IN SEARCH OF THE SPARK
Chloe Hooper has trouble letting go. Enough is rarely enough for this writer, who combs over and over her work adding and checking details.
“Somebody has to come and tear the book away from me,” says the Melbourne author of The Arsonist, a recreation of a major Black Saturday bushfire and the detective work that led to the Churchill home of the firelighter.
Hooper, 44, sometimes had to remind herself how much she and her partner, fellow author Don Watson, were paying babysitters to look after their two sons, aged 7 and 4, to yank herself back to the here and now.
“I drove everybody [I interviewed] crazy, getting back to them over and over asking them ‘do you have any recollection of X, Y and Z?’. I could have gone further. There were times when my focus was obsessive.”
Hooper had to convince Victoria Police to talk. She says a delay in co-operating was protocol-related rather than wariness over what she had written about the force’s Queensland cousins in a previous book.
The Arsonist is Hooper’s first long nonfiction in a decade. It follows The Tall Man, her multi award-winning death in custody book about Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley and indigenous man Cameron Doomadgee, who died on Queensland’s Palm Island in 2004.
She also wrote psychological thriller The Engagement and a remarkably confident 2002 debut novel, A Child’s Book of True Crime, which was set in Tasmania.
The Arsonist begins at an intersection of two roads in a burnt Latrobe Valley forest and a detective puzzling over what happened.
Hooper is in awe of the forensic skill of fire detectives. “It is incredible that from 30,000 burnt hectares the arson squad detectives traced the first flames to three square metres.”
At the centre of the story is the man who set the place alight on the scorching February day in 2009 known as Black Saturday. Brendan Sokaluk, an ex-volunteer firefighter, sat on his house roof to watch the blaze.
About 30 firebugs were known to local police, but Sokaluk was not. In many ways, though, the intellectually disabled 42-year-old who relied mostly on his parents and dog Brocky for company, fit the arsonist profile.
Homing in on one man, one investigation, one court case and one small community, Hooper tells a much bigger story of fire in Australia, bringing in its sociological, cultural and environmental dimensions.
The inferno scenes are terrifying and the survivor stories harrowing, but it is also a reflective work. “I started out asking who becomes an arsonist and why,” she says. “Answering the question led me into this community in Victoria’s coal country in a town that was a dormitory suburb for power workers. Since the closure of the State Electricity Commission there, a rust belt has formed.”
When the heightened fire risk associated with climate change meets a severe economic downturn, the results can be combustible, she says. “Crime stories are often about disadvantage and dysfunction. And there are more people with grievances who will bring these fires to life. When people who are disenfranchised also happen to live on the edge of eucalypts, as they often do, that’s where the fire will often be.”
Police catch 1 per cent of firelighters. Hooper has learnt that arson is often attributable to boredom, frustration, sadness, powerlessness, desire for revenge, attention and to be a hero, and a range of compulsions.
A subset of firesetters call in police, as Brendan did, and help to fight it.
Of the 173 people who died in the Black Saturday fires, 161 died in fires caused not by arson but other causes, mostly power infrastructure failures, with some blazes subject to class-action lawsuits.
“After Black Saturday, there was hysteria around arson, and there still is, but we also have to hold electricity companies to account over their safety standards,” says Hooper. “It’s complicated that an intellectually disabled man was vilified, but we don’t hold boards of directors of power companies to account in quite the same way.” AMANDA DUCKER The Arsonist, Hamish Hamilton, $34.99