Death threats, stalking, dead flowers: My foster siblings’ parents must be in town

This story is part of the October 19 edition of Good Weekend.See all 13 stories.

Jacki Weaver tracked me down, not the other way around. It was 2017. The Hollywood actress was 70. I was 25, a university dropout running a three-star motel in Bundaberg. The Honeymoon Suite was occupied by a decorated meth dealer. I was a long way from Los Angeles, let alone heaven. “I mentioned to a friend that I might seek you out,” she wrote via email. “And he said: ‘Sometimes it’s ­better to let sleeping dogs lie, especially if the dog has rabies.’ ”

A few days earlier, on ABC radio, I’d told Richard Fidler the tale of Michael and Mary Shelley. For 30 years, the Shelleys travelled the world preaching the gospel of Jesus, while stalking and threatening their many enemies. Priests. Premiers. World leaders. And my parents, Lenore and Tom Blaine. Mum and Dad were foster parents to three of the Shelleys’ biological children: Steven, John and Hannah. I was born after they came. My siblings were raised in witness protection, except the witnesses couldn’t ­remember anything.

“Our children were brought up in depressing ­western Queensland pubs, which featured the reckless indulgence of alcohol and an obsession with idiotic ball sports,” wrote Michael Shelley in his never-ending ­spiritual manifesto. Michael’s belief system was a bewildering ­mixture of environmentalism, elitism and Old Testament misogyny. But why did he hate women so much? This remained a mystery.

After my interview, I received contact from kindred spirits: strangers who were still ­living in fear of Michael, such as Jacki Weaver.

“The adolescent Michael who I loved was complicated, but sweet and devoted,” she wrote in her email to me. “That Michael bore little ­resemblance to the dictatorial young man that he ­became in his 20s.”

In 1959, Weaver met Michael Shelley at a YWCA dance in West Pymble on Sydney’s upper north shore. He was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Knox Grammar boy. His IQ was prodigious. So was his ­charisma. He was 13, she was 12. He became Weaver’s first love.

Michael descended from one of Sydney’s wealthiest colonial families. His grandfather had been ­vice-commodore of the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron. His father took him and Weaver for a yacht ride on the harbour. As teenagers, they had sex most days in his mother’s bed or on the banks of Lane Cove River.

Michael with his first wife Beverly in 1968.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

“Michael was genuinely very hurt when I broke up with him,” wrote Weaver. “There was much more to our relationship that I couldn’t put into my memoir. I didn’t want to anger Michael and risk retribution.”

In 1974, a newspaper predicted that 28-year-old Michael Shelley would be a millionaire by the age of 30. He owned a wine bar and a hotel. His first wife, Beverly, overheard female customers bragging about her husband’s sexual prowess. “I slept with approximately 200 women by the age of 28,” Michael later wrote. “I didn’t believe I had the right to say no to a woman.”

Michael consumed vast quantities of illicit drugs. Nearing bankruptcy, he began trafficking them. He divorced his first wife and remarried a younger woman from a rich family. This second marriage was brief. In 1976, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Michael, 30, was committed to a psychiatric hospital.

‘When women are liberated, complete anarchy results.’

Michael Shelley

He met Carrie, 33, at group therapy the same year. She was a beautiful brunette with olive skin and ­intense brown eyes. In 1962, Carrie had been pictured on the front cover of Women’s Weekly with her first ­husband, Lionel Long, a famous singer and actor. By 1976, Carrie was divorced from Long, and officially ­diagnosed with bipolar. “I fell in love with Michael the first time we met,” she later wrote.

Mary Shelley on front cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1962.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

Michael and Carrie moved into a house together. On the verandah, they recited Bible parables. Michael had an incredible epiphany. He was a prophet of God. This born-again root rat became obsessed with the immorality of single mothers. Michael began stalking his ex-wife, Beverly, and her young daughter. “When women are liberated, complete anarchy results,” he wrote.

Michael was arrested for harassment and assault. Under strict instructions from Michael, Carrie changed her name by deed poll to “Mary Shelley”. In 1980, the now penniless couple hitchhiked barefoot from Sydney to Far North Queensland with just a Bible. Mary gave birth to a boy named Elijah.

“Elijah + I have Michael 24/7,” wrote Mary in a letter. “I am the weaker vessel. Baby Elijah has a stronger heart than me. We are trying to be God’s children.” The Shelleys were repeatedly arrested for vagrancy and sent to Boggo Road Gaol in Brisbane. Social workers suspected they were suffering a folie a deux, French for “madness of two”. Michael accused them of being “feckless feminists”. Elijah was underweight. He was placed into a foster home in the city’s north.

