The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga

By Imre Salusinszky

In 1978, Evan Pederick, a naive 22-year-old in the thrall of a radical religious movement, Ananda Marga, placed an enormous bomb outside Sydney’s Hilton Hotel. It killed three people.

A decade later, Pederick confessed to this act of terrorism. But when one of his alleged accomplices was later acquitted, significant parts of Pederick’s testimony were undermined and he was accused of being a ‘fantasist’.

Conspiracy theories flooded in to fill the vacuum. Was it a plot by ASIO, rather than, as Pederick asserted, a plot to assassinate the Indian prime minister? In the absence of a Royal Commission or similar inquiry, mystery continues to shroud the deadliest terror attack on Australian soil.

Pederick, an Anglican priest, stands by his confession and testimony. Here is his story, told for the first time.

It is an extraordinary tale of guilt, remorse, renewal, and the search for forgiveness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780522875508

Book preview

Dylan

1

LIVING IN THE SEVENTIES

‘The Lord be with you,’ says the priest. He has a close-cropped moustache and goatee; he’s neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor short, pleasant in appearance rather than striking. His manner is mild. There is nothing ingratiating or needy about him—quite the contrary: he is slightly reserved—but even in his flowing white robes, he seems approachable. He is standing in a modest cream-brick church at Cannington, a blue-collar suburb in the south of Perth.

‘And also with you,’ respond his listeners. There are about twenty-five among the Anglican congregation at St Michael and All Angels this February Sunday morning—the first Sunday of Lent, 2012. It’s a multicultural group that reflects the strong Philippine, African and Islander communities in the area. There is a majority of older faces in the pews. Soon, the priest will leave the altar and bring the blessed sacrament to one elderly man where he sits in his wheelchair.

‘In this season of penitence, waiting and hope: Lord, have mercy,’ says the minister. Penance, repentance, self-denial, wandering in the desert: these are the themes of the Lenten observance. ‘Christ, have mercy,’ replies the congregation. ‘Hear the commandments which God gave to Israel,’ says the priest.

Later, in his sermon, he will strike a literary note. As an example of what the desert means to Australians, he’ll talk about Patrick White’s novel Voss, telling his listeners that ‘What makes the novel so powerful is its exploration of the role that the desert plays in the Australian psyche—as a force to be reckoned with, an obstacle to be crossed and tamed, a void filled with fantasised treasure to be exploited, but also as an emptiness of almost mystical dimensions that both fascinated and horrified colonial society.’ He adds that ‘the desert works as a sort of blank canvas that reveals most of all the unexplored depths of the human mind and soul’.

The congregation may know a bit about Patrick White, or not. But how much do they know about their priest? Do they understand that many years ago he attached himself to beliefs that are the antithesis of the mild and moderate Anglicanism they are celebrating this Sunday morning?

Do they know the priest has broken the sixth and most dire of the commandments he invokes to them: ‘You shall not murder’? Do they know that he spent ten years wandering in a desert of his own guilt and self-loathing? Do they know this was followed by another decade locked up in jail—when he was deemed too dangerous to be part of any normal community—on the other side of Australia?

The answer to these questions is, most probably, yes. The priest sometimes says he’s glad of the internet, because he can assume that his flock has googled him and discovered that for three years in the late 1970s, he was an indoctrinated member of a group that committed acts of violence around the world. He’s glad this kind of research is available because he is not interested in concealing his past, and it relieves him of any periodic rite of disclosure.

If those in the church do know these facts, they don’t appear discomfited. The priest seems to have an easy, relaxed relationship with his parishioners. In a few minutes, some will approach him for counsel. But now, as the service draws to a close, he reminds them of upcoming social events, asks for volunteers in various roles. These sausage sizzles and quiz nights may seem trivial alongside the existential themes of Lent, with its trials and tribulations in the desert. They seem even more so set against the absolutist themes that drove this man’s life all those years ago, and that convinced him it was necessary and right to take the lives of innocent people.

