At the Erin Patterson trial - Going Underground in the Rose City
So smile for a while and let’s be jolly
Love shouldn’t be so melancholy
Come along and share the good times while we can
I beg your pardon
I never promised you a rose garden
- Lynn Anderson, Rose Garden
Bolt upright in the witness box in Morwell Magistrates Court number four, pale brick, and a large shaded window out on the Latrobe Valley, telecoms expert Matthew Sorell was having the time of his life. A compact man in a bran-coloured suit, with a shock of woolly hair, he was taking the court through the eighth or ninth sheet of phone records at the end of a long morning and afternoon. The line item records of mobile phone tower pings hung above him on a huge screen.
‘Now could I take you to line 4…’
‘Line 4…’
Four pm, and the prosecution junior struggled to find the energy. In the public gallery, we pinched ourselves to keep going, this was getting interesting. And in the glass and pale wood dock at the back, Erin Patterson, looked over glasses perched on her nose at her own monitor, her look betraying very little. The evidence was not nothing, though, showing that, a couple of weeks before the May 2023 lunch at which she served a mushroom-paste beef wellington which left her two former in laws and their cousin dead, Erin Patterson’s phone had been around two areas close to her home, where death cap mushrooms had been sighted, and their position recorded online.
Or maybe it showed. ‘We can say where a phone wasn’t’ Sorrell had said earlier, smiling happily’. If prosecution counsel was disappointed at this caution, she hadn’t shown it. The phone records switched to maps. Blue marks for the mushroom sightings, red circles for the phone towers. Ping ping ping in Outtrim and Loch. We sat wilting in the late afternoon and transfixed at the same time, at pictures of towers closing in. The line item lists came up again.
‘Oh ignore L, M, N, O, P items.They’re just for my interest’ Dr Sorell said.
Interest? Jesus. This was hardcore. But there’d been a lot of it in the last two weeks of R V Patterson, which your correspondent has been dropping in on occasionally. The trial is in week four, having been listed for six weeks. That deadline now seems optimistic. After a week or so of evidence from Patterson’s relatives - her ex-husband Simon, who skipped out on the fatal meal on the morning of it - the prosecution case moved onto the minutiae of the medical attention to the meal’s sufferers and survivors, and then moving onto days exploring the lore of mushrooms.
World media descended on Morwell when the trial began, and a few of them are still here, roosted in the Cedar Lodge Motel, or the old Coal Valley Inn (it’s the Latrobe now, but you can see the old wording on the brickwork), eating at the Morwell Club, longing for a Quest and a room service Club sandwich. Every morning as the valley mist thins, they meet up in the Jay Dee’s cafe, the globals and the locals, the TV talking heads in their soft winter coats walk over to do a morning clip in front of the crews, jigging around and breathing mist, in the forecourt. By eight thirty, people are starting to queue at the building door, to get in, the regular court attendees milling around them, worried-looking cheaply dressed middle-aged women, and half-shaven fat boys with mullets, in borrowed suits, all like Toady from Neighbours. The R v Patterson deadheads, self included, then queue for the 20 or so free seats in the ‘public gallery’ - three rows of bus station style stuff chairs. The mist clears early, but if you come up on the six am Melbourne train, it wreathes the world from the start of the valley on, fading the trees, closing vision to a few metres from the train. Magical mist, a child’s fancy, that never loses its mystery. Then the sun burns it away.
***
Waiting for the court to open, those who’ve made it in, gray and white haired, neatly dressed and, well people like me, dissect the case in ways that I could not possibly relate in this report, forming instant friendships round the tables, self-funded retiree Tuesday morning Murder Club, and pass judgement on the jury, a slightly more salt-of-the-earth crew - ‘is there any sort of IQ test required?’ - and jockey for queue position. There’s laughter of course. There’s always laughter at these trials. A woman is being judged in a way that may take decades of her life, for a crime that would have once prompted a capital trial, accused of the gravest sin three times over, and the gravitas of that gives us all the giggles, like when you break up with someone and they crumple into tears before you and you can’t stop laughing.
‘I bet he was a nerd at school’ says someone
‘Who?’
‘Him!’, as an expert witness is hustled into the court antechamber.
‘Oooooh yes, brainbox’
‘Do you think he’s gay?’
‘Well, I saw a wedding ring’
‘Oh Katie that doesn’t mean anything these days’
Gales of laughter. It rolls through the crowd, it catches up people who didn’t hear the joke. Outside and inside the court, no-one can quite stop it.
***
Erin Patterson has to live with this, all day, every day. She sits in a slightly raised dock at the back, with a half height clear barrier, a chair for the defendant, and two chunky stab-vested police officers on either side. It’s a very modern juliet balcony, in a court not made to hear a triple murder charge. Patterson rejected the chance to move the trial down to Melbourne, and the portentous classical decor of the Supreme Court, and have it in Morwell, where the Mag’s court has been designed to tone down the might and majesty of the law, for paint huffers and deadbeat dads. If the real peril she is in, whatever her innocence or guilt, is getting to her, she isn’t showing it. More elegant than she appears in flattened out news photos, long hair flowing, one can see the country gal beneath the fat, the one who had the tempestuous relationship with ex-husband Simon, breaking up and reconciling again and again, until it appears there was nothing left to put together. The press sits afront her, save those who’ve retreated to the media feed room, to sprawl and make arch comments, and, in the jump seats at the side, a pair of grey haired true crime writer ladies, two of a possible three Fates, lines flowing across their pads, ballpoint pens shearsharp, going clack clack clack across the page.