A 1982 clipping with Elijah, Michael and Mary Shelley.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

“Despite his location being a secret, we found where Elijah lived by the grace of GOD,” wrote Michael afterwards. “Elijah was waiting right at the door.” His ­version of events was heavily disputed by Elijah’s foster family. They saw a “pigtailed hippie” storm through the unlocked front door of their suburban house. Three-year-old Elijah was watching Play School. He was blond-haired and blue-eyed, like Michael Shelley. His biological father snatched him off the carpet. “Mumma!” cried Elijah, reaching for his foster mother.

Three of Elijah’s foster sisters chased the getaway vehicle, a gold Holden Commodore. It was a decoy. Mary waited nearby in a campervan. The Shelleys switched vehicles. The kidnapping of Elijah provoked a national manhunt and media storm. Five days later, near Canberra, police intercepted the campervan. “KIDNAP BOY KISSES DRAMAS AWAY,” read a headline.

Elijah returned to Queensland. He was placed into a new foster home under an alias. The Shelleys faced 15‑year sentences. Michael represented himself to fight extradiction to Queensland. He blitzed the ­prosecution with a deluge of ­affidavits and niche legal ­arguments. The Shelleys were released from custody.

Michael and Mary disappeared into the Blue Mountains. They had two more sons: Saul and Joshua. In 1985, the Shelleys went back to Brisbane to ­attempt another kidnapping of Elijah. They were both ultimately arrested. Saul and Joshua were placed into foster care. Saul had nearly died from neglect. Joshua was malnourished.

A 1983 clipping recording Elijah’s return to his foster parents following his kidnapping by Michael that sparked a five-day national manhunt and media storm.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

Social workers searched for a couple willing to foster the children of infamous kidnappers. They found my parents, Lenore and Tom Blaine. Mum and Dad were publicans in country Queensland. Mum was a shy bookworm with a perm. Dad was a 130-kilogram ­atheist and sporting fanatic, with a mullet and a ­handlebar moustache. He was destined to be Michael Shelley’s best enemy yet.

“The sum total of Australian culture is football, cricket, meat pies and beer,” Michael once wrote. “The so-called Australian larrikin is a foul-mouthed, cowardly thug. You can find them at pubs, drinking and smoking.”

My parents came from poor backgrounds. They ­believed a country was judged by its treatment of the downtrodden. This was their god. Egalitarianism. Mum had suffered four miscarriages. Which was why my parents decided to become foster carers. Their first placement was a boy with autism. Now, at their country pub, they studied newspaper clippings about Michael Shelley.

“What is the go with this bloke?” asked Dad.

“He’s a narcissist,” said Mum.

“An arsonist?” he asked, alarmed.

“A narcissist; he loves himself,” she said.

“So, he sniffs his own farts?” he asked.

“Something like that,” she said.

Social workers warned my parents that Michael and Mary Shelley would try to find Saul and Joshua. All sorts of safety precautions would need to be taken. My parents were unperturbed. In 1986, the Blaines drove to Brisbane to collect the toddlers. Their names were legally changed to Steven and John Blaine. They would get no direct contact with the Shelleys, at least until the age of 18. Mum spent her days showering Steven and John with total affection.

Steven, Elijah and John in 1988.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

“The love that organically develops between a foster child and a foster mother is priceless, because it is not payback for a biological debt,” she wrote in an A4 ­notepad. The words THE BOOK OF LOVE were ­printed neatly on the cover.

My parents tried to foster Elijah Shelley, too. But the social workers didn’t want to wrench him from another placement. Elijah came to visit Steven and John during school holidays. This clever, charming older brother verified my mother’s insistence that they came from a different woman’s tummy.

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Michael Shelley stalked and sent death threats to the then Queensland premier Mike Ahern. He demanded $13 million and the immediate ­return of his children. Then, Mary fell pregnant again. In 1990, the Shelleys fled to Whanganui, a town in New Zealand. A daughter named Hannah was born in the bathtub of a three-star motel room. “We left with absolutely no sign of what had just happened,” wrote Michael.

The Shelleys stole a van from a church group called Operation Good Samaritan. They led police on a wild goose chase from Wellington to Auckland, leaving ­unpaid motel bills in their wake. Michael was arrested. Hannah was six months old. She went into foster care. Doctors diagnosed her with a failure to thrive, due to Michael’s dieting beliefs.

