On Valentine’s Day 2012 a group of defence lawyers stood watching a ‘jury view’. The jurors were inspecting the edge of the plantation where it was alleged Brendan Sokaluk had deliberately lit two fires. In the summer heat, on the fouth day of his trial, they gravely made notes, and gravely considered the possibility that they were standing at the scene of an appalling crime. A haze of insects drifted in the gaps between neat rows of trees.

Ten thousand hectares of plantation timber had burnt in the blaze: the Eucalyptus globulus destined for the local paper mill, the long-fibered Pinus radiata for the timber mill. The debris had all been bulldozed and the land replanted. Here, by the dirt track named Jellef’s Outlet, the gums had been replaced with pines. The young ones were like Christmas trees, but on the other side of Glendonald Road, the stand of unscathed radiata, 26 years-old and storeys-high, remained as silent witnesses to the fire’s beginning, three years and one week earlier.

Jarrod Williams, a Legal Aid public defender acting as Sokaluk’s junior barrister, stood back assessing the jurors. It was a professional pastime, trying to size them up without their noticing. As the horrors of Black Saturday had entered the public consciousness, he assumed they had surely entered the consciousness of these people too. The country’s worst recorded natural disaster had changed the way even city folk thought about summer. These strangers, their lives suddenly disrupted, wore fluorescent jackets, as did the judge, who looked pleased to be out of the Melbourne courtroom. A minibus parked to the side of the road gave the jury view the feel of a school excursion – except these men and women were responsible for deciding the fate of the one man whose Black Saturday arson charges had reached trial.

Williams could see the geography of the story dawning on them. The fire’s path was still evident on the hills adjacent to the plantation. There were clusters of bone-white eucalypts where the inferno had burned too hot and too deep into the ground for the trees’ survival. The steep angles of the land meant the damage was on permanent display. These sloping hills, the heat, the quiet, the ease of ignition, and of finding oneself trapped – none of it was hard to imagine.

Courtrooms disembody the evidence. Melbourne’s Supreme Court building was a grand, goldrush-era edifice; all the embellishments of the high-Victorian decor matched the intricate legal formalities. But now the main players of this drama, other than Brendan himself, stood in the dirt, with birds darting and calling in the taller branches overhead.

The jury were shown one proposed ignition site by detectives Adam Shoesmith and Paul Bertoncello, then they navigated the new pines to the second site, a hundred metres away, on the other side of Jellef’s Outlet. They were followed by the Honourable Paul Coghlan, the presiding judge, without his wig and gown.

Ray Elston, a veteran prosecutor with a calm, even manner, stood with his junior barrister and solicitors. Jarrod Williams stood in a separate group with Brendan’s instructing junior solicitor, Gaby Pulczynski, from Legal Aid; and Jane Dixon, the star silk, also provided by the state, who was leading the defence.

From their point of view, this trial was going to be difficult but was far from unwinnable. Their case, outlined by Dixon the previous day, was this: after an event ‘of catastrophic significance’, Brendan Sokaluk was ‘an easy target. So easy that he even managed to make himself believe that something he did must have caused the fire in Glendonald Road.’

Now they were standing by Glendonald Road, with Shoesmith and Bertoncello, whose investigation Dixon had excoriated in her opening address. After working on this case off and on for three years, these two officers had become personally invested in Brendan’s conviction. Things were rarely relaxed between a defence team and the police, but the atmosphere here had an undertow of aggression. In short, the defence lawyers sensed that the police detested them.

There was a stand-off, already established in the opening days of the trial, over who Brendan Sokaluk actually was. The police and prosecutor’s view that he was cunning and calculating vied with Dixon’s story of a hapless naif, a simpleton more sinned against than sinning, caught up in events beyond his control.