Yet these social rituals are peculiarly comforting things, signs that one is a member of a normal community. After awful acts, though, can that ever happen? How far can you transgress normal social boundaries, then cross them again in the other direction, back to the fold? Christianity appears to set no limits on the journey back. The little booklet accompanying today’s service quotes Psalm 25: ‘Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my transgressions: but according to your mercy think on me.’

Even so, a listener this Sunday, an outsider to Cannington and Christianity too, reflects that it must have tested the limits of the Church not just to forgive this lost sheep, but to make him a leader of his flock. Did they consider it risky? Or might they have concluded that such a man’s experiences, for all the suffering they brought, have also brought him ways of responding to the wanderings and tribulations of others? Those experiences surely add some depth, today, when he talks to his parishioners.

In the desert, he tells them, ‘everything that is non-essential gets stripped away and discarded. To survive in the desert, you need to get back to the basics of who you are and what you’re about.’

Early on the morning of Thursday, 16 February 1978, three days after the Hilton bombing, I stood on a street corner in the Melbourne CBD, awaiting a motorcade. Late the previous evening, on the Wednesday, I’d been at work as the duty cadet at The Age when we heard the Indian prime minister, Morarji Desai, would be flying to Melbourne to visit the ailing former prime minister Sir Robert Menzies. The chief of staff, Neil Mitchell, called me over from the photo desk, where I was trying to keep a low profile, and told me to be on deck exactly seven hours later.

Given Desai was already assumed to have been the target of the bombing—correctly, as it turned out—his sudden unannounced visit to Melbourne was a big story.

Deadlines were much later in those pre-digital days—despite the fact that every page of the newspaper had to be set up using blocks of metal type—and we had no problem splashing Thursday’s paper with the news, just as we’d managed to get the bombing itself, which had occurred at 12.42 a.m., into Monday morning’s paper. For some reason I’ve never forgotten the stark headline that appeared above Michelle Grattan’s front-page story: ‘Desai for Melbourne’. Her copy captured the feel of that week—a security panic unleashed by the bombing that would leave Australia forever changed:

Massive precautions will be taken to protect Mr Desai, who believes he may have been the target of the Sydney Hilton Hotel bomb which killed two men.

The Victorian Government has ordered a full security alert and mobilised extra police and the special branch.

Mr Desai is regarded as particularly vulnerable because of the hostility of a group waging a worldwide campaign to secure the release from an Indian jail of the founder of the Ananda Marga movement, convicted of murdering several followers.¹

But what do I, the 22-year-old cub reporter on the beat, remember of Desai’s visit that day? I was stationed in Collins Street, near the office Menzies maintained there, and can recall staring down from the ‘Paris end’, eagerly awaiting the heavily protected motorcade. Unfortunately, at that moment it was 10 kilometres away, pulling up outside Menzies’ home in Malvern, where the two friends spoke for thirty minutes in the old man’s study. Desai then immediately flew back to Sydney for the final session of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting (CHOGRM) that had brought him to Australia. (Menzies died three months later.)

I doubt that I gave the Hilton bombing a thought over the next decade, most of which I spent away from Australia. But at the end of the 1980s, when I was a young lecturer at the University of Newcastle, the bombing loomed again thanks to unusual circumstances.

Nobody had been arrested for the atrocity, but everybody knew whom the New South Wales Police had in their sights: the fringe religious group mentioned by Grattan, Ananda Marga, which, during the middle and late 1970s, had been involved in acts of violence directed at Indian targets abroad. Members of Ananda Marga had burned themselves to death in protest at India’s persecution of their guru. A coronial inquest into the Hilton murders in the early 1980s had concluded there was a prima facie case of murder against two members of the group, but that had gone nowhere. At the time, in 1982, three Margiis were in jail on unrelated crimes, for which they were eventually pardoned. One of them, Tim Anderson, had left Ananda Marga and become a university academic in Sydney. He was prominent in a variety of left-wing causes.

