RK: What myth was that?

RD: This was the mythical figure of Eric Edgar Cooke who was a serial killer over about five years when I was a teenager. One of the eight people he killed was a friend of mine. For a while he worked for my father. We didn’t know he was a murderer at the time, of course. Later on as a young reporter, I covered his committal in the Perth police court and then was one of the people who covered his trial. So our lives crossed back and forth over about five years. In a way it wasn’t even a unique position, because many people knew someone who was killed and many people knew him. But in talking to any of them now, it comes to the surface quite quickly, thirty-five years later. I am still thinking about it. It is still in my consciousness and I found myself inevitably drawn to it.

RK: You managed to make the suburbs and beaches of Perth quite a menacing place in the 50s and 60s, after a supposed time of innocence. But even before the spate of murders, it was a menacing place because you were a stranger, coming to Perth as a young Victorian. There were lots of things about the west coast that were terrifying for you, weren’t there?

RD: Not terrifying. They were awe-inspiring but I loved it immediately. I did see it as a foreigner for a few years, coming from Melbourne. I immediately took to it and when we would go back to the eastern states for holidays, I did feel very constricted and constrained after the wild freedom of coastal life, But I certainly always saw it as very much on the edge and even as a teenager I did think this is like living on the moon or Mars. Right on the coast, it is as bare an environment as you can see. There is nothing in it to soothe the eye. I also found it amazingly stimulating and I loved it. When I think now, my mind’s eye is full of that scenery and it still is my home town.

RK: Was it ever a place of innocence really?

RD: Yes, I think so. I think it was a place of innocence. No one locked the doors of their houses. You’d go into a shop and leave your keys in the car, for instance. People always slept with the windows and doors open. When the killer was on his various rampages, even after he had killed a couple of people, he never had to break into a house. They were always open and he could get in easily and attack sleeping people.

RK: But it was a place where racism was accepted, a pretty small-minded place.

RD: It was a very conservative place and still is. These were conservative times everywhere in Australia, it must be pointed out, and Perth was probably no different. Mr Menzies was revered. It was socially very conservative, with quite a strong caste system. But it wasn’t even aware of racism – it was so endemic the condition was not even named. As a young reporter, I was surprised to see my first Aborigines who appeared in a court context. They were always regarded rather jokily by the magistrates.

RK: Your life as a young child revolved around the Dunlop rubber factory and all the products that your father proudly made. Tell us about your life in rubber, because it is funny.

RD: We were certainly a Dunlop family. We literally could not take a step without Dunlop coming into it. We were shod in Dunlop, we wore Dunlop. It was regarded as part religion and part nationality. It was regarded as a form of treachery to suddenly appear with a GoodYear bike tyre. This was policed very carefully by my father. We just accepted this. We believed that Dunlop was marvellous.

RK: Your father was a real company man, in the sense that a Japanese man might be now.

RD: He was a total company man. Nowadays he’d be regarded as a corporate man. He told my mother when he married her – and he would repeat this over drinks with people – that she was marrying Dunlop. Dunlop would always come first and he was proud to say that. After about the age of twelve, we’d look askance at this saying, but that was the way he thought.

RK: The other very tender relationship in the book is that between you and your mother. It’s classical Oedipal where you think your mother is very attractive and are a bit disturbed that other men find her attractive.

RD: That’s not right. I’m not sure it was a classical Oedipal situation. I was proud of the fact that she was attractive to other men but I didn’t want that situation to demean my father. And I didn’t want them to embarrass her either. If there was sometimes an insider joke going on with them and she might be the butt of it – that was the sort of thing to which I was supersensitive. She always seemed to us, to my sister and brother and I, to be a better-looking person than our father and we could never quite understand why she had chosen him. In the photo album there were photos of her with earlier boyfriends, Victorian League footballers and so on, who were much more heroic to us than someone always talking about rubber goods.

RK: The 60s were hard for a young kid and his girlfriend, who just wanted to sleep together and there was no contraception easily available. You had an unplanned pregnancy and like a trooper decided to marry your sweetheart. You were a father at eighteen. You were young to be a father and a journalist at the same time.

RD: I was a first-year cadet reporter on the West Australian and supporting a wife and child on $22 a week. We lived in a cement room for a while then moved to a residence behind the butcher shop. It was close to the beach and seemed ideal.

RK: Your family was not happy about it.

