All who had these concerns will be agreeably surprised by Burton’s book. Certainly, she pays lawyerly attention to detail and takes care with citations, scrupulously documenting permission for every reference. But beyond that, she travels widely, visiting sites and recruiting helpers to investigate the family’s history in England and Australia. She finds experts to help her understand the dramatic changes in society, psychiatry, and aesthetics that took place during Nick’s life, and the contribution he made to them. And she writes well, creating a narrative so absorbing that, unable to sleep for thinking about it,I had to finish reading the book in the middle of the night.

Another surprise is what Burton reveals about mental illness in Australia. It takes a high-profile case like the Waterlows’ to attract attention, or a graphically publicised one like that of Roberto Laudisio Curti, the Brazilian student who died after being tasered by police in the Rocks in March 2012. But many of us know of young people with schizophrenia and its common symptom, paranoia, who have died, often by suicide. Close to every Australian family, says Burton, is someone who has had an episode of mental illness: shockingly, one person in five is affected by it. Some refuse treatment, some become violent, some are depressed, and some, like Anthony Waterlow, can be friendly, charming, rational, even shy, and then suddenly yell and punch holes in walls. Yet it was his right to reject medication, even after he had been arrested for assaulting people and property, or had threatened members of his family, and had attacked a dedicated friend who shared her house with him. He believed they were conspiring against him with others around the world, to whom they were linked by the Internet.

Certainly, the Waterlows have had more than their share of sadness and mental illness. There were early deaths and suicides on both sides of the family in England. (The boarding schools the boys were sent to at six years old would have tested anyone’s sanity.) In 1960s London, which was swinging, as Richard Neville said, ‘like a pendulum’, alcohol and hallucinogenic drugs dulled the pain for some and made life exciting for others. The effect of these substances on developing brains (which Freud asserted are not mature until twenty-eight) was less well known than it is now. Nick himself, publicly so gentle and amiable, had depressive episodes, and, Burton writes, could fly into violent rages at home.

While Anthony’s parents partied with the arts crowd in England and Australia, he started drinking at fourteen and by sixteen was regularly using marijuana and underperforming at his Sydney Catholic school. His mother was the Breville heiress, and Nick added to the family’s wealth with hard work, curating three successive Sydney Biennales and directing the gallery at the UNSW College of Fine Arts (COFA). Whatever money could buy was available to Anthony, who was moving from first-stage to third-stage schizophrenia and had begun hearing persistent voices. His behaviour became more erratic and threatening, until the only person in the family who was not scared of him was his English grandmother. She encouraged his aspiration to be an actor, but firmly told him off when he misbehaved. In front of other authority figures such as police, judges, and doctors, he was calm and rational. Then he could storm into his father’s office at COFA, threaten the staff, demand money, and get it. He would promise to take medication, then refuse, ironically for fear that it would ‘mess with his brain’.

Burton does not nominate heredity, upbringing, alcohol, or drugs as solely responsible for Anthony’s illness. Schizophrenia was named a century ago, but its causes are still poorly understood, treatment is haphazard, and unanimity among specialists does not exist. She implicates the underfunded, chaotic mental health system, both in England and Australia, that ‘chose to leave him without proper care … respected his liberty and privacy more than his right to be helped, or that simply believed that helping people like Anthony was uneconomical’. Only when he had killed two people were Anthony’s Australian doctors left in no doubt that he was schizophrenic, and then the prison system had to deal with him.

Prominent Sydney citizens Anne Deveson, Dinah Dysart, and the late Frank Walker (a former attorney-general of New South Wales), who have all lost children to mental illness, have campaigned for better understanding and more timely treatment. But psychosis is increasing in Australia, and for every Waterlow case thousands more remain unpublicised and untreated. The 1960s ‘swingers’ who did drugs and then got over it have now grown old, and opinions are divided between those who want the soft stuff decriminalised and those who fear what is on offer to their children and grandchildren.

The Sydney Morning Herald of 13–14 October 2012 described growing numbers of young people in the throes of paranoia, disorientation, depression, and prolonged psychosis after sampling a range of hallucinogenic drugs, some sold cheaply online. This the SMH called the YOLO generation (you only live once), some of whom don’t know or don’t care about risks to their mental health. Their parents and grandparents should give them Burton’s important book.

Alison Broinowski knew Nick Waterlow and others mentioned in The Waterlow Killings.