My mother was desperate to reunite Hannah with her biological brothers in Queensland. She was extradited to Australia in the autumn of 1991. The social workers drove evasively from the airport. This was to prevent any of the handful of Michael’s disciples from following them to the secret address in country Queensland.

The Blaine family waited on the front patio of the pub. At that point, my parents had six foster care ­placements, including Steven and John. Everyone was delirious with glee. Steven and John looked at their baby sister’s face and saw traces of themselves. Dark hair, brown eyes and olive skin, like Mary Shelley.

“What a unit!” said Dad. “Hannah, the Big Goanna!”

Mum was inspired by Mary Shelley’s fertility. She had given birth to Hannah at the age of 47. What was stopping Mum? She was only 38. So she started taking an oestrogen replacement drug, Premarin. I was conceived on the Sunday night following Hannah’s arrival.

Lech (right) and his sister Hannah in Wondai, 1994. They were joined at the hip – and dressed in colour-coordinated outfits.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

Steven and John hailed my mother’s womb as if it contained baby Jesus. Mum needed to get a caesarean, due to her age, and the fact that she had suffered six miscarriages. The miracle was matter-of-fact. I was born in January 1992.

“My kid’s got a dick!” Dad roared victoriously. He named me after Lech Walesa, the larrikin trade unionist who helped emancipate Poland from communism. “That’s the future prime minister, mate,” said Dad, winking at the registrar.

Giving birth for the first time made my mother love her foster children even more. She got to see them mesh with her own flesh and blood. They didn’t begrudge her shifting focus. They loved me just as much as she did. Particularly Hannah. Despite our different ages and DNA, we were joined together at the hip like Siamese twins. Mum dressed us in ­colour-coordinated outfits.

“Leck-sta! Peck-sta!” Hannah called me. “Read all about it!”

In 1995, we moved to Toowoomba. Dad bought the lease of a pub. His nephew, Allan Langer, was one of the best rugby league players in the country. It was Michael Shelley’s idea of hell. His children worshipped at the altar of the Brisbane Broncos, the Queensland Maroons and the Australian cricket team. “If you’re not first, you’re finished,” said my father.

As teenagers, Steven and John competed to be seen as a better athlete by Dad. Steven was a rugby league star. John was an eight-ball pool prodigy. Dad signed Hannah up for junior cricket. She was the best batter on a team of all boys. “My beautiful ­tomboy,” my ­mother called her.

A family photo from 1993 at Airlie Beach, Queensland. Back row, from left: Tom, Lech, Lenore, Nathan and Trent Blaine. Front row, from left: Hannah, Rebecca, John and Steven Blaine.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

Steven, John, and Hannah knew they were fostered. But they weren’t bothered by the circumstances of their births. At the end of the day, they talked like a Blaine. They dressed like a Blaine. And they played sport like a Blaine. As far as they were concerned, Michael and Mary Shelley were on another planet.

On a Monday afternoon in 2002, I was at cricket training with Dad. My mother sat reading a novel in the sunroom of our house. It was a rundown worker’s cottage in a rough suburb of Toowoomba. The doorbell rang. Mum looked at the clock: 5.01pm. Nobody who knew us entered via the front. Mum answered the cocksure knocking.

“Jeez Louise,” she whispered.

Mary Shelley stood on the front porch. She wore a purple dress. White hair to the waist. Finally, Mary came face-to-face with the woman who had replaced her. Mum wore Ugg boots and tracksuit pants. Greying hair cut short. “My name is Mary Shelley,” the woman on the porch said, with the fading trace of an upper-class British accent. “I am here to see Saul, Joshua and Hannah. My children.”

Mary walked to the breezeway out the back. John was playing Nintendo 64.
“John,” Mum whispered. “Mary Shelley is here.”

John was 17. A few days earlier, he had been diagnosed with bipolar II. The waves of pain and mania had begun in his final year of high school. Now, he was coping with the side-effects of mood stabilisers.

“You’re kidding,” said John.

“I kid you not,” said Mum.

Mum called the police. John went to get Hannah from the bathroom. She was 11. Hannah hid behind the shower curtain, hair frothing with shampoo.

“Our mother is here,” said John, with a blank face.

Hannah believed innately in the fiction that Lenore Blaine was her mother. She didn’t think for a split-­second he meant their non-fictional mother.

“I know she’s here, you freak,” said Hannah.

