In her closing address, Jane Dixon took the jury back again to the moment of the fire’s birth. There, in the crazing heat with the eucalypts avid for a spark, the first flames stretched in every direction, a picture of havoc. ‘The case before you,’ she said, ‘[is] a bit like the area of confusion which was described by the fire experts . . . an area where there are different indicators pointing in different directions. The flags don’t all point the same way, and that’s how you know you’re in the right spot, apparently. And we say that’s a bit like this case . . . The flags don’t all point the same way, in the direction of guilt[.]’
In the dock was her confounding client. He had been right there when the plantation’s fire was a ‘couple of car sizes’, and had called 000, in the defence’s telling, as a concerned citizen, ‘hardly the act of an arsonist’. As his trial reached its end, Brendan Sokaluk looked less like someone whose fate lay in the balance and more like someone waiting for a bus. His expression remained remote, he yawned, he gazed into the middle distance. When the jury stole glances at him, he surely reminded them of that person, whose otherness they might see and instinctively avoid, and then feel guilty about the impulse. His presence in this courtroom evoked both pity and outrage, and that was the greater area of confusion.
The defence knew the momentum of the trial had not gone their way.
‘You weren’t lucky,’ the judge told Dixon during a discussion before her final address. The defence’s case relied on expert evidence, and their witnesses hadn’t struck the judge as ‘very expert’.
‘North is always north as far as I’m aware,’ Ray Elston had scoffed while summing up the prosecution’s case. In his final address, he’d claimed that the direction of the fierce wind on 7 February 2009, a northerly, eliminated the possibility of the two adjacent fires being anything other than deliberately lit. And lit by this man, who’d led detectives to a site metres from where the fire investigators had located the signs of ignition. Sokaluk, although impaired by autism in communication and social skills, was still able to set a firestorm then lie about his involvement.
With the evidence tightening around Brendan, Dixon argued: ‘This was no contrived web of lies and deceit . . . this person is a simple man who seems to have believed himself in very, very big trouble.’ She urged the jurors to consider her client as he appeared in the tape of his police interview, without ‘any prism of prejudgement’. His ‘patchy, uneven neurodevelopmental disorder makes him a poor judge of his own thoughts and actions and place in the world’. But by looking carefully they would see his distress over the fire, and his repeated and persuasive denial of guilt: No! No! ‘It’s stark and it’s plain and concrete and real. And what Brendan does is tell the truth as he perceives it to be.’
All along it had been difficult to entirely believe Brendan’s explanation: the fiery interplay of cigarette ash and a napkin. And now Dixon was conceding to the court that it may well have been an incomplete version of events. But Brendan’s grip on reality was fundamentally skewed. ‘He knows there’s a fire, he thinks, “Oh, oh! Did I cause this? That thing I chucked out, that serviette with the burning cigarette fuel, did that cause the fire? . . . It mustn’t have been properly out. It’s all my fault. My fault as usual.” . . . It’s not some cunning made-up story.’
But it was a story nonetheless. Whether it was one invented out of slyness, to disguise a criminal act, or naivety, because Brendan had trouble perceiving and remembering his fumbling actions, was the central conundrum and point of dispute.
Dixon reminded the jury that Dr Goode had helped paint a portrait of a man who had been mistreated for much of his life, both by those who’d actively wished him harm and those who simply hadn’t understood his distinct psychology. Hounding Brendan to the point of meltdown became a sport for his classmates. The child who relied on sameness in order to cope was punished as he floundered. Hiding in a storeroom when his regular primary school teacher was away, possibly having a panic attack, he was forcibly dragged back to the class by the other staff. His school reports stated that when he was struggling he didn’t ask for help – but he hadn’t conceived that other minds might have a solution. At work, with a focus on different stimuli, he had great difficulty following instructions, and with a poor feel for his tools he was more injury-prone. He was treated, though, as a pest and a malingerer: the ‘half-wit’ whipping boy.
