Long before I began writing this book, I was a baby journalist who had just finished my cadetship and was newly assigned to the County Court of Victoria by the newspaper I worked for. The Australian court system splits criminal offenses into three tiers. The least serious stuff is dealt with in each state by magistrates courts. This is a plum job for a journalist on the courts round because Magis (as we called it) is also where the big-ticket trials get off the ground. Murder, terrorism, and everything front-page-worthy has its first hearing there before being sent to the Supreme Court for trial. If you’re not getting the first look at the crown’s case against a murderer, you’re reporting on celebrity misdemeanors and other quirks of humanity. Magis is splashy, Supreme is serious, but County is bleak and complicated.
County court is where almost all sexual offenses are heard (sometimes a particularly heinous rapist will go before the Supreme Court). The real-life stories I heard covering County made me sick. The sheer volume of abuse perpetrated against women and children by their husbands, lovers, fathers, uncles, teachers . . . the litany of crimes was unending. There was a separate list every day for sexual crimes, and judges took turns overseeing it, trying to avoid burning out on the hideous materials they were faced with. I covered that court for a little over a year, in 2008 and 2009. I still think about it all the time.
In the months after Victoria was devastated by the Black Saturday fires—a bushfire event that killed 173 people and completely leveled whole regional towns, and at the time the worst natural disaster in Australian history since colonization—I was assigned to cover state politics. As the junior member of that team, I spent a lot of time tailing the premier in the region. I met people across the affected areas, I saw the recovery efforts firsthand, and I covered hundreds of kilometers of bush, some of it blackened and destroyed, some of it eerily untouched. With my court background, I was also pulled onto the coverage of the Royal Commission that investigated the fires, a confluence of state politics and court—a meticulous excavation of how the fires happened and exactly what they took from people.
When I started writing Radiant Heat way back in 2012, I held two things in my mind: glimmers of the place and person I wanted to write about. The place: Victoria, after a fire that resembled the Black Saturday blaze. The person: A woman who survived it. Women, I think, are often allowed to be only one thing at a time. Daughters, wives, victims, lovers, sisters, friends—we are endlessly defined by the roles we play and the way we live up to the expectations that our families, communities, and society place on us. It was important to me that Alison, Sal, and really every woman in this book were more than one thing, and in being multifaceted they were flawed, human, imperfect. That even though they had endured terrible things, they were still capable of great strength and were not defined by what men or the harsh Australian environment had done to them.
It has always seemed to me there is an inherent violence to the Australian landscape. It is a hostility, perhaps, to her treatment these last 235-odd years. Colonization and genocide make a mark on us all. So, how do we exist in this blood-soaked culture, and what does it do to us? I will never forget the first time I drove through the fire-ravaged landscape, in 2009. How as the road twisted toward Kinglake, the hills were a blackened moonscape, so much loss absorbed into them. As I wrote, I thought a lot about that drive, and a lot about the thrillers and mysteries I read growing up—the ones I continue to consume to this day. So many of these stories are about unraveling the truth about something terrible that happened to a woman. Very rarely is the woman who it happened to the person trying to unravel the truth.
I imagined, instead of a detective or a sleuth, a woman who wasn’t prepared to just sit back and passively experience the violence and trauma of her own life. She felt true to the women I’d met in my life, the ones I’d witnessed in the county court, and the people I’d seen rebuilding their lives after Black Saturday. She was flawed, but she was strong, and brave when she needed to be. Violence is an annihilator. Whether it’s the violence of a fire or of a man. It takes from us and makes us something else. Radiant Heat, then, is a story about a woman who didn’t just survive—she lived.