Jane Dixon, in her late forties, had an enigmatic part-smile and a sharp-faceted intelligence. She was at that time only a few years away from becoming a Supreme Court judge herself, and was the president of Liberty Victoria, a platform from which she’d championed human rights, particularly of the disabled. As a barrister she had a gift for understanding who her client was and building a narrative like a raft around them.

But a corollary of Sokaluk’s innocence, in her view, was the Arson Squad’s incompetence, and Dixon had criticised the forensic investigation of the ignition sites, suggesting there had been ‘helicopter bombing, bulldozing, raking and hosing’ in the area, which had disturbed the alleged crime scenes.

The defence had also recruited a well-known wildfire expert, the academic Kevin Tolhurst, who in the months after Black Saturday had achieved almost celebrity status due to his regular television appearances. He prepared a report damning the investigators, including for not giving due consideration to the possibility that the second fire was actually the result of a spot fire. Tolhurst believed that localised wind effects, turbulent eddying and spiralling gusts seen only in extreme fire conditions, could well have ignited the second area of the blaze’s origin.

More controversially, Tolhurst also wondered if another arsonist had been roaming the hills. In her opening address, Dixon had flagged his claim of a suspicious fire that he called Churchill Two, just over a nearby ridge. Churchill Two, his theory went, had been lit after the two other fires were already raging on Glendonald Road, and was missed by the Keystone Kops.

Adding insult to injury, Dixon now asked Detective Shoesmith to show the jurors the site where Tolhurst suggested this Churchill Two fire had been ignored.

What if, the defence intended to suggest, all the while that Brendan Sokaluk had been trying to start his car, believing he was somehow responsible for the burgeoning inferno, the real perpetrator had got away? The rumours of suspicious motorcyclists in the hills on Black Saturday were ongoing, to which Tolhurst’s evidence would add force. The defence planned to call as a witness one motorcyclist whose registration was taken down by police shortly after the main blaze took off.

‘If there was an arsonist involved in and around Glendonald Road, was it the accused, or was it perhaps some other more mobile person?’ Dixon had earlier asked the court. ‘[T]he question for you,’ she told the jury, ‘is, “Was this a case of arson at all?”’

The thinking around who bore responsibility for Black Saturday had significantly shifted. The Bushfires Royal Commission, an exhaustive, fifteen-month inquiry into the fires, had revealed that deep levels of bureaucratic and corporate incompetence played a major role in the tragedy. All over the state on 7 February 2009, despite fire scientists, including Tolhurst, accurately modelling where the multitude of blazes would spread, barely any information filtered through to the public. The spurious orthodoxy adopted by the CFA’s senior management was that more people might die fleeing fires than if they sheltered in the houses they were trying to save. The royal commission proved the theory baseless.

The commission also decided that privatised and often outdated power infrastructure was largely responsible for damage estimated at 4 billion dollars. The Kilmore East fire – in which 119 people died, 1242 houses burned down, and 125 383 hectares were blackened – was the result of a 43-year-old conductor between two rural powerlines failing, and discharging plasma at a temperature of 5000 degrees Celsius near vegetation. (The electricity in those malfunctioning wires most likely came from the Latrobe Valley.) Now a $494-million class action was winding its way through the courts, brought by the fire’s survivors. And as it became clear that a faulty powerline, rather than Ron Philpott, had caused the Murrindindi blaze, a $300-million class action was launched to follow.

It was reasonable for Brendan Sokaluk’s lawyers to ask whether the public fear of arsonists contained an element of hysteria, and if the police had echoed and amplified this fear and loathing by bearing down on Brendan. Here was a man, Dixon claimed, easily scapegoated under the ‘pressure to somehow make someone responsible for a catastrophic occurrence’. Their client was a Philpott-like figure, who ‘obviously slipped through the cracks in the system, in Churchill’, and was considered ‘a bit retarded’, or ‘an odd sort of fellow’, ‘a man who in the olden days would have been described as a bit of a simpleton’. He liked ‘tinkering in the shed like many Aussie blokes, except that in this case there is evidence [he] was overheard by neighbours . . . listening to Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank tapes’.