It was a hard irony that, had Brendan been better able to process verbal information, some of the experts’ evidence might have helped him understand his difficulties, and possibly provided some solace. The answers to what Goode claimed were standard questions for people with Brendan’s disorder: Why don’t people like me? Why am I different? Without this piece of the puzzle, Brendan – and his schoolmates, and then his workmates – entered into a common downward spiral.
As Goode put it, ‘We all tend to react in a negative way to people who don’t behave as we expect. It’s not necessarily a conscious process but the interaction has been skewed already.’ The autistic person, habitually treated as weird, or retarded, has ‘great difficulty determining whether hurt is deliberate or accidental. So, they kind of get into the habit of assuming that it’s deliberate . . . they get defensive, they may retreat, they may become sullen, they may do all sorts of things which make them appear even worse to somebody.’
The questions hovering unanswered in the courtroom were: Did Brendan accept responsibility for the fire because he was so used to being the one in trouble? Or did he light the fire to revenge himself for his poor treatment? Or did the truth lie somewhere in between?
The defence lawyers had found their client to be a compliant, almost docile man, but they knew from the statements in the brief of evidence that this was not everyone’s experience – particularly at Monash, where Brendan had mixed childish stunts with behaviour that his colleagues found belligerent and spiteful. A female apprentice quit because Brendan would sit staring at her, or make grunting noises, or block her path, making the job intolerable.
‘Whenever Brendan was upset there would invariably be repercussions,’ a co-worker had told the Arson Squad detectives. Nothing could be proved, but equipment would be found damaged, tools missing, ‘and more personal things like . . . I had the wheel nuts undone on one of my wheels’.
‘He wouldn’t relate properly to people and it seemed to me that he would deliberately do something to push people’s buttons,’ another colleague reported. ‘It was as if he got off on making you angry . . . I was very scared of Brendan. I didn’t know how to deal with working with him because Brendan would often get pissed off at something that you would do and then make threats to blow you up and kill your family.’ The colleague reckoned Brendan said he could get dynamite from relatives who owned a quarry. ‘He would sometimes smile when he said it, but I never knew whether he was joking or not. I found it very stressful. I reported it to my supervisor several times, but I was told to just deal with it.’
Brendan had apparently told this supervisor, ‘I know where you live,’ and when he answered, ‘I live a fair way off the road,’ Brendan answered, ‘I could still shoot you with a rifle.’
The defence lawyers had interpreted these anecdotes about his aggression as the acts of a cornered child striking out, making outlandish claims borrowed from his cartoons. A small boy might threaten to get dynamite and blow away his enemies – coming from an adult it sounded ludicrous. These colleagues, however, had found him unpredictable enough to still feel chilled.
Brendan had spent a lifetime trying to pass, to find ways of appearing less impaired to those around him, and one effective method was through intimidation. But autism is by definition asocial rather than antisocial. To be antisocial, at least in terms the DSM recognises, a person needs to grasp basic social concepts. They need a competent working knowledge of how other people operate. They understand when they’re causing harm to others, and either don’t care – perhaps the better scenario – or enjoy it. Whichever, people with antisocial personality disorder are attuned to the nuances of their victims’ feelings, and to the suffering. They have what psychiatrists refer to as a deficit in emotional empathy.
It would seem that instead Brendan Sokaluk had a deficit in cognitive empathy. In his blunted way, he was unable to understand his colleagues’ feelings, to take their perspective. For years the consensus was that those with autism felt no empathy, and that, being unable to understand another’s grief, they were therefore incapable of remorse. But those on the spectrum are often marked by irregular levels of empathy. Some autistic people are conscious of other individuals’ and animals’ feelings to an almost painful degree; the idea they’ve hurt someone can be devastating. For others (perhaps as with many in the rest of the population), empathy is a harder emotion to access.
Certainly Brendan’s grasp of social situations was idiosyncratic at best, and influenced by a lifetime of being an outcast in a place where life was tough and combative.
In her memoir, Nobody Nowhere, Donna Williams describes her ‘insular and extremely lonely, unreachable’ childhood in late-1960s and early ’70s Melbourne, dealing with poverty, abuse, and undiagnosed autism. ‘The world seemed to be impatient, annoying, callous and unrelenting,’ she writes. ‘The more I became aware of the world around me, the more I became afraid. Other people were my enemies.’ To them she was ‘a nut, a retard, a spastic. I threw “mentals” and couldn’t act normal.’