Before her, half of one wall is occupied by an enormous full length window, a diffusion screen softening the vista, a sandy ridge with small brick builds afront, a fringe of hills and cloud builded sky beyond. Country your heart leaps out to, it’s Tom Roberts, it’s Bellini, and if Erin Patterson is convicted, it may be the last of this beautiful rolling, sandy, greeny land she’ll ever see. ‘I mean it’s amazing’ a perfect stranger leaned over and said to me. ‘This is a…world trial and it’s happening here!’ he cast his arm around. The municipal air lulls one into humour.
‘Say you’re watering the garden and you stop between doing the shrubs and watering uh ….’ Dr Sorell falters for an example
‘Perhaps a veggie patch?’ someone says. A laugh, a little gasp, another laugh.
***
The prosecution outlined their accusations in the opening remarks. Patterson, it is claimed, picked the lethal mushrooms, claimed to source them from an Asian foods grocery she couldn’t identify, ground them to a powder to put in that quintessentially Womens’ Weekly meal, a Beef Wellington, kept hers separate from the others by a different coloured plate, went to hospital herself with faked symptoms, and disposed of the dehydrator she had powdered the shrooms with. Last Monday, after the medicos were finally finished, it was time to hear from the mushrooms themselves. Or their representatives on this earth, the mycologists. ‘The next witness is Tom May’ the bailiff called. ‘There’s a delay because he’s gone for a walk’ the assistant called from the door. That laughter again, racing round the court. The man whose evidence might convict or acquit had gone foraging.
***
‘And those pictures are posted by you on your own account?’
‘That’s right’ May, a tall man with a gray ponytail, and a beige shirt buttoned to the neck replied, as bulbous death caps hovered on the screen.
‘And that account is called-?’
May must have known this moment was some time during his hours of evidence. His voice lowered a little.
‘Funguy Tom’ he said, in the tone which addresses something you have done not at all wrong, yet nevertheless mildly shameful.
Funguy Tom, a little joke by a man who had, for hours, taken us into the extremely strange world of fungi. A world expert, based in those beautiful buildings you see at the Domain end of the Royal Botanic Gardens, May’s careful, illuminating evidence concerning this life form neither plant nor animal, had convinced the court of one thing: these mutant fuckers were out to get us all. Mushrooms aren’t even mushrooms per se; they’re spores of the larger underground body, which spreads throughout the terrain, sprouting and not as it wishes, to a loose temperature cuing that they break when they want to. Death cap is the sole lethal species, Amanita phalloides, of a genus which has many fine and lovely variants. Landing here in the 60s, most likely in imported soil, it’s a stoneface killah of man, woman, children, dog and anything else that snuffles it up. Later, Cynthia McKenzie, a poisons information specialist pharmacist would give evidence of her own identification of the species growing wild, her systematic removal of them, and her hatred of the spore-beast came through. She got a good photo she said, then she excised them thoroughly, using gloves and dog poo bags. Tom May as he spoke at length of the death cap colouring. Sometimes a curve of yellow, sometimes not. He spoke of the delicacy of the frilled ‘gills’ beneath the cap. This was absolutely his job, and he did it well because it was his love.
***
Indeed, it seemed possible that I had seen Tom May or someone like him before. Two years earlier, I had been to a party at the Botanic Gardens mycology centre for, Melbourne, what else, the launch of an issue of a cutting edge art and theory journal. They’d done a fungi issue, using the …entity’s multiple, differentiated/undifferentiated body form and sexual/asexual ‘reproductive’ cycle, as a metaphor for, what else, the Symbolic deterritorialisation of fascist architectures of meaning, through the rhizomatic parallax of etcetera, you know the drill. We’d all arrived in the star-hung Melbourne night, in a convoy of Ubers from the bar where the thing had started, pulling up one by one at the building’s spanish steps, like bright young things rolling up to the opening of the season. The mycologists were already there, a half dozen in a circle, among the glass-case walls of mushroom samples, talking about mushrooms. They spend endless hours in the field, are lean, lined and fit men (and a couple of women). Diaphanous art girls in knock-off Mary Quant and smoky-eye mobbed them, happy to meet straight guys who didn’t have a stalled Master’s thesis on Kant and Zoloft-induced erectile dysfunction. The myci’s were happy to entertain them, with talk of mushrooms. Then they turned back to themselves and spoke of mushrooms. They seemed to merge and recombine. Were the girls not their type? Type? Ha! They weren’t even their preferred biota kingdom! Spawn from a subterranean mycelium that cannot be defined in animal or plant terms and take over my root system, then we’ll talk, baby.
***
Snapped back to the trial, staring at the full length shot of a death cap, I could see Tom May’s point. The many species of the Amanita were recorded in the fungarium, he said-
‘The fungarium?’
