LECH BLAINE Australian Gospel: A family saga. Reviewed by Mary Garden

Lech Blaine’s memoir recounts the ongoing harassment his family suffered from the parents of his foster siblings.  

Australian Gospel: A family saga by Lech Blaine is the story of two families whose lives intersect in an extraordinary way. Blaine emphasises that it is a work of creative non-fiction, not history or journalism. Using a novelistic style, he has sought ‘to capture the emotional truth of what happened’.

Tom and Lenore Blaine were working-class publicans who moved around regional Queensland with their growing family of foster kids. Lenore suffered a string of miscarriages before the couple turned to the foster system. They also had dozens of short-term foster care placements. Lech was an unexpected miracle, born in 1992 and named after Lech Wałęsa, president of Poland between 1990 and 1995.

Michael and Mary Shelley were itinerant fanatical Christians, who for 30 years roamed around the world (mostly within Australia and New Zealand), preaching their version of the Gospel of Jesus and crusading against their enemies. They terrorised the families who fostered their children, all of whom were removed at various times by the Department of Child Safety. Three of their children, Saul and Joshua (renamed Steven and John) and Hannah, ended up with the Blaines.

Blaine writes in the prologue that he worked on his book with four cork boards on the walls of his office: ‘The Gospel of Michael. The Gospel of Mary. The Gospel of Tom. The Gospel of Lenore.’ Like the gospels in the Bible, each tells a different version of the story, and early in the book, Blaine explores the family histories of all four, with subsequent chapters alternating between the lives of each family, knitting a web-like structure.

During ‘the biblical shitshow’ of his childhood, Blaine’s mother would talk about writing up the story of the ‘Shelley Gang’. Due to illness, she never got the chance. Blaine took up the challenge. Using her diaries, supplemented by court reports, case files, restraining orders, newspaper accounts and interviews with hundreds of people who had encountered the Shelleys, he pieced the story together.

The Shelleys met in a group therapy session in a Sydney psychiatric hospital in 1976. Michael, twice divorced and penniless, had attempted suicide. Carrie (who later changed her name to Mary) had also been married twice and had been diagnosed with bipolar. After they left hospital and began living together, they would recite their favourite Bible passages, and began to believe the Bible was talking to them.

A new-age curiously about scriptures snowballed into a folie à deux, French for ‘madness of two’. Michael was that Michael [the archangel], the messenger, God’s right-hand man. He told Carrie that she didn’t need any more lithium or electroshock therapy. They were cured of future suicide attempts …

Lenore met Tom in 1978 at a backyard barbecue in Ipswich, Queensland, and moved in with him a month later. While Tom loved frequenting the pub and Lenore preferred to read a book, they were soul mates. Their God was egalitarianism: they believed that a society was judged by its treatment of the downtrodden.

After years of driving a taxi, in 1985 Tom had a Eureka moment reading the Courier Mail. A pub for sale! In Rosedale, near Bundaberg, a small town with a population of 356. This was the beginning of their lives as publicans in various towns, including Chinchilla, Wondai and Toowoomba.

In 1979, Mary fell pregnant, and the Shelleys got rid of all their possessions and hitchhiked north. Their first child, Elijah, was born in a hippy commune high in the Atherton Tablelands. Soon after the birth, the Shelleys continued hitchhiking, seeking free lodging at churches, despite Michael dismissing them as ‘spiritually bankrupt money-laundering operations’. He soon made himself unwelcome with his demands, his rudeness, and his criticism of his hosts’ junk food. The Shelleys were arrested for harassment and vagrancy.

Authorities determined that Elijah was malnourished, and he was eventually sent to a foster home. Mary had two more boys, Saul and Joshua, born in 1983 and 1984, and a daughter, Hannah, born in 1990. All were put into foster care. For decades the Shelleys tried to get their children back, even though the children were given new identities and their locations kept a closely guarded secret. In 1981, they kidnapped Elijah, which led to a national manhunt and media storm.

A social worker warned the Blaines of the risks of adopting Steven and John, and sent them a dossier of newspaper articles about the notorious couple. Tom studied some photographs of Michael Shelley and asked his wife:

‘What is the go with this bloke?’ he asked.