But with violence, Donna ‘knew where I stood. To call it the result of “baser” emotions must be true, for I certainly found it easier to grasp. Niceness is far more subtle and confusing.’ She ‘began to fight back . . . trying to kick people down stairs, hitting them with chairs, slamming fingers under desk-tops and becoming hard, quiet and brooding’. Eventually, she writes, ‘hatred became my only realness and, when I was not angry, I said sorry for breathing, for taking up space’.
Did Brendan feel like this?
There’s an unsettling detail on the list of Sokaluk’s various misdemeanours compiled, years before Black Saturday, by his supervisor at Monash. Amidst the petty complaints about him stuffing food into his pockets at work functions and mowing over rubbish, is this claim:
The intellectually impaired Tasmanian man Martin Bryant, who went on a killing spree in 1996 and shot dead thirty-five people, was eighteen months older than Sokaluk. Like Brendan he had been a socially distant child who had difficulties with communication. Considered ‘annoying’, he was the victim of severe bullying and grew into a strange, isolated person. After his arrest, at just on twenty-nine, he was assessed as having the mental age of a ten-or eleven-year-old. Before the massacre, Bryant’s hobby was taking international flights. On these long-haul trips, those in adjacent seats were unable to avoid talking to him, and later he could recount these conversations to police almost verbatim.
What was it about Bryant’s intentions that Brendan could understand? What did he even imagine they were? A yearning for revenge? For notoriety? For the unleashing of a desire for power? Did Brendan feel these things too? And if you were never going to be considered a hero, was there allure in becoming a villain?
After he left Monash, Brendan spent much of his time on the internet. Whatever else he was doing online, he also played computer games. They accurately reflected how he viewed his life. On screen he was small and other, a kind of alien facing multiple threats. But in his camouflage-print clothes, he was dressed for imaginary combat, ready.
‘Oh, oh! Did I cause this?’ the barrister had asked, imagining herself as the accused.
What if Brendan’s condition meant, as Dixon claimed, that he had lit the fire and yet remained so alienated from his own self and actions that he didn’t completely grasp what he’d done? The CGI landscape changes and a fire, his devastating avatar, has appeared. The cigarette story is part confession and also a metaphor for his own lack of control of himself. An accident and a compulsion aren’t that far apart. Neither is willed, both are only partially understood.
Dixon stood in the courtroom and tried to angle the fire indicators in the right direction for the defence. She urged the jurors not to feel ‘under pressure to somehow make someone responsible for [this] catastrophic occurrence’; to accept the wildfire expert’s thesis that the second blaze was due to a spot fire. Kevin Tolhurst testified that he’d been to countless fires and had seen ‘local turbulent winds’ – gusts that come back the wrong way. On Black Saturday the wind had been blustery and unpredictable; an ember could just have eddied and spiralled and started a second blaze.
In the back of Jane Dixon’s mind was an inquest she had appeared at sixteen years earlier. She’d been part of the legal team representing the families of nine intellectually disabled people who died in a fire at Kew Residential Services, formerly known as Kew Idiot Ward, in 1996. It was the kind of place a child such as Brendan might have once been sent to live: a world, the inquest had revealed, of warren-like rooms with locked doors, poor staffing, and inadequate safety features. The fire had been started by a 38-year-old resident with very little language who was obsessed with matches and lighters. He would pick the staff’s pockets to find them, and on making a flame appear – a tiny magic act in a dreary, loveless world – pronounce, ‘Good boy!’
A flame can be an entrancing, other-worldly sight. And what Dr Goode had not told the court was that psychologists often separate autistic fire-setters from others who deliberately light fires, because some neuro-atypical people find the flames not just mesmerising, but soothing. Fire-setting can be part of a repertoire of self-stimulating behaviour used to regulate anxiety. In February 2009, the same month as Black Saturday, a Melbourne magistrate had refused to grant bail to a teenager, until he was medically assessed, who’d admitted to starting two small grassfires because ‘he liked the burning pattern fires make [and] flames have infinite possible shapes’.