None of that interested me particularly. By now I’d abandoned journa lism for literary scholarship; politics and public affairs were secondary. But then I noticed that some of my best students felt strongly on the Hilton issue, and in particular felt that Anderson had been unfairly targeted by the authorities because of his political positions. They seemed to be part of a movement, almost. I listened to them and took their points seriously, even though their claims that Australian police and security agencies had bombed the Hilton sounded tendentious.

Then, in the middle of 1989, extraordinary events put the Hilton bombing back on the front pages. Anderson was arrested for the crime based on the testimony of a notorious jailbird, Ray Denning, who’d come to know him in jail. The following day, a man called Evan Pederick, another former member of Ananda Marga—completely unknown to police, the media and the public—came forward in Brisbane, alleging he’d planted the bomb outside the Hilton, and incriminating Anderson.

The next time I saw the brightest of my students on campus, I was keen to get her reaction to these developments. She was composed and did not skip a beat. Nodding and smiling, she explained that the allegations by Denning and Pederick were just the latest moves in the official persecution of Anderson. It was almost as if her v iews on the Hilton bombing and the official conspiracy behind it had been confirmed rather than challenged by the arrests in Brisbane and Sydney.

And indeed, as we shall see, the conspiracy theories just kept coming, shooting up like toadstools well on into the 1990s. Eventually the suggestion there was an official conspiracy behind the Hilton bombing almost seemed to settle into accepted wisdom. The bombing ‘remains one of this country’s great historical mysteries’ was the phrase used in September 2004 by journalist George Negus on his ABC-TV program George Negus Tonight, during a segment in which various conspiracies were floated. Watching it, I waited for some mention of Evan Pederick: it didn’t come. I wondered: in what sense is a crime a ‘mystery’ when a man has confessed to it, been charged with it, been convicted of it, and gone to jail for it?

‘Somebody, somewhere, must know what it was really all about,’ said Negus at the close of his segment. My irritation came almost as a shock: how can you leave the confessed and convicted murderer out of a murder story? Whatever I did, it seemed the story had me, and it was around this time that I first thought of writing something about the Hilton bombing. But there were young children running around, and I was still in the throes of a midlife career change back to journalism. When the internet and Google came along, I learned that Pederick, released from jail, was living in Perth and that he’d become an Anglican priest. That seemed interesting.

In 2011, I was going to Perth to launch a book. Before leaving Sydney, I dropped Pederick an email, asking if I could buy him lunch.

When I first laid eyes on him, he was sitting on an oversized couch in the foyer of my hotel. He looked nervous, wary. Now I can imagine why. What was my agenda? Was I planning to burn him? How was I different to the journalists who’d just wanted a cheap ‘splash’ out of him? Or was I one of the conspiracy theorists? Apart from the last, those are not questions I could easily have answered.

We went directly across the road to an Indian restaurant. Of the several hours of free-flowing conversation that followed, my recollection is that the Hilton bombing occupied a very small proportion. He wanted to hear about the book I was in Perth to launch, and I was happy to talk about it. But I can recall feeling surprised at how quickly the conversation turned away from banalities to the things that really mattered to each of us. Whatever I’d expected as I’d closed my hotel door behind me a couple of hours earlier, it wasn’t that I’d be telling this stranger my deepest thoughts about family, work, life, and what the hell it all meant as we both approached the watershed of sixty.

That, I realised over time, was a big part of it: we were almost twins. Our lives were parallel, and this created an easier correspondence between the pair of us. It also made me the perfect audience for Evan’s story. Even as we talked that day, but much more powerfully over the years that followed, I had a sense of sliding doors, of ‘There but for the grace of God …’

Evan and I had started university in the same year, 1973. We’d both arrived there as academic overachievers, clever, but naive and overprotected. We were only-sons who’d grown up with doting sisters and heavy parental expectations. Much more quickly than Evan, I’d got swept up in what we called the ‘counterculture’: leftist politics, student journalism, communal living, weed. He got there too, eventually, though not by the political road. And as I heard about how, for him, it had all gone so bad, I could sense and feel just how that might have happened to me or my friends. There were differences, of course: even at seventeen, I was far too cynical a piss-taker to fall into the clutches of any guru, religious or political. But the parallels were there, and the ease of our long and meandering conversation that afternoon, which they encouraged, took me by surprise.