“Our real mother,” said John.

“Jeez Louise,” Hannah whispered.

Hannah’s short, wet hair was slicked back with bobby pins. She wore shorts and a tight red singlet that said GIRLS KICK HARDER THAN BOYS. Mum opened the back door. She led John and Hannah to the family reunion.

“My daughter!” cried Mary. “What have they done to your hair?”

Mary hugged her numb body. Hannah’s brain floated above the embrace like a spaceship. She pulled away. John was shirtless. He loomed between Mary and Hannah.

Hannah Blaine in 2002, the year of the Shelleys’ arrival. Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

“Don’t f---ing touch her,” he told Mary.

“Joshua Shelley!” cried Mary. “How dare you speak to me like that!”

“My name is John,” he said. “John Blaine. B-L-A-I-N-E.“

“Blasphemy!” she said. “I am your mother. After all I’ve done …”

John vanished. Steven came up the driveway. Hannah used his arrival as a decoy to sneak back inside the house. Mum followed. She called the police again. Mary studied the insult of her son’s name badge: STEVEN.

“Saul!” she cried. “Your name is Saul!”

Steven was 18, but the accounting student was wise beyond his years. He reciprocated Mary’s hug. She didn’t measure up to the female goliath of his childhood imagination. “You can’t just rock up out of the blue like this,” he said.

Michael and Mary were arrested for stalking. Mary had left a death threat in the letterbox for my mother.

“Saul, what choice did I have?” asked Mary. “I am your mother. Nothing can change that. I haven’t seen my own children in 10 years.”

“Hannah isn’t responsible for any of this,” said Steven. “She’s 11. And she’s freaked out that Michael and you are going to try and kidnap her.”

For almost two decades, the word “kidnap” had been used to deny Mary’s maternal urges. “Hannah was kidnapped from us!” she said.

Steven offered a compromise. If Mary agreed to leave, Steven would meet her and Michael for dinner in Brisbane. And if they could demonstrate civility, he would attempt to facilitate direct contact with Hannah. Mary kissed her handsome son on the cheek. She left without saying goodbye to Hannah.

The ceasefire was short-lived. Overnight, Mary Shelley left a death threat in the letterbox for Dad. She demanded $100,000 and the immediate return of Hannah. Police officers and social workers relocated us to a motel under a fake name.

On Saturday, John went home to mow the lawns. A white 1979 Chrysler Valiant pulled up on the street. Red upholstery glowed through the windows. Rosary beads swayed from the rear-view mirror. Michael Shelley climbed from the driver’s seat in a white robe. He looked like an ageing Jesus Christ.

Steven and John’s high school photo from 2000.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

“Good morning, Joshua,” said Michael.

John exploded into flight. He sprinted up the driveway and high-jumped the back fence. Then he called the police from a neighbour’s place. Michael and Mary were arrested for stalking. Mary had left a death threat in the letterbox for my mother. She accused Mum of being a lesbian and Dad of molesting Hannah.

Hannah was temporarily sent to live with a friend. We went home from the motel. At night, Mary’s white dress was frequently seen fluttering out the front. She left threats and dead flowers. Mum suffered from ­insomnia and panic attacks. John suffered suicidal ideation. Michael stalked Steven at university.

“My children needed guardians who were educated, artistic, cultured and physically active,” Michael told Steven. “Not obese, illiterate, liquor-swilling hillbillies!”

“The only reason Mum doesn’t have a degree is ­because her family was poor,” said Steven. “And she dedicated her life to looking after us. Unlike you.” The court awarded Hannah a 12-month child ­protection order, strengthening the existing conditions. She came home. Michael began peppering the pub with phone calls and letters. He called my father “a fat ugly glutton” and “a perverted paedophile”. Dad suffered a minor heart attack. On New Year’s Day 2003, Michael sent him a final warning.

“LENORE + YOU ARE ENDANGERING YOUR LIVES IN THIS LIFE AND IN THE NEXT,” wrote Michael. “ETERNITY IS FOREVER!”

A few days later, we ate dinner at the pub. Afterwards, in the car, Hannah and I spotted Michael and Mary on the street. Michael was petrifying. I thought I might die just by laying eyes on him. Mum drove straight to the police station. Then we went back to the motel.

Michael Shelley hitchhiking in 2003. Michael and Mary had no settled home until she developed dementia.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

“Will I need to go to a different foster home?” asked Hannah.

“Over my dead body,” said Mum, with a rare ferocity.