A fascination with light and movement is defined by autism expert Bryna Siegel as a defining characteristic of the condition. Donna Williams wrote of ‘fractured patterns, which were entertaining, hypnotic and secure’. Naoki Higashida believes that ‘when a colour is vivid or a shape is eye-catching then that’s the detail that claims our attention, and then our hearts kind of drown in it, and we can’t concentrate on anything else’.
Could Brendan Sokaluk, in his isolated world full of broken, cast-off things, have been particularly vulnerable to the enchantment of something vivid or eye-catching?
On Thursday 15 March, the twenty-third day of the trial, the jury finally retired. While Brendan’s fate was being decided, the defence solicitors essentially babysat him. He watched television in a Legal Aid interview room, favouring the same programs as Shannon Dellamarta’s four-year-old son. Dellamarta had worked with clients who had allegedly committed violent offences, and with whom she felt the need to stay on guard. But Brendan was never nasty or threatening. If anything, she worried for this juvenile man, knowing whom he’d meet in jail. Usually, even her intellectually disabled clients would ask how long they could be locked away for. Not Brendan, though. It didn’t seem to register that he should be curious about what came next.
The three months Brendan had been on bail were happy ones, he’d told Gaby Pulczynski. He’d had his squabbles at the assisted-living facility, with some of the other troubled men there accusing him of stealing or breaking things, but that was his ongoing story. He’d also worked out how to use Melbourne’s public transport system. There was so much to see, and no one knew him. He was just one face in a mass of faces, no more strange than anyone else, camouflaged by all the weird types a big city enfolds.
The jury deliberated on the Friday and the Saturday, and again on the Monday. Although the trial hadn’t gone to plan for the defence, these lengthy deliberations suggested that someone had been convinced. Then, on Tuesday 20 March, the twenty-eighth day, the jury re-entered the courtroom. It was 11.36 am.
Detective Paul Bertoncello sat in court waiting.
Throughout these past three years, he had been the police liaison for the victims’ families. When, for instance, there was a delay in the legal proceedings, he had to ring thirty different people – the parents, children, partners, siblings of the dead – and let them know what was going on. Completing these calls usually took him a couple of days. Sometimes the conversations were merely functional, at other times they were deeply emotional. Often he was managing expectations: Bertoncello would explain the difficulty of securing an arson conviction, and try to impart some general wisdom about trials. A guilty verdict, he’d warn, would not necessarily bring the pain and fury to an end.
Now he sat with two mobile phones. Only a few families had opted to come to court. Bertoncello had advised those who stayed away that he wouldn’t be able to reach each of them individually before the verdict hit the media. Instead, when he heard the judgement, he’d send a group text. On one phone he’d typed a message announcing that Sokaluk had been found not guilty, on the other he was guilty. Each was ready to be sent to the thirty contact numbers.
‘Madam Foreperson, apparently you have agreed upon your verdict?’ Judge Coghlan enquired.
‘Yes, your Honour.’
When the detective heard the single-word verdict, he felt pure relief at being able to reach for the phone holding the ‘guilty’ message.
Later, at Brendan’s sentencing, Ray Elston had to stand in the courtroom and read the victims’ impact statements. Paul Bertoncello thought the prosecutor delivered these stories in something approaching a monotone, as if adding any emotional expression to the words would break him. Even so, the detective sometimes heard Elston’s voice crack.
The statements told the story of Black Saturday three years on.
Rodney Leatham, the man who had been unable to save his wife from dying in the fire, couldn’t be in the sun anymore because of his burn scars, ‘so itchy that I could tear my skin off . . . Every day,’ Elston read out, ‘I have a thousand what-ifs, that I should have done this, or I should have done that, and my wife would still be alive.’ Rodney had spent five months in rehabilitation, ‘but I pushed myself so I could finish, because there were others that needed the staff’s attention and time. I feel I can’t go places I used to go anymore because everywhere reminds me of my wife. It’s as though I have two lives, the one I am trying to live and the one that is dead and gone.’
