Cruel Silences
The Age
Saturday December 3, 1994
GATTON MAN, By Merv Lilley, McPhee Gribble, $17.95.
ON BOXING Day, 1898, three members of the Murphy family were murdered in a paddock near their farm. The killer of Norah, Ellen and Michael Murphy was never found. In 1977 James and Desmond Gibney wrote a book about the brutal rapes and killings. Rodney Hall gave his fictional account of the murders in his distinguished 1988 novel, Captivity Captive.
Now Merv Lilley declares that he knows who the murderer was.
According to him, the killer was his father, Bill Lilley. The fact that he does not make a very convincing case for this strangely does not take away from the fascination of his book.
Just for a change, the blurb gets it right by referring to the Dad and Dave stories. There is a darkness in Rudd's stories that hovers just out of sight beyond the bushfire blackened trees.
Merv Lilley has brought that darkness into focus in, as he says, ``Barbara Baynton-style". Bill Lilley served in the Boer War, then returned to South Africa ``as a murderous bastard, a killer of black men". As for many of his central claims, Lilley produces no real evidence for this charge.
What he does offer is the detailed picture of a man who returned to Queensland, married Lucy Dagg and lorded it over his farm, which was ``run like a convict estate". Lilley is convincing in his portrait of a man who raped both his wife and his grand-daughter, who was relentlessly vengeful, who was always cruel to his two sons and two daughters, and who brutalised His animals, killing them when they irritated Him. The ``old feller" is always ``He" and ``Him".
Always present is the gentle, patient Lucy who stood by a sadistic and vindictive man she once loved. And while Lilley's sisters are central to the story he tells, his book is essentially an account of three men, Bill and his sons Osborne and Merv, fighting, often physically, for power.
More than a third of the book is taken up with examining in detail ``the main event", the Gatton murders. Lilley admits that he has ``no proof" and then tries to convince the reader that his father was a multiple murderer and a rapist of both women and men.
Part of the fascination of the book comes from Lilley's need to share this belief, which is based on secondhand, anecdotal evidence whose ultimate source was a man who lived by lies as well as by brutality.
When Lilley tries to establish his case by a detailed study of police evidence, you could drive a herd of elephants through the ``evidence" and still leave room for Bob Hawke's ego.
What Lilley does provide is a chilling account of ``the sadistic life on dairy farms", which he claims was commonplace in the Queensland of his youth and has been hidden by a conspiracy of silence.
Interestingly, in his eagerness to show what a monster Bill Lilley was, his son presents the neighbors as being rather kind and protective.
Here lies the other fascination of this book, its emotional ambivilance. It almost seems that Lilley needs some notorious act of violation and murder to set the public seal on his father's monstrosity. Lilley's mesmerising, lolloping prose certainly convinces me that everywhere around him there was ``hatred, hatred, hatred".
Yet Lilley, in spite of his disclaimers, seems unresolved about ``the philosophy of violence". He is clearly proud of his own knockout punch and notes ``that may have been the last time He hung one on me, I was getting pretty dangerous myself". The last knockdown fight between ``the old feller" and Osborne is described with the loving detail that would do Gus Mercurio proud on TV Ringside.
This is a compelling portrait of ``a mad old bad old bastard". . `` ... Some 60 years have elapsed" since many of the events described in this book, but Lilley gives them a searing reality, using no doubt memory and some imagination (as in some of the reported dialogues).
Lilley's portrait of his mother, ``the soul of gentleness", gives a horrific picture of what one particular woman suffered emotionally and physically from a vicious man. But it is the world of males stalking each other in an eternal fight to be king of the herd that is the main focus of the book.
Lilley believes that from Lucy he received ``some chance of the saving grace of respect for life". But when you examine the rhetoric, you realise that he also inherited from Bill an admiration for a straight right fist. The real interest in this book lies not in the Gatton murders but in its autobiographical forthrightness about a childhood and youth in which Rudd's farce takes on a chilling brutality. It was an upbringing that not surprisingly left through its battering some emotional ambivilance. And, surprisingly or not, a sense of the poetry and grace that remain possible in any life.
John Hanrahan is a Melbourne writer.
© 1994 The Age