Evan wasn’t what I’d expected. He was humorous, articulate and thoughtful. I had met very few people who had committed major crimes and gone to jail for them. I’d assumed such experiences can turn people crazy, bitter, angry or even dangerous. But as I talked to Evan that day, I came to see that what he had been through had turned him philosophical.

He must have sensed some of the correspondences between us, too, just by agreeing to keep talking to me. His standard approach to those who’d expressed an interest in ‘writing something’ about the events of 1978 and their consequences had been politely to decline. He later told me he’d sensed there might be something ‘a bit different’ about me, and whatever that difference was, it made him feel I was not just another journalist looking to screw him over. Perhaps, he thought, I was going to dive a little deeper, and emerge brandishing something more interesting than another ludicrous ‘theory’. At the end of our lunch he promised to send me a manuscript he’d written in jail. When I returned to Perth a few months later to spruik the same book at the writers’ festival there, I went to Evan’s church, St Michael and All Angels, to hear him preach and watch him with his congregation.

I can’t say at exactly what point I realised that I didn’t want to write another ‘forensic’ book about the Hilton bombing and the silly conspiracy theories that had grown up around it (which, in any case, other authors have capably dismissed).² Here was a man who had done a terrible thing, paid the price, and rehabilitated himself as a pillar of his community. Despite this, as he would eventually remind me, there are no happy endings: the pain continues, in Sydney and in Perth. The story that mattered was this one, the story of Evan’s life. And eventually I realised that a proper understanding of that life could be consequential in ways that might be truer than of any other living Australian.

They were strange times, the middle and late 1970s, with many weird currents and cross-currents swirling around.

Less than a decade earlier, the changes in youth culture that had overtaken affluent Western societies were securely tethered to a political project: ending the war in Vietnam. But that project petered out as conscription, and the war, ended. Critically, it was North Vietnam that won the war, not youthful protesters on the streets of London, Sydney or Washington. Had it been otherwise, the counterculture based in and around Australia’s universities might have remained focused on mass movements, alliances with more traditional left organisations, and the achievement of specific and definable political goals.

To participate in the radical culture of a major Australian university, and its buffer zone of surrounding suburbs, in the 1970s was to move in a promiscuity of subcultures, some of which did not fit together: there were the anti-nuke zealots (forerunners, though little did we know it, of today’s global environmental movement); pale, Whole Earth Catalogue types, selling legumes from a hessian sack at a stall in front of the Union; carry-over Trots and Maoists (already looking like relics); radical feminists (pioneers, like the anti-nukes, in ways we did not recognise); ageing celebrity draft-resisters, as keen to tell you their war stories as the old diggers at the RSL; serious stoners (guilty as charged); and, of course, followers of ‘The Wizard’, Ian Channell, mostly inebriated Engineering students, attempting to mock and disrupt all of the above.

Certainly there were plenty of protests but these were sporadic, single-issue, and largely disconnected from broader, traditional left movements. An indication of their increasing inwardness was a frequent focus on university governance. Cultural critics of the period have noted that as organised radical politics faded somewhat into the background and disillusionment with progressive political parties increased, other ways of signalling resistance and change began to emerge.

One of the key ones was the rise of alternative communities with a greater or lesser degree of separation from the broader community around them. In Helen Garner’s classic novel of the inner-Melbourne counterculture of the 1970s, Monkey Grip, a network of shared houses becomes like an alternative society—almost, but not quite, independent of the suburban society that stretches away in every direction. Music, drugs, promiscuity and emerging female power are all elements swirling around in this alternative community, but it would be difficult to put in words what, if anything, defines it.