There was also another layer to Brendan’s story.

In her opening address Dixon had warned, ‘It’s not good enough for you, the jury, to simply say, “Oh, well, Brendan Sokaluk himself seems to think he must have caused the fire, so that’s good enough for us.” Why is it not good enough? In this case, you’re dealing with a person who suffers from autism.’

When Jane Dixon took over this brief, there had been something about her new client’s walk that made her wonder if his proprioceptive senses, his feel for his own body in space, weren’t skewed. She also noticed that Brendan never seemed to recognise her. Whenever the gap between meetings was more than a few weeks, he greeted the legal team as if for the first time. Facial blindness, or prosopagnosia, is not uncommon amongst those with autism spectrum disorder; light, sounds, smells can often take precedence over facial features or details such as eye or hair colour, height and weight.

Dixon’s instinct was proven correct. Brendan was diagnosed by three doctors as being on the high-functioning end of the spectrum, but also on the borderline of intellectual disability, with his poor verbal comprehension placing him truly in the range of the disabled. (He was therefore going to look more impaired, one psychologist later explained to the court, than someone with more extreme autistic behaviour who might have greater intelligence, and be therefore able to learn to compensate.) His condition had affected nearly every aspect of his schooling, employment and relationships. Why not also his relationship to the fire?

A few weeks before the trial began, Brendan’s legal team had taken him back to Churchill, and the same corner of the plantation where the jury would stand, picturing the fire’s start. Two months earlier, after 1041 days in custody, Brendan had finally been granted bail. One of the conditions was that he not return to the Latrobe Valley without his lawyers.

It was a long drive out of the sprawling suburbs of Melbourne. Jane Dixon was at the wheel, Jarrod Williams in the passenger seat, Gaby Pulczynski and Brendan were sitting in the back.

With his hair grown out of its buzzcut, it was more obvious that Brendan was greying. The lines around his eyes had deepened, while his face was fuller. In jail he had started lifting weights, but on bail he could easily access his favourite junk food and had added bulk.

Living with his days free had been an adjustment. For the past few years, Brendan had resided mostly in a maximum-security unit for intellectually disabled prisoners where every aspect of his day was scheduled.

The unit ran a horticultural program, and in the car Jane Dixon did her best to draw Brendan out, asking him about the greenhouse where plants were grown from seed, the ornamental garden, the orchard, the vegetables he’d planted. Skilled as Dixon was, she could not engage him in conversation beyond a narrow range. In volume five of the DSM the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder, which the defence generally recognised in Brendan, included, ‘failure of normal back and forth conversation’, ‘abnormalities in eye contact and body language’, and ‘deficits in understanding [others’] use of gestures’.

But these are outward signs of a more profound difference. Many neurodiversity advocates prefer to frame autism as a radically distinct way of being in the world. The celebrated writer and activist Temple Grandin, herself autistic, writes of ‘specialized brains’ of contrasting, not lesser, intelligence.

Grandin also draws attention to the sensory minutiae of everyday life that can pose a threat to those on the spectrum, regardless of their intellectual abilities. ‘A person with autism has hypervigilant senses,’ she explains; ‘my nervous system was constantly ready to flee predators. Insignificant little stresses caused the same reaction as being attacked by a lion.’

Many other autistic people also report living in a distorted sensory realm. ‘It often felt like the effect one gets in a 3D movie where you duck and weave as everything seems to be coming at you, invad[ing] your world,’ the writer Donna Williams observed. And according to Naoki Higashida in The Reason I Jump, ‘It feels as if the ground is shaking and the landscape around us comes to get us, and it’s absolutely terrifying.’

Commonplace sensations can be transfixing and distressing: Grandin describes certain clothes feeling ‘like sandpaper scraping away at raw nerve endings’, rain sounding ‘like gunfire’, a fluorescent light ‘flicker[ing] like a disco’, a balloon popping like an explosion, crunchy food that’s too loud to eat, a ‘hair dryer like a jet taking off’.