A woman whose husband and son had died found it difficult to sleep at night: the membrane was so slight between what might have been and what was. Her husband had woken that Saturday morning and fed his cows and checked his fruit trees and vegetable garden. After hearing of an approaching fire, the woman evacuated, leaving her husband to defend the property. As she drove away from the fire, a driver coming towards her flashed his lights. Her son rushing to help his father. That was the last time she saw him.
Now she was the guardian of her son’s child, and this boy could hear her crying herself to sleep. ‘I cry a lot and he does not like me crying, and this makes me feel guilty, because I don’t want him to be sad.’
Another now-fatherless child also had trouble going to sleep, and getting up each morning, ‘because I just keep thinking about my dad,’ the prosecutor read. ‘After Black Saturday I had to catch a bus to school and it went past my old house that got burnt, everyday.’
A woman whose brother died in the fire had lost contact with people because she didn’t want to be asked, or have to answer, how she was.
Another woman worried that she would forget her brother’s voice and mannerisms.
A man who’d been on the phone to his son-in-law in the moments before the latter’s car caught alight asked himself constantly whether he could have done something to change what happened.
A woman who lost her husband pictured his death over and over: ‘images flash inside my head of him burning every day’. She had given up her nursing job, unable to concentrate.
A woman would hear her two-year-old granddaughter calling out to her dead son, ‘Uncle, where are you? Come and play with me.’ The child didn’t understand why the people around her were weeping, but she would wake in the night calling the young man’s name.
A man who’d stood in a local fire station begging firefighters to send help to the house where his son was trapped would hear a song on the radio that his son had once listened to and be brought instantly undone.
Ray Elston went on reading. In these accounts, the bereaved told of being short-fused; of relationships breaking down between parents and children, between partners, between siblings. He read of self-harming; of needing antidepressants, and anti-anxiety and sleeping medication. Some people had had to move – if there was a house left to move from – to avoid continually driving past the scorched forest. The fire kept spreading in this other dimension, burning through memories, and the layers of identity. Aerial photographs had shown a landscape of black. The survivors found themselves still living inside it, daily tasting the ash.
The day of the verdict, Shannon Dellamarta had waited in court for the jury’s decision with a pounding heart and nausea. These physical symptoms rarely struck her so severely, but the magnitude of this moment, and its consequences, suddenly felt clear. When she heard the guilty verdict she tried to stay composed. She knew the defence team’s reactions were being watched. In the face of Brendan’s seeming vacancy, the lawyers, and particularly she and Gaby Pulczynski, had become surrogates for the accused. They had had to absorb the grief that would wash over the relatives in the gallery, the disdain of the press. And now the police, the families, the journalists – they all wanted to see if these lawyers, ‘being on his side’, were suffering, how much they were suffering, whether they were sorry for what their client had done.
As people hugged and wept, Brendan looked as disconnected as ever.
Dellamarta knew that a perpetrator’s public contrition was a flawed measure: who can really tell the depths of an offender’s misery? It’s so human, though, the desire to see remorse. The Latin root of this word, remordēre, means ‘to bite back’; it’s the gnawing of one’s conscience. We want the wrongdoer to acknowledge the pain of the bereaved and then to feel some of it. We invented hell for the purpose.
But whether Brendan could take in the scale of the loss was unclear. Certainly, any remorse he may have felt could not be displayed in a way a courtroom would ever understand. Instead, to the extent that he had followed the trial, he was like a little boy feeling himself to be the victim, and denying everything: ‘I didn’t say that,’ he’d tell the lawyers. ‘I didn’t do that.’ ‘They’re bad people, making it up!’
His defence team had slowly come to wonder if his kindergarten sense of morality didn’t explain his ongoing claims of innocence. Brendan had opted not to have a lawyer during his police interview, believing they were for ‘bad people’. In his false Crime Stoppers report, he also referred to ‘a bad man lighten fires’. Of course, good people sometimes do bad things, but to someone with lower intelligence and autism, doing a bad act makes a bad person. This concrete way of thinking is almost the opposite of defence barristers – the blurring of these concepts is the space in which they live. Ambiguity is at the heart of many cases. But Brendan, it seemed, did not want to be regarded as wicked, and therefore he would likely never change his story.