RD: The family wanted me to renege on the moral training they had taught me. They became like families in the movies. I was watching this and watching my own behaviour and all this drama as if it were a movie. Part of me felt detached like a movie goer. There was so much drama happening in this period – a friend had been murdered and various others I knew had been killed, drama was going on in my own household. I was suddenly seeing real life, in the sense of the real world of a newspaper reporter for the first time. These were very tumultuous times.

RK: Much of the book is so detailed in its recollections that I wondered if you had kept diaries from which you took particular scenes.

RD: No, I didn’t keep diaries. I looked things up to see they were chronologically as right as I could get them. I looked up newspaper files for court evidence and I interviewed the murderer’s oldest son and his widow, for the first time since the murders. I tried to get it as accurate as I could for something that is basically memory meeting myth. I can remember things that happened a long while ago much more vividly than things which happened last year.

RK: How can you be sure that you remember conversations you had with your mother or conversations that you overheard? Or have you used your novelist’s eye or car to fill in what you think would be the right words?

RD: I can certainly remember vividly particular conversations with my mother. They are etched into my brain. With others you use skills to put down what you remember happening. It’s all a bit like asking a group of siblings what happened on a particular occasion and they will all remember differently. But as accurately as I can remember it, this was what happened.

RK: Let’s talk about Eric Edgar Cooke. You have some parts of the book that are really from his point of view, the imaginings of the life of Eric. He had a very miserable childhood and it seems to have all started because he had a harelip and an unrepaired face.

RD: It does seem like a classic case. According to his son and wife, he was very much abused as a child by his own father, who was an alcoholic and who beat him from the moment he was born, abused him and made no secret that he de tested the way he looked. He was behind the eight ball from the word go. It’s almost like a copybook example of what an abused child is capable of and very sad for that reason.

RK: You met him as a young man. He came into your backyard.

RD: Sure. Of course it was hard in writing it. I had to try and regard him as if he were not a murderer because at that stage none of us knew he was. Looking back, he would not have actually killed anyone at that stage, when I was thirteen at least, before he began killing people we know of. There are still a few question marks about other unsolved murders they think may possibly have been done by him. When I remember him even more vividly is actually seeing him in the dock, because by then he had done something, so he then assumed an evil aura. He looked evil in the dock, in that he was aroused early from the cells and was unshaven, still in the clothes he’d been arrested in and so on. He recognised me in the court and winked, which was an unusual feeling, for a moment quite hard to deal with.

RK: So did you use as sources for the book from his viewpoint the memories of his widow and son?

RD: Yes. Everything that I have him do he did according to them and according to an interview that I read with his mother, who is now dead. So in those sections I guess are informed fiction, I don’t think you could actually get closer to someone, in that having known and seen him over a period of years, having interviewed his widow and son, and covering his trial, having read the transcript – that was as close as I could get. I think I got somewhere towards the essence of him.

RK: From the beginning of this book, there is a sense of deep guilt as a kid, being racked with feelings of inadequacy, wondering about the lives of the parents and about your own role in the early death of your mother. Can you talk about the intertwining between the murderer’s story, the looking for the one to whom the murders should be pinned, and your own sense of foreboding and guilt?

RD: In writing something now, I am not sure whether my huge feeling of guilt, which I have carried ever since the death of my mother, whether I was actually going back and with that knowledge imbuing my early life with it. I really can’t tell whether I have done that. It is hard to tell where foreboding begins. Certainly since then, consciously I have felt a deep sense of guilt which has worked its way into other books too. I don’t know that I felt any conscious guilt before then. I was raised by strict parents who came from a rather bizarre religious mixture and rather different households. They were quite stern in terms of my behaviour, though they lightened up a bit with the younger kids. I did have a strong feeling of right and wrong and I always seemed to be on the edge of wrongness, no matter what they said. Whether that is guilt or not, or whether it is just reacting against too tight a halter, I don’t know.

RK: And it’s not exorcised by the act of writing?

RD: Well, I am still waiting for the catharsis to hit. Certainly I felt I needed to recuperate after the writing and really felt strung out.

RK: More so than after other books?

RD: Much more so than after a novel. I did feel that I had gone through a harrowing experience with this. I also did feel, on rereading it, doing proofs and so forth, some lighter moments in it as well as remembering how I felt when my son was born, and feeling pleased and awed all over again. It’s not all gloom and doom. I have tried to pin down an eccentric place and time.