Danger Down Under: The Dark Side of the Australian Dream (True Crime Series)

I've always thought that crime encapsulates culture. Particularly violent crime. The who and how and where and what and why of a murder fix details that might otherwise be overlooked and lost for ever, because murder is an extraordinary thing that happens to ordinary people. If you want to learn about everyday life in Victorian Britain, don't read about Queen Victoria, read about Jack the Ripper. Similarly, if you want to learn about everyday life in modern Australia, don't read about an Australian celebrity, read about MacDonald the Mutilator. His is one of the extraordinary and often disturbing cases examined in this book, which ranges from convict days in the late 1700s to the disappearance of foreign tourists in 2001. Some true-true-crime writers would gloat over this history and try to titillate readers with it. Blackden doesn't, and he doesn't just record, he analyzes and places in context too. Australia has a distinctive culture and a distinctive landscape and both are reflected in the crimes committed there.Or not committed there: one of the most interesting cases examined in that book is that of Azaria Chamberlain, a month-old baby girl who disappeared near Ayers Rock in 1980. Had her parents, who were Seventh Day Adventists, carried out a so-called "sacrifice in the wilderness", as certain newspapers claimed? Or had she, as her parents claimed, been snatched by a dingo? In Blackden's account the latter seems much more likely, and the media-inspired prejudice suffered by the Chamberlains is one of the ways a distinctively Australian tragedy has application to the US and UK too. Crime encapsulates culture, and so does our reaction to crime. Often that reaction, in books as well as newspapers, is voyeuristic and exploitative, but that isn't true of Danger Down Under: it's intelligent, thoughtful, and highly readable, and though I doubt the Australian Tourist Board will be happy with it, I think intelligent and thoughtful true-crime fans should be. Australia isn't all sand, surf, and sunshine, and it isn't all serial killers and psychopaths either, but all of those things exist there and DDU is a very useful reminder of that.