Cultural critics have identified mystical religion as another preoccupation of the period, challenging both ‘straight’ middle-class society and organised political protest against it. According to Canadian sociologist Stephen A. Kent, as the political protests of the 1960s faded, many young people in Western societies turned to ‘new and exotic religions’. He writes that ‘Where the late 1960s had been characterised by explosions of youthful protest over social issues, in the new decade many of those who had been protesting were turning instead to new religions or undertaking unorthodox spiritual disciplines.’³

The interest in micro-communities, such as portrayed in Monkey Grip, and the interest in exotic religions are not unrelated. For some young people of the time, their chosen micro-community was a new religious movement, or cult.

What distinguishes a religious cult from a traditional religion? Those who’ve studied cults and new religious movements have turned to a seminal 1957 essay by the noted Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman. In ‘Characteristics of Total Institutions’, Goffman’s original target was settings such as mental asylums and prisons, but students of new religious movements have found his insights useful in dealing with institutions that don’t have walls and guards.

Goffman points out that, in the broader free society, our sleep, our play and our work take place in different settings, with different companions, and no ‘overall rational plan’. In a total institution it is the opposite, and there is ‘a breakdown of the kinds of barriers ordinarily separating these three spheres of life’. All aspects of life are regulated and conducted in the same place. The ‘member’ conducts all his or her daily activities in the company of others whose lives are similarly scheduled and controlled ‘through a system of explicit formal rulings and a body of officials’. And while life outside a total institution may have very little in the way of a formal plan—for all our best efforts—for those inside one, ‘The various enforced activities are brought together as parts of a single overall rational plan purportedly designed to fulfil the official aims of the institution.’

As Goffman points out, to achieve naturalisation of initiates on this scale requires a rigid demarcation between their new world and their old. A recruit comes into a total institution with an existing network of attachments. Upon entry, they are ‘immediately stripped of the support provided by these arrangements’ as they begin ‘a series of abasements, degradations, humiliations and profanations of self’.⁴

A cult, like a total institution but in contrast to a religion, has rules and regulations covering every aspect of day-to-day life, and all forms of social interaction and personal relationship. Needless to say, it cannot achieve these aims without strict hierarchies and lines of authority that are very far from the world portrayed in a novel such as Monkey Grip.

The 1970s was the great start-up era for cults, religious and otherwise—from the Krishnas and the Moonies to Jim Jones’s People’s Temple and the Branch Davidians. In Australia and other Western societies, for certain kinds of vulnerable young people, this was the mechanism for replacing whatever galvanising force had been exerted by the anti-war protests of the previous decade. Cults answered, too, to the increasing secularisation of mainstream society and the breakdown of other kinds of social capital, including youth groups and even the nuclear family. These were all supply-side factors for cults.

But just who were these ‘vulnerable young people’? Some studies have found they tend to see themselves as religious seekers, often experiencing a sense of tension or crisis that they interpret in spiritual rather than political or psychological terms. If this sense of internal crisis corresponds externally with their first contact with a cult, and they form a close attachment with another cult member, the conditions are right for the deal to be sealed.⁵ Meanwhile, empirical surveys of young people who fall into the clutches of cults have tended to reveal them as overwhelmingly well educated and middle class. Often, the atmosphere in the family home was experienced as emotionally restrained, even cold. And frequently, these were kids who had not managed successfully to complete their adolescence, in the sense of a clean and amicable separation from their parents. Canadian psychiatrist Saul Levine calls these drifting kids ‘radical departers’. They have been adrift, unable to conceive of a future for themselves: ‘And then the future presents itself. Out of the blue, the Hare Krishna, Divine Light Mission, Healing Workshop, Children of God, or Armed Guard offers on a silver platter every ingredient that has been missing from their unhappy youth.’⁶

Once this tiny minority of young people looking for an alternative to the crass materialism or religious conformity of their parents’ world had fallen into the clutches of a cult, there was usually a period of initiation and education—or what is often called ‘brainwashing’.

The term emerged during the Korean War, in the 1950s, to describe the brutal techniques employed by the North Korean side to extract denunciations of US policy by captured US soldiers. It was used during the same period to describe how totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin elicited fulsome false confessions from dissidents during show trials. And so a generation later it offered itself as a useful word for those studying the techniques of new religious movements of the 1970s as those movements sought to attract, retain and radicalise adherents, in some cases turning them to violent ends.

