 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Joe Cinque's Consolation
By Helen Garner
Picador $30
All Things Bright & Beautiful
By Susan Mitchell
Macmillan $30
 Each with a high-profile female author, these 'true crime' books explore recent killings in Australian capital cities and their legal aftermath, with the spectre of mental health looming over the main protagonists.
Given the seriousness of events - a single death in the former case, 12 bodies in the latter's - it needs hardly be said that they are not for the faint-hearted.
Garner, the well-known, sometimes controversial author, and Mitchell, a writer and radio broadcaster, were so struck by the callousness that they decided to find out more. They take us inside the worlds of both victims and perpetrators as well as to court, leaving little doubt about their disappointment in the legal process.
Joe Cinque, engineering graduate and son of a Newcastle Italian family, died in from the effects of heroin and Rohypnol administered by then-girlfriend, Canberra law student Anu Singh.
Earlier Singh had told friends of her intention to kill, yet no one took the threat seriously enough to alert Cinque or the police, nor to dissuade Singh from her course of action.
Cinque's death followed Singh's ambiguous phone call to the ambulance service, the transcript of which, like much in this book, makes distressing reading. Equally disturbing is the reaction of Singh's 40 year old uni friend Madhavi Rao, a 'different proposition altogether' to the younger 'sex bomb round whom the air crackles with an agitating static.'
Singh was found not guilty of murder, felonious slaying, attempted murder and attempting to administer a stupefying drug, and was discharged to the amazement of many.
Less successful before the courts were John Bunting and Robert Wagner, found guilty of the 'bodies in the barrels' murders, named after the mid-1990s discovery of their victims' remains.
'Snowtown is 180 kms north of Adelaide but unless you were going there to stare at a disused bank whose vault had once stored barrels of decomposing bodies, you would never bother,' Mitchell notes bleakly.
'Underneath the sign that says 'Snowtown' is an advertisement listing the town's available services. 'Butcher' is the first on the list.'
Mitchell revisits her former hometown, the 'City of Light', for the gruesome trial about torture, murder, vivisection and the gross intimidation of accomplices by the sociopathic Bunting, a former abattoir worker dedicated to 'cleansing' the city of 'diseased paedophiles'.
Her elegantly written account contrasts the ghastly testimonies of the Bunting-Wagner set with Adelaide's social scene - 'he liked to share his pleasures and he'd poured a glass of crisp Sauvignon Blanc...'
They seem to be different countries.
- Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore.
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