, is widely available now.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to another special episode of
Speaker 1: Read This. Join us each Sunday to hear our favorite
Speaker 1: interviews from the show. Listen out for upcoming conversations with
Speaker 1: Malcolm Knox and Mary Beard. And if you don't want
Speaker 1: to wait until next Sunday to dive in to Read This,
Speaker 1: you can search for it wherever you listen to podcasts