‘He’s a narcissist,’ said Lenore.

‘An arsonist?’ asked Tom, alarmed.

‘No, Thomas. A narcissist. He loves himself.’

Tom was relieved. He nodded, knowingly.

‘So, he sniffs his own farts?’ he asked.

‘Something like that,’ she said.

In 1990, with social workers and the police ‘circling’, the Shelleys fled to New Zealand, with Mary now 36 weeks pregnant. Hannah was born in the bathroom of a motel in Whanganui; Michael was the ‘midwife’.

They then travelled around New Zealand leaving a trail of unpaid bills, until Michael was arrested. The New Zealand Department of Social Services was alerted, and Hannah was removed from Mary, who by this time ‘appeared deeply haunted and possibly psychotic’. Michael and Mary had a month in the Carrington Psychiatric Hospital, formerly known as the Whau Lunatic Asylum.

The Shelleys went on to spend some years roaming New Zealand. Following repeated suicide attempts, Mary was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Hamilton. Eventually they returned to Queensland, hellbent on tracking down their children.

Which they did, embarking on a campaign of terror against the family in an effort to reclaim their children. Michael was incensed to find their children living with the Blaines, and later wrote:

Our children were brought up in depressing western Queensland pubs which featured the reckless indulgence of alcohol and an obsession with idiotic ball sports. In collusion with the Department of Child Safety, the Blaines brainwashed our children into boring Australians.

The Blaines moved house and obtained restraining orders against the Shelleys, but the harassment continued. They received a torrent of abusive letters, such as this one:

AS GOD’S CHOSEN PROPHETESS, I GIVE YOU A FINAL WARNING FROM GOD. I NEED MY DAUGHTER HANNAH RETURNED TO MICHAEL + I TODAY WITH APPROPRIATE COMPENSATION ($100,000 WOULD BE A NICE START) OR GOD WILL SEND HIS NEVERENDING WRATH UPON YOUR HEAD.

And this:

The contempt I feel for you two child abusing deviates is profound and deserved. I rejoice in where you are both going – HELL!

The Shelleys did not limit their campaign to the Blaines, extending their efforts to doctors and MPs and even threatening to kill Premier Mike Ahern.

Blaine points out that there is ‘a thin line between the winners and the losers; the good Samaritans and the criminals; the saints and the sinners’. His siblings ‘won the foster care lottery’ in finding a home with the Blaines – many foster children are not so fortunate. He draws parallels with the Stolen Generation and asks us to consider under what circumstances it is right to remove a child from their parents. Despite their behaviour, Mary and Michael loved their children, albeit in a distorted way, and were heartbroken at being separated from them. Clearly these two fell through the cracks and did not receive the long-term psychiatric and psychological support they needed.

However, the damage the Shelleys caused was long lasting. After Hannah had left home and was at university, ‘the fear was still there, just hidden, like rust covered with fresh paint’. In an interview with Walter Marsh in The Guardian, Blaine said, ‘Even after I’d moved away from Toowoomba, I used to dread their potential arrival.’

I’ve never read a book quite like this. It is both complex and bonkers (bonkers in the sense of wild and bizarre) and would have been an extremely difficult book to research and write. Blaine says it took him eleven years. He explains in another interview that he ‘needed time to write the book from a place of curiosity and love; not fear, anger, or grief.’ That time paid off. Australian Gospel is rich with detail and deeply moving and compassionate.

Lech Blaine Australian Gospel: A family saga Black Inc. 2024 PB 352pp $36.99

Mary Garden is an award-winning author and a journalist, with a PhD in Journalism (USC). Born in New Zealand, she settled in Queensland in the late 1970s. Her new book My Father’s Suitcase: a memoir was released in 2024 and was the joint winner of the Goody Business Award 2024 in the self-help/memoir category.

You can buy Australian Gospel from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: creative non-fiction, foster children, foster parents, Lech | Blaine, Lenore Blaine, Mary Shelley, memoir, mental illness, Michael Shelley, Tom Blaine