Jane Dixon, Jarrod Williams and the solicitors sat in the courtroom and waited as the jury were thanked for their service. Some of the jurors were crying, seemingly with sorrow for all involved. Then they were dismissed, and having glimpsed the complexity of other people’s lives, they walked out onto the busy city street and back into their own.
Remaining in the courtroom was Kaz Sokaluk. His wife had been unable to bear these last stressful days of waiting, but he had kept travelling back and forth by train to support his son. The lawyers took in this man, already far out of his element and worn down with distress, as they all watched Brendan being shackled by security guards and escorted through the public gallery, with his lumpen, high-stepping walk, on his march to the cells.
After this, Kaz would return to Churchill and he and Lou would try to rebuild their lives. Later, the lawyers heard that one night, when it seemed things had finally become easier, the Sokaluks’ house burned to the ground. Brendan’s parents stood on the street watching flames from an electrical fire devour the place in which they’d raised him. It was as if some fire curse had been placed on them too.
In the courtroom, the oxygen seemed slowly to thin. The usual pleasantries the defence might have exchanged with the prosecutor were muted. A trial becomes its own little world. This one had taken priority over everything else in their lives and they’d fought and fought for Brendan, and before that worked long, hard hours in the effort to drag him through the legal process with some semblance of comprehension. Soon, exhaustion would come over all of them.
When everything was settled and they’d bidden Kaz farewell, the lawyers walked around to a grand-domed lightwell – shells and flowers in the high plasterwork, almost a kitsch vision of enlightenment. Nearby, at the foot of a Victorian spiral staircase, a wooden sign in a scrolling golden font read: NO ADMITTANCE/ PRISON STAFF ONLY.
They pressed an old-fashioned doorbell and waited to be admitted to the cells.
Up the bluestone circular steps, the architecture seemed more stifling, more draconian than ever. They’d all been in this close, grim place before, and the deja vu was perhaps part of their sudden weariness.
At the top of the stairs were the cells that seemed to have been last modified decades earlier. They consisted of a row of tiny booths with thin wooden partitions, devoid of privacy. Other barristers were there, talking to their clients through perspex barriers, and the guards, walking up and down, could hear everything.
This conversation with the freshly convicted was what some barristers considered the worst part of their job. For most people, the prospect of spending years in jail remained abstract until this point. That was a means of coping. But when they heard the guilty verdict, reality closed in. And for the defence, the reality that closed in was a feeling of responsibility, an immediate accounting of whether they’d done all that they might have, and whether the client wondered this too.
Seeing Brendan now, the usual sinking feeling was only deeper and more vertiginous, the question of what to say more difficult, since Brendan was waiting behind the scratched perspex and his facial expression and demeanour had not greatly changed. The now tear-reddened eyes and bleak looks worn by the lawyers didn’t faze him, maybe because, making no eye contact, he didn’t really see them. And because he didn’t see them, he looked blinded and defenceless.
It was dawning on the lawyers that their client hadn’t actually realised he’d been found guilty, or even that his trial was now over. The profound consequences of what had just happened in the courtroom, like the fire itself, appeared not to have registered. As Jane Dixon tried to explain the verdict to him, Brendan just went on asking when he could go home.
Later, when the verdict had sunk in, his mother told the lawyers that her son seemed most distressed by the prospect of missing out on years of birthday and Christmas presents. But right then, after three years of legal wrangling, and countless days in court in an atmosphere of grief and hatred, it was clear their client was as lost as ever. The legal contest had pitted the story of a fiend against that of a simpleton, but the two weren’t mutually exclusive. Brendan was both things. Guileful and guileless, shrewd and naive. A man apparently capable of unleashing chaos and horror, who now, behind the perspex of the cells, looked so bewildered that when the lawyers said goodbye they felt devastated, for it seemed they were leaving behind a child.