It was a stalemate. Short of killing her, no amount of domestic terrorism would make Mum willingly surrender custody.

In the spring of 2003, Hannah and I stayed at home alone while my mother attended to a quick errand. Hannah was 13. I was 11. She watched TV. I sat at the computer in the dining room. Mary Shelley rushed up the driveway. She stared inside. I grabbed the cordless phone and ran to the lounge room.

“Mary is here,” I whispered to Hannah.

Hannah thought she’d stumbled upon a suicide. Then Mary’s eyes slid open. Hannah screamed.

She muted the TV. We slid under the metal frame of our parents’ queen bed, met by the smell of rust and dust. Hannah’s skin was the temperature of porcelain. She dialled triple-zero and explained the violated restraining order.

My parents rushed home. The police ­arrived. Mary had vanished. The police left on a woman hunt. Hannah returned to her bedroom. Mary lay on the bed. Her face was so at peace that Hannah thought she’d ­stumbled upon a suicide.
Then Mary’s eyes slid open. Hannah screamed. She saw a monster. “I just wanted to be near you,” said Mary, apologetically.

Steven evicted Mary from the room. They had an argument out the back, eyes opened but blinkered. He was blind with hate. She was blind with love.

“I will never stop loving Hannah,” cried Mary. “One day, when you have your own children, you might ­understand just how much I love you.”

Michael sent letters to everyone in Queensland with the surname Blaine, alleging that Dad was a paedophile. Mary gate-crashed parliament. On national TV news, she claimed Hannah was being molested. Michael had a showdown with my father at the pub. Mary smashed an ashtray through the windscreen of Dad’s ute. “You could not make this shit up, mate,” said my father.

The Shelleys were charged with a litany of crimes, including ­stalking and assault. A prosecutor successfully applied to extend Hannah’s restraining order to my parents and their business. Michael represented himself. He attempted to excuse himself from the ­stalking charges. “I’m not my wife’s keeper,” Michael told the judge.

Michael was his wife’s keeper only with psychiatrists. For decades, he had prevented her from taking mood stabilisers. To the naked eye, Michael seemed like the saner spouse. Mary had acted as his messenger and his scapegoat. Over the past five years, she had spent 99 nights in police watch houses.

“You want me not to see Hannah for another year, and another year,” said Mary to the court. “Don’t you think I deserve some peace in my life?”

Michael began stalking Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner. He blamed the archbishop for causing the AIDS epidemic by showing compassion to homosexuals.

The judge disagreed. Michael was convicted and sent back to prison. Mary was convicted and released on a good behaviour bond. She was strictly forbidden from making any direct or indirect contact with my parents or with Hannah.

In 2006, the Shelleys fled to South Africa. Michael began stalking Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner. He blamed the archbishop for causing the AIDS epidemic by showing compassion to homosexuals. Michael was arrested. He spent six months in various South African prisons and refugee camps.

The Shelleys travelled through Asia to western Europe. Michael located Pope Benedict in the Italian Alps. He berated the Pope for covering up child abuse. Then the Shelleys went to France. They were repeatedly arrested for harassing politicians and diplomats.

After an odyssey from New York to LA via Mexico, the Shelleys came back to Australia. In 2009, Hannah was studying psychology in Brisbane, while working at a cafe. That was where she saw Mary for the final time. They were within touching distance, but there was no recognition. Mary was searching for a gangly tomboy. Hannah looked like the 18-year-old version of Mary Shelley.

‘You think you’re an angel. You’re just a narcissistic arsehole.’

Steven Blaine to Michael Shelley

“Why am I still afraid?” Hannah asked her boyfriend, Jay, after work.
How many hours had Hannah spent anticipating a kidnapping attempt? Thousands. So many years ­feigning strength for my parents, social workers, teachers. The fear was still there, just hidden, like rust covered with fresh paint.

Steven, then 26, was a craft beer salesman in Perth. He had become a marathon runner. The Shelleys stalked him and his girlfriend, Prue. Michael sent ­letters annotating Prue’s defects, supposed proof of her unfitness to be a mother. “I will never love you,” Steven told Michael near Fremantle Beach the same year. “You think you’re an angel. You’re just a narcissistic arsehole.”

Michael wouldn’t take no for an answer. He went back to Toowoomba. John, then 25, was running a pub with my father. “Joshua Shelley” was now 186 centimetres tall and weighed 110 kilograms. He and my father were the same person, 35 years apart. Nurture had permanently erased the difference between their alien natures.