Experts who’ve studied the use of sophisticated brainwashing techniques by religious cults have noted a number of common features. It is important, first of all, to keep the initiates unaware that they are being controlled or manipulated at all: in other words, that they have entered a totalistic environment. Relationships and connections outside the cult are progressively shut down. Brainwashing techniques create a sense of powerlessness and instability in the target, undermining their existing beliefs. Advancing them towards radically new understandings must occur in small, measured steps so they remain unaware they are involved in a thought-reform process. To drive the process home, cults will often present their initiates with their new knowledge in the form of an elaborate jargon: this will both make them feel part of a special cohort, and lend the group’s or guru’s wisdom a pseudo-scientific prestige.⁷

Earlier I said something that wasn’t quite true, or wasn’t the whole truth: that on Thursday 16 February 1978 I could remember standing on Collins Street, Melbourne, waiting for Morarji Desai’s motorcade. I do remember that, but when I first sat down to write this story, I could remember the motorcade moving up Collins Street towards me. I could also remember crowds of onlookers and police barricades.

None of this happened, I discovered when I went back into the archives. But this is hardly an unusual experience. After all, I was recalling events of more than forty years ago. We can all come up with examples such as this, much more recent than four decades distant. They demonstrate why cognitive science challenges the view of memories as simply ‘activated engrams’, to quote the memory scholar Daniel L. Schacter: that is, simply as images chiselled into our brains that can be recovered intact. Our memories aren’t engraved anywhere. Schacter and his colleagues have concluded we use several different regions of our brains when recalling even the most uncomplicated information. The retrieving of engrams is a far more creative process than simple activation, and hence susceptible to all manner of distortion.⁸

Another mistake we make about our minds is to assume that the events most clearly etched in our memories will be the dramatic, emotionally loaded ones: the day I got married; the day my first child was born; the day I tried to blow up the Sydney Hilton. Sure, the key moments of such days, the ones we invest with the most intense emotion, can stand out as what cognitive scientists who study memory call ‘flashbulb’ events. But high emotion, including that associated with trauma, can sometimes have the opposite effect to engraving a series of events permanently in our memories: it can trigger dissociations, dislodge sequences and disrupt clear recollection of what followed what, or of exactly where we stood in relation to events. Occasionally, the flashbulbs remain—brighter, even, than we would like—but with their sequencing awry. According to Schacter, our memories of traumatic events often remain reliable in respect to ‘the central core of the experience’ while the ‘specific details’ can be subject to decay and distortion.⁹

These disruptions are likely to be even more pronounced when the trauma associated with a memory was so severe that we have made an effort over the years not to remember the events that triggered it. In the story that follows, different theories of memory, particularly traumatic memory, will have a decisive influence on human lives—here, I mean the implied theories of memory that we can derive from the statements and decisions of lawyers, juries, judges and journalists.

2

LITTLE EVAN REDWING

The crisis had been building for the longest time, and it came to a head in the middle of 1975. One night he came home from uni and felt unsettled. He was listening to a piece of classical music and halfway through suddenly thought: ‘Why am I doing what I’m doing?’ In a way, it’s odd the question even arose, never mind that Evan Pederick—then a nineteen-year-old science student at the University of Western Australia—couldn’t answer it. If some elements had been lacking in Evan’s upbringing, compass points for locating life’s ultimate goals were not among them.

His father, Don, was a Methodist minister who eventually rose to lead the church’s Western Australian Conference, immediately before it was merged into the Uniting Church. Respectable and middle class, Methodism was not short of verities about how to live. The precepts of its founder, John Wesley, were: shun evil and avoid partaking in wicked deeds; perform kind acts as much as possible; and abide by the edicts of God the Almighty Father. In Evan’s memory, Methodist churches looked like courthouses—austere, with lots of heavy wood panelling. Methodism was Calvinistic, straitlaced. It shunned the full engagement of the senses that worshippers might find in a Catholic or High Church Anglican setting. The minister would be dressed in a business suit.