Many autistic children deal with delayed speech. In Thinking in Pictures, Grandin quotes Donna Williams’ claim that as a child she ‘heard speech as only patterns of sound’; Jim Sinclair recalling he had ‘no idea that this could be a way to exchange meaning with other minds’; and Darren White’s difficulties communicating because ‘another trick my ears played was to change the volume of sounds around me. Sometimes when other kids spoke to me I would scarcely hear, then sometimes they sounded like bullets.’

A lack of eye contact can be due to what Grandin refers to as ‘sensory jumbling’, an inability to look at someone and listen to them at the same time. For Donna Williams, it was hard to concentrate on speech while focusing on a face, ‘because the eyes did not stay still’.

In other words, Brendan Sokaluk likely inhabited an alternate reality. He spent much of the car trip asleep, but woke when they were close to the landscape of his life before the fire. His ‘specialised brain’ included a savant-like visual memory. He was alert to the topography of the Valley in ways that would impress the most experienced surveyer. And yet, back on the map he knew best, as the car passed the giant open-cut mine and, after the turn-off to Churchill, the industrial zone that led to the quiet town, Brendan stared impassively ahead and it was impossible to guess what he was thinking.

Next to him, Gaby Pulczynski was growing used to Brendan’s seeming blankness, and the complexities it may have hidden. The legal team had now spent a great deal of time with him. They’d needed extended sessions because of his scant attention span and verbal comprehension. Often the lawyers had to give the same simple information over and over, and ask him to repeat it, to check if, in some form, he had followed. Whether or not he had was frequently unclear.

With his family two and a half hours away, Gaby had to give Brendan a lot of the help he needed. Kind by nature, she’d grown almost fond of him. He would try to make jokes, and even though they weren’t funny she’d laugh for the poignancy in the attempt. She’d buy him a packet of chips from the prison vending machine because he’d be as excited as a kid at Christmas. And after he was granted bail, she found herself, along with Shannon Dellamarta, his senior Legal Aid solicitor, escorting him to a billeted assisted-living facility and making a detour to his beloved KFC. Checking the weather each morning, she reminded him on days of total fire ban, anywhere in the state, that he was forbidden to go out. Brendan, meanwhile, remained adamant he had never deliberately lit a fire. The young lawyer wanted him to have the best chance to prove his innocence.

Pulczynski was impressed by Jane Dixon’s lack of ego and her dedication. When they arrived in Churchill, Dixon, a nonsmoker, stopped at the petrol station to buy a packet of cigarettes. She lit one up as she drove from the town: a form of legal method acting. Past the golden cigar, gleaming in the summer heat, they approached the plantation with the coiling smoke drifting out the window into the breeze. She wanted to see how long it took for a cigarette to burn down and how far she could drive while it did. But it was less a scientific test than a means of jogging Brendan’s memory.

And then there they were. Near the intersection of Jellef’s Outlet and Glendonald Road. The trees quivering with insects, sap blistering the bark in the warmth of the day. And there he was, Brendan Sokaluk, telling them again in that slow, slurring voice about catching cigarette ash in a napkin. His face numb while his hands, as he spoke, were in repetitive movement, finger and thumb rubbing together or lightly touching the fabric of his clothes.

What Brendan was thinking at being back here, beyond the mechanics of his story, was again impossible to tell. Perhaps he was remembering his many happy days scavenging in the forest. Or the sky-blue car in which he cruised around the service tracks. Or the drama of that day when he walked through the fire with Brocky.

He’d lived near these hills for most of his life, though he’d never known the virgin forest in which they’d once been cloaked, or heard the lyrebirds that added the sounds of axes and chainsaws to the repertoire of songs they passed from one generation to the next. He’d told the detectives the forest was a special place for him – ‘[the] one thing I loved in my whole life’. But there was nothing in his reaction now to suggest that he was moved at being returned to the remnants of it.