‘Well yes, it’s where we keep the fungi…’ and studied in ever greater detail. Under cross, he would clarify that it is technically impossible to distinguish Death Cap from harmless species that mimic it. Nothing told us which one a picture was of, except the label. The spore seemed like death itself, indifferent to all flourishing or love that other realms might produce. Funguy Tom’s service to us all, among many, is that he goes round the state talking of mushrooms and fungi, and looking for them when he does and one night two years ago, he found a patch of death caps beneath a host oak tree, and uploaded pics and details to the ‘I naturalist’ citizen website, from the location he was giving the talk in - the small town of Outtrim, close to Leongatha.
***
Mid-afternoon break, locals here for the arvo session:
‘We mushroomed all the time!’
‘Right! Out in the fields!’
‘Out in the fields!’
‘You never picked anything under a tree’
‘Never under a tree!’
***
Trials such as this start in matters we all know about, like the difficulties of family life, of keeping a relationship with estranged co-parent of your children, of the strange attractions to in-laws and ex-laws, of odi et amo, loving and hating someone enough that life becomes an endless series of splitting and recombination. Then the specialised knowledge comes in, and what everyone knows is transformed by what no-one knows, except one expert. And which you only learn later. Like how decades of mushroom research means the effects of a lethal one can be identified with a blood test, or a mobile phone position triangulated from towers. The juridical process is a philosophical one; the world emerges from inquiry, with all its frills and gills. Erin Patterson’s defence is that the ghastly event was a terrible accident, that her post-lunch falsehoods were panic, and simply that the case of murderous intentional action has not been made. Will she take the stand? Not if her defense team can help it, one presumes. But she appears to be a woman of firm decisions, her power extending from the dock into the court, and anything is possible in the next weeks.
***
Outside the court building, generic, Vicgov flatpak build, the Morwell Centenary Rose Garden spreads, across lawns, banks and traffic roundabouts, petalfists bursting in a thousand shades, scarlet, crimson, cerise, lemon, bright sun, white brilliant, pink-tinged, petal balls spreading out to meet the city. It is gloss elegance, like standing in a postcard from the 70s, kodachrome bright, gloss coated, deckle-edged, GREETINGS FROM! It is the city’s glory, and when this trial is done, we should have one to see who or what killed Morwell and Moe, and all the other cities left to die when they had ceased to serve metropolitan purpose. Wrecked streets, vacant shops, nothing given, all taken, a place that has retreated to the framed sepia photos in the cafes that remain, power station dances and Labour Day parades. Still, the art gallery next to the court is hosting a heavily subsidised group exhibition of assemblage pieces, Interfacial Intimacies, advertised by a pic of a lycra’ d young woman pawing at a funhouse mirror, hovering over the rail station. “What does it mean to be the absolute essence of who you are without being wedded to any of it?” the publicity asks a town with no shoe shop. “For a long time, the ‘self’ was considered a stable and trustworthy container within which you can be found. Emerging theories of selfhood recognise that it isn’t so simple.” Oh Christ. “We know that we can have as many…”
Some of the camos and crew come over to the rose garden for a break, no-one smokes anymore, this is a take five. The song goes round in your head of course, how could it not? A rose garden outside a courtroom, this house of misery and nemesis, and Lynn Anderson’s voice:
I could promise you things like big diamond rings
But you don't find roses growin' on stalks of clover
So you better think it over
Well, if sweet-talkin' you could make it come true
I would give you the world right now on a silver platter
But what would it matter?
I beg your pardon
I never promised you a rose garden
Well, uh, yeah. Simon and Erin, Erin and Simon, would they ever have sung it to each other in their tempestuous years together? What fight-and-fuck couple hasn’t? What was this marriage, this family, these entanglements? ‘When you take, you gotta give/ So live and let live or let go/whoa-whoa-whoa’. Country is rural’s rock, what’s lived by, and that song has been bouncing off the walls of the valley for half a century. Whatever the truth of that lunch, how did it all get here, to this? The light wood panelling and gleaming metal staircases of the court building have a labyrinthine air, Escheresque, turning back on each other, the lined women and fat boys going up and down up and down for ever, as R v Patterson breaks, and, outside, the crews upsimba cameras to shoulder as the principals come out the doors.
***
Too late to go home, and too tired, after the afternoon’s evidence. I took Chisel’s advice, booked a room and stayed the night at the Latrobe, had a beer at the Morwell Club with the sole other punter there, to get the goss, and so they’d let me buy some Jack takeaways. He had never heard of the trial, Erin Patterson, death caps, and did not know what a Beef Wellington was. Outside, the temperature had hit three degrees, and the town had shut for the night. Back at the Latrobe, the white painted cement block room was unwarmable from the ancient wheezing grille wall unit. Absolute zero as it were, and the bone shaking cold brings a memory of the early morning mist on the way up, the faded trees, trees as if printed on the white, as if memories of trees. Here, I could see my own breath in the room with me. Near on two years ago, three people were here, who for whatever reason, now are not, and that cold fact screws you down, as the knowledge of it rises up from the deep, deep earth.