To Evan, it came eventually to seem a ‘dour’ sort of worship. The focal point was the pulpit—and if it switched to the organ, it was to highlight a hymnody that was metrical, solid, unmysterious. Worship here was cerebral, without any direct experience of the numinous. From his teenage years forward, Evan felt it lacked ‘juice’. There was no sense of being in contact with what was at the very base of things. It was a religion that took the Ten Commandments seriously, a religion of ‘dos and don’ts’, a religion of expectations. You were either approved of or you weren’t, and the ultimate approving authority was God Almighty.

Distrust of feeling and a reluctance to engage the whole individual were elements of Methodism reproduced in the emotional economy of the Pederick family home. Evan felt cared for, but not particularly close to his parents. His mum, Judy, had had a broken childhood after her own mother died when she was less than a year old. A succession of institutions and foster homes, and separation from her brother, had made her an anxious and inward person; she did not display emotion easily, and was uncomfortable with the public dimension of the life of a minister and his family.

Don was a compact man with round brown eyes and a prominent beak. In public he wore a cheerful smile, but to Evan he was always a remote figure. Evan and his three sisters weren’t to play loudly when he was writing his weekly sermon behind his closed study door. Yet for all the distance between him and his father, or perhaps because of it, Evan yearned for Don’s approval. He didn’t grow up with the idea of family as a safe place or a haven, but as a place where there were expectations of you. Even though his father’s disapproval would be expressed in a soft undertone, impressing Don was everything for Evan. Don’s remoteness drove the boy closer to his mother; she, meanwhile, rigorously closed down any conversations, never mind arguments, that ‘Dad wouldn’t like’. Topics capable of arousing controversy were avoided. To avoid anatomical themes, all the family dogs were deemed boys and the cats girls, whatever their actual sex.

Evan Dunstan Pederick was born on 26 November 1955 in Merredin, halfway between Perth and Kalgoorlie. His sister Bethwyn was two years older; Meredith and Trenna (‘the girls’) came four and six years later. The family moved around a lot, because the church didn’t like a minister to spend more than three years in one posting. When Evan was a toddler, the Pedericks moved to Rockingham, on the coast south of Perth, then back out to the wheatfields of Narrogin and, before finally settling in Perth, to Collie, a mining town in the state’s south-west.

It was an itinerant life, but Judy was rigorous about keeping up appearances, partly because she was so afraid of what people would think. Everyone had breakfast together and then there was a roster of chores for the children. On Sundays, Don might have to deliver sermons in two or three tiny country churches, something that added to the pressure of his work and rendered him even less approachable. Everyone would put on their Sunday clothes and accompany him, but despite the disruption Judy prided herself on being able to put a full Sunday roast on the table, for which they all remained in their Sunday best, Don in his clerical gear. (There was of course no alcohol: the Pederick family home was dry in every sense.)

In Collie, where the family lived from 1964 to 1969, they lived in the manse, a neat, modern brick home one street back from the small Methodist church. Collie, home to around 5000 people, is surrounded by jarrah forests and was originally a timber town. It later became the source of all of Western Australia’s coal, and most of its coal-fired electricity: the first of the town’s three generators was commissioned while the Pedericks lived there. It’s a neat town, but sizzling in summer, freezing in winter, and too dry for nature strips.

But in the 1960s it was a good place to be a kid. The Collie River was magical, and Evan spent hours with his best friend, Richard, exploring its blackberry-choked banks, building secret forts, catching tiny mosquitofish. In the summer holidays all the kids would get on their bikes and ride to a shady bend in the river called Minninup Pool a couple of kilometres outside town. It was safe and pleasant to swim there, and there was a tyre for swinging.

In 1964, when Evan was eight, the river broke its banks and flooded half the town. Bethwyn and Evan drove with Don from house to house in the affected areas with an urn of hot water and cases of biscuits. Evan was puzzled that other men were doing hard work, like carrying people’s furniture out of houses, while his dad was just making tea. Only much later did he realise the value of what his father had done that