“Oh my God, Joshua,” said Michael. “You have let yourself go! Have you been on the same diet as Thomas Blaine? I can barely recognise you!”

John’s insatiable appetite was a direct result of the mood stabilisers for bipolar II. He hadn’t missed a day of medication since the age of 17. As a result, he never suffered another major episode of mania or depression.

“Okay, Jenny Craig,” said John. “You haven’t seen ya son in seven years. And the first thing you do is hang shit on me for being fat? That’ll do me.”

Unbeknown to Michael, John knew a fair bit about fatherhood. He had three daughters. That afternoon, Mum was babysitting John’s twin girls. Amelia and Sophie were nearly four. They were blonde, olive-skinned and identical.
“Twins are the best thing since sliced bread!” said my mother, embracing them in each arm. “Double the hugs. And double the love.”

The twins saw nothing uncool about spending Saturday nights listening to my mother recite bush poetry. They regarded her as their grandma, not a foster grandma. Mum didn’t need to worry about social workers, custody battles, or vindictive Christian fanatics. The Shelleys had taken a lot, but not this.

Hannah and her daughter Lennie, named in tribute to her mother, in Alice Springs, 2021. The siblings remain tight-knit.Credit: Courtesy of Lech Blaine

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In 2011, my father died suddenly of a stroke. He was 61. Michael Shelley hailed the death of his nemesis as proof of divine intervention. Two years later, my ­mother was diagnosed with a fatal and incurable brain disease. I was 21. It was my job to sell the house and organise a nursing home placement.

“Don’t throw out the paperwork!” said Mum. “It’s for you, baby.”

Mum had kept a meticulous archive of ­letters, newspaper ­articles, foster care files, court transcripts and restraining orders. Plus regular diary entries. First on a typewriter, and later on a computer. It was a ­record of her marriage to my father, and their tumultuous time as foster carers. “I’m going to write a book about the Shelley Gang one day,” Mum used to say ­during the ­biblical shit-show of my childhood. Now, she was dying. But I’d inherited her passion for ­literature and language. It was up to me.

The Shelleys were living on the Victorian coast. Mary had dementia. For three years, I traded emails with Michael. He told me the who, what, when and where of his life as God’s prophet. In 2017, a few weeks after my interview with Richard Fidler, Michael died in his sleep.

“That is handsome news,” whispered Mum with a wry smile, when I told her at the nursing home. She had never stopped waiting for Michael to arrive.
Mary Shelley died shortly afterwards. Mum ­followed in July 2018. They were all gone. Michael and Mary. Lenore and Tom. I kept writing. I tracked down hundreds of people. We spoke for thousands of hours. It took 11 years for me to finish the book Mum had wanted to write, Australian Gospel. I was fuelled by love, not grief or anger.

In November 2023, I flew from Sydney to Bundaberg with my new girlfriend, Laura. It was time for her to officially meet the Blaine family. My brother John, 39, was an award-winning Mitsubishi car salesman. His twin daughters, Amelia and Sophie, were turning 18. They had a party at the Old Bundy Tavern.

“There’s a couple of people I wish could be here tonight,” said John in his speech, eyes wet and throat choking up. “Mum and Dad. I wouldn’t be here without them. And neither would my kids. I owe everything we have to them.”

My siblings and I were scattered across the continent, yet we remained tight-knit. I had 13 nieces and nephews. For decades, my parents had pedalled into headwinds so that they could ride through life with the breeze at their backs. “Great speech,” said Steven, ­hugging John, his bigger but younger brother.

Steven and Hannah also made speeches. Steven, 40, was an accountant in Perth with three children. Hannah, 33, was a neuropsychologist in Alice Springs, with two kids. Hannah named her daughter Lennie as a tribute to my mother. Lennie believed that her namesake was smiling from the dusty sky of Alice Springs during sunrise and sunset. “Night-night, Grandma!” Lennie sang with a big grin.

Hannah swore that she saw flashes of my parents in the faces and personality traits of her children. Was it crazy to think this way? Mum and Dad showed us how to be just the right mix of soft and strong. Thanks to them, we knew that there was more to love than blood, and more to life than pain.

Lech Blaine’s Australian Gospel: A Family Saga (Black Inc, $37) is out November 5. Lech will donate $1 from the sale of each book to the Pyjama Foundation, a charity providing support to foster children. To pre-order the book or see Lech’s events, visit lechblaine.com

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