Temple Grandin, upon seeing the joy the psychiatrist Oliver Sacks found in a sunset, had confessed her sadness: ‘I wish I did too. I know it’s beautiful, but I don’t “get it”.’ She believed that while stargazing she ‘should get a “numinous” feeling’, an almost spiritual sense of awe, but it didn’t come. And despite knowing all the names of the birds and plants and geological features of the countryside near where she lived, Grandin claimed to have ‘no special feeling for them’.

Brendan, like Grandin, seemed to experience his environment in utterly different ways. He could hold the nuance of the area’s complicated geography in his head – the lawyers soon realised he knew all the unmarked tracks through the plantation – but back in this place where his life had gone awry, he was nonchalant.

All of us can turn away from the consequences of our actions. The effects of the cigarette that may or may not have fallen, the lighter Brendan did or didn’t put to the leaf litter might have become too overwhelming for him to consider. Or maybe his brain did not make this connection.

In the brief of evidence, the transcripts of telephone calls between Brendan and his father included one recorded a few weeks after the fire:

Kazimir: ‘So, you still reckon you didn’t do it?’

Brendan: ‘Yeah. I know I didn’t do it. I think it’s the same as like Monash. They – you, you tell ’em what, what really happens and they just change it, you know?’

Kazimir: ‘Yeah.’

Brendan: ‘After a while and you remember, “hang on, that’s not how it went.”’

Kazimir: ‘No matter what, Brendan, you can’t come back here.’

Brendan: ‘No. I’m not coming back.’

Kazimir: ‘You have to go somewhere else, some other town . . . change your name and shit . . .’

But later, Pulczynski walked down the main street of Morwell with her client and stopped to buy lunch at Subway. If anyone recognised him, no one said anything. The man who three years earlier the locals had wanted to knife and shoot and burn was hidden in plain sight. Brendan stood staring at the pictures of bread rolls stuffed with cold cuts and seemed to fit right in.

Except that he didn’t. The lawyer noticed that even the task of ordering a sandwich was complicated for him. Those with autism spectrum disorder are sometimes said to have no ‘theory of mind’; that is, a deficit in the ability to recognise that other minds think differently. It wasn’t just that Brendan had difficulty reading the menu, he was also unable to read basic social cues; he didn’t register the shop assistant’s mouth set in waiting position, or the inflections in the usual back-and-forth of ordering. ‘Yes?’ the assistant kept asking, becoming irritated. ‘What do you want?’

That there was something disconnected about Brendan became more apparent to Pulczynski when they were out in the wider world. It was as if the glass partition of the prison interview room went with him: there was always some invisible wall that separated this man from those around him. He lived in an echo chamber. He couldn’t really ‘hear’ what was being said to him, and it was difficult to make out what he was trying to say.

All this blurred him. ‘His features are nondescript,’ one witness had told the police. ‘He has just the face you sort of recognise in the car. It’s not the face I say G’day to if I walked past, or anything like that. Just a face you wave to in the car as it passes.’

Brendan’s lawyers knew there was a chance the court would hear a simplistic version of his history. Allegations in the brief of evidence suggested he may have lit fires in the past. But there could also have been a folkloric element to these stories: the hearsay of hearsay that in small towns rises up from the substrata. In the days when Brendan was so despised, it was no doubt easy to unload gossip about him down at the police station.

Someone had once seen a strange expression on his face while he used a blowtorch in a high school woodworking class. Someone else remembered a group of teenagers, including Brendan, setting a fire in the toilet of a local milk bar and, later, in a park at the back of the high school. ‘The fire cleaned out the whole park,’ recalled this former acquaintance – another school outcast. ‘About 10 acres went up in smoke. I do remember Brendan saying that he liked that the forest was now clean of all the rubbish, like how the Aboriginals used to do it.’ This man’s story kept changing, however, and the defence found out that he had been to court in the past for dishonesty offences.

