A Compulsion to Kill is
like no other! Investigating the lives of the murderous and heinous, Robert Cox
brings Australia’s earliest serial killers to life in a gripping page-turner.
Cox sat down with Editorial Assistant Sarah Trapski to have a quick
chat about his new book.
Sarah Trapski:
With your previous work, Baptised in Blood, and now A
Compulsion to Kill, it’s obvious you’re not one to shy away from historical
research. What, in your opinion, is the big draw?
Robert Cox:
History has always fascinated me. In Tasmania it’s all around you; you’re
standing in it or leaning on it or living in it; it’s very unlikely to have
disappeared under concrete and steel. But I’m a reader rather than a historian,
so my interest isn’t in the dry old stuff of formal histories, like policies and
administrations and economic fluctuations, but in the people, the
personalities, especially the lesser lights, the ordinary people whose flame
briefly flared in some way: convicts, bushrangers, Aboriginal people. And
serial killers, of course!
ST: A
Compulsion to Kill is about Australia’s earliest serial
killers. Researching the history and lives of Charles Routley, Alexander
Pearce, and John Haley, just to name a few, would have been a monumental task!
How did you go about it?
RC: I’d written
about the virtually unknown Charles Routley, Tasmania’s worst serial killer, in
a previous book, which got me to wondering whether there’d been other serial
killers in the state who’d also been forgotten. Alexander Pearce has been much
written about and his story’s also been filmed a couple of times, so he was
fairly easy. For the others, I had to rely on books, contemporary newspapers,
historical documents, and, in a few cases, websites. It’s quite fascinating
when you start with just a name and perhaps just a detail or two but nothing
else to go on, then eventually manage to build a picture of a life or an event,
bit by bit, through assiduous research.
ST: Any tips for
budding historians out there?
RC: I have to say
I don’t consider myself a historian; I have no qualifications or training in
that discipline. I’m just a writer who happens to like historical subjects. Like
Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, I’m a
snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, which isn’t a bad thing, given what I do. Like
a patchwork quilter, I gather a scrap of fabric here, a scrap of cloth there,
and stitch them together into what I hope is an interesting whole. All of which
is a rather verbose way of saying: leave no stone unturned. Cast the widest
possible net. Accumulate scraps large and small. Send Google on wild and
imaginative searches. But where possible, rely only on original sources.
ST: Out of the
list of serial killers you documented in A Compulsion to Kill, who
did you find the most fascinating?
RC: Probably
Rocky Whelan, not least because he operated in areas near Hobart that I know
well. Also Thomas Jeffrey. Jeffrey was a warped individual, a sadist, a sexual
predator, a killer and cannibal. But Whelan was simply a fairly minor career criminal
who underwent a horrific 20-year brutalising in the Norfolk Island penal colony,
which hardened him and probably turned him into a killer. When he was
transferred to Tasmania, he absconded and in just 24 days killed five men in
cold blood.
ST: A
Compulsion to Kill is your sixth book. Is writing compulsive
for you? Or do you enjoy the research more than the writing?
RC: I do enjoy
the research, especially when it rewards me with something new or unexpected.
But writing … I don’t know whether compulsive
is the right word for me. I just do it — I write every day — and it’s fulfilling
and hugely enjoyable, even when it’s not going well. Then it becomes a
challenge to get it right, and I enjoy that too. I rewrite constantly
—compulsively, even!
ST: What are your
thoughts on Jack the Ripper? How does he compare to Tasmania’s killers?
RC: Jack the
Ripper was insane; I don’t think anybody would dispute that, especially anyone
who’s seen post-mortem photographs of his victims. But I wouldn’t readily say
that about Tasmania’s colonial serial killers. They nearly all seem to have had
clear motives for what they did: Brown and Lemon killed for revenge, Pearce and
Broughton and McAvoy to avoid starvation, John Haley through losing his
uncontrollable temper. Routley, Jeffrey, and Whelan, although they killed to prevent
being identified by men they’d robbed, all seem to have increasingly enjoyed
exercising their power over their victims — the power of life or death. The
more they killed, the easier it seems to have become. Jack the Ripper, probably
fuelled by an insane rage whose cause we’ll never know, seems to have found
murder easy right from the outset.
ST: Do you think
reading this book will affect the way Tasmanians view their State?
RC: I hope so.
Tasmanians, especially those who come from pioneer stock, are very protective
of their history, but all too often they see it through the rose-coloured
glasses of hearsay and ignorance and don’t want to face uncomfortable facts.
Some terrible things happened here in the early days, but there’s a part of the
population that simply doesn’t want to know about them. My last book, the first
history of the town of Sorell, which took me six years to research and write,
was traduced by so-called historians with local roots who claimed I had it all
wrong, but none of them has yet produced an iota of evidence to support the
claim because none of them has ever bothered to do any real research. I can’t
see A Compulsion to Kill being on
their reading list. Too much truth!
ST: What’s your
next project?
RC: One’s already
with the publisher: Behind the Masks,
a collection of friends’ reminiscences about the late and much-esteemed
Tasmanian poet Gwen Harwood, which I co-edited and contributed to. My other
projects are a New and Selected Stories,
which is nearly complete, and Broken Spear, a biography of the Aboriginal
leader Kikatapula, or Black Tom Birch. After being raised partly in a wealthy
Caucasian family, he went bush, started and led Aboriginal resistance in
Tasmania’s Black War of 1823-32, then changed sides to work against his own
people, yet the great majority of Tasmanians have never heard of him. His story
has never previously been told, and he’s wholly absent from a truly astonishing
number of history books, even those about the Black War.
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