After he left school, Brendan volunteered with the Churchill CFA. In June 1987, he was accepted for active membership. Some time the following summer, on ‘a really hot, terrible day’, a family friend of the Sokaluks noticed a fire in a paddock she was leasing for her daughter’s horses. The two of them rushed towards the flames.

When we got to the paddock I saw the fire brigade coming. When the fire truck pulled up [Brendan] was on it. He was dressed in CFA gear with his CFA jacket. The fire was just in the bale [of hay] and the CFA put it out. Once the fire was out we saw a box of matches on the bale. The fireman took the matches straight away. I thought it was Brendan who lit the fire because he’d just joined the CFA, loved the trucks and the power of being a hero. He would have only been 19 or 20 then but had the mentality of about six. I can’t say it was him but I just know it was . . . I didn’t call the fire brigade at all so I don’t know how they found out.

In early 1988, Brendan was dismissed from the CFA for ‘dishonest conduct’. The Arson Squad had located the CFA captain of the time, an ex-policeman now working as a bus driver in Queensland. He claimed that Brendan began appearing at a series of fires to which he hadn’t been called. After a lengthy conversation, Brendan allegedly admitted to lighting the fires so he could go out on the truck and help fight them.

But Lou Sokaluk told the lawyers that all those years ago, the CFA captain, an officer of whom the family weren’t fond, had not told Kaz or Lou about any lengthy conversation with their son, nor any admission on his part. They’d been led to believe that Brendan was dismissed from the CFA for a different transgression.

One evening around that time, Brendan had entered the Churchill high school after hours, setting off an alarm. Lou Sokaluk acknowledged that he shouldn’t have been there; it was stupid, the wrong thing to do. But her son had trouble with basic reasoning, with common sense. He did dumb things. Why, she wondered, if he’d been lighting fires, had the officer never come and told her and Kaz? If half the town now claimed they suspected he was a firebug, why had no one ever mentioned it to them?

Years later, after leaving his job at Monash, Brendan had tried to join the Churchill CFA again, but his mother claimed this was only at her urging. She wanted her son to have people to talk to, a place to go, a task of some description that would fill his very lonely days.

If Brendan was asked to whom he felt closest, he would answer, ‘Brocky.’ Even after their long separation, he spoke of the pet often and in terms that could be confusingly human. He believed, for instance, he knew which chips Brocky preferred from the different junk food outlets they’d frequented together.

Dr Marged Goode, a clinical psychologist specialising in autism spectrum disorder, would later give evidence at the trial. Of his devotion to the dog she told the court, ‘Pets are actually very good at reading your body language and it doesn’t matter if you can’t read theirs. Pets don’t tend to be sarcastic or make jokes or do any of the things that people do that [those on the spectrum] find so hard to deal with.’

Brocky had often been the only thing stopping Brendan from being totally friendless. And so, on their visit to the Valley, Jane Dixon arranged to meet Kaz Sokaluk somewhere discreet so Brendan could briefly spend a moment with his dog. They all assembled on Cemetery Avenue, between the power station and the Hazelwood pondage.

As Brendan and the legal team stepped from the car, there was a sense he almost enjoyed their company. This was perhaps the first moment in his life that a group of people had spent time asking him questions, listening to his stories and asides, accepting him, more or less, for who he was. He was reunited with his pet, and the lawyers stood back to give him some privacy, half distracted anyway by the view.

This was a surreal world for those not used to seeing the gargantuan infrastructure that makes our electricity. The towering chimneystacks looked like the columns of a temple, the veil of thin brown smoke a reminder that fire here was constant.

Brendan wanted to hug Brocky, while his father, perhaps trying to protect the animal from Brendan’s overwhelming attentions, preferred to keep the now renamed dog at a distance on the lead. Even this interaction, once Brendan’s mainstay, had become complicated.