I lie and steal for a living, but what I did to my family shocked me

I stole from my family to write my debut novel, I Want Everything, or at least I thought I did. I told the dim myths of my relatives in broad strokes, their terrible deeds and those done to them, though I didn’t probe for the particulars. This was not to protect the memories of ghosts I’d never met, rather I was worried real life would prove disappointing. But the truth was much stranger than I could have anticipated. It turned out I was not a thief but a liar.

I Want Everything is about a literary parasite, a feckless writer who attaches himself to an ailing cult author, Brenda Shales, who reveals the secrets of how her sensational novels came to be. As one does in fiction, I grafted my family’s stories onto Brenda and the characters in her orbit, hoping some of them would take, a way to better inhabit a time I knew little about, the political now personal.

A few years ago, when I’d just begun the novel, my wife and I visited my paternal grandfather, Vincent, at his hospital bed. He was well over 90, and his heart was slowly giving out, though he was sharp enough to complete The Age crossword every day. He was sweet with my wife, talked with alacrity about his boyhood in St Kilda, an unruly place back then, his father’s imprisonment at the Tatura prison camps during World War II, a story I’d never heard. Like many Italian immigrants, my great-grandfather was suspected as a fascist sympathiser, though he’d already naturalised as a White Australian, renouncing his motherland along with my chances of ever obtaining a European Union passport.

Dominic Amerena’s paternal grandfather, Vincent (right), and great-grandparents, Pasquale and Annie.

As he talked about those war years in which he’d eaten city pigeons and kelp washed up on Elwood beach, I felt the sick inkling familiar to every writer, when a story begins to present itself. My grandfather died not long after our visit, cremated in a coffin draped in the St Kilda flag. Alongside the usual sadness and regret, my writer’s self rubbed its hairy paws in anticipation, itching to draft my version of my relative’s imprisonment.

The Tatura internment camp in 1943.Credit: Courtesy Australian War Memorial

More than 15,000 people were held captive at the Tatura camps, one of whom was a stand-in for my ancestor. In my novel, I created a communist who’d fled Italy when Mussolini’s Blackshirts swept to power. He braved the harsh camp conditions before I shaved his head and sent him home, to become a symbol of Australia’s suspicion of difference. I had no idea how much he resembled Pasquale, my great-grandfather, nor did I much care.

My maternal grandfather, Frank, died on the toilet, long before I was born. My mother and aunts had always described him as a chain-smoking workaholic, and part of B.A. Santamaria’s “Movement”, a secretive group of crypto-fascist, Catholic activists who rooted out communism in Melbourne’s body politic.

I always remembered a story my mother had told me, of waking in the middle of the night as a young girl to find her parents in the kitchen, her mother holding a bag of frozen peas to her father’s head, his shirt sheeted in blood from a gash on his forehead. She didn’t need to ask who had done it, and neither did I.

Dominic Amerena’s maternal grandfather, Frances Rush, with his wife, Marea, on their wedding day.

In my novel, I hung Frank out to dry. I made him Brenda’s father, a valiant defender of Christendom, vigilant against reds under the bed and in the submarine that spirited away poor Harold Holt from the choppy waters off Cheviot Beach. So far, so novelistic. Left versus right. Mum v Dad. The Centre and the Periphery.

Once the novel was written, and my book deal was signed, it was time to perform my due diligence. Find out precisely who these men were, and what further biographical nuggets I might extract. But once I started digging into my family’s backstory, I was dismayed to discover I knew next to nothing at all.

The cover of I Want Everything.Credit: Simon & Schuster

I emailed museums and local historians about the Victorian internment camps in Tatura, Murchison and Rushworth. The researchers checked the files and archives, but could find no record of a Pasquale Amerena at any of the camps. I surmised my grandfather had been losing the plot; maybe the story was a fantasy, or stolen from someone else. I asked my wife what she remembered from that afternoon at the hospital. She clearly recalled him talking about his childhood in St Kilda, but nothing about prison camps, nor a disappearing father. When quizzed, my own father hadn’t the foggiest what I was talking about.

Somehow I’d made the whole thing up, attached a traumatic backstory to a man I’d never met, replete with fantastic details (kelp!). But at least I had my Catholic fascist. Or did I? My mother vigorously disputed that characterisation of her father, a kind man by all accounts. Later, my aunt confirmed he’d been staunchly anti-union, but was the furthest thing from a thug. Needless to say, the incident with the bloodied shirt was an utter fiction I’d convinced myself was real.

I’d forced my family into a history that wasn’t theirs, conflating them with something I’d read about camps, communists and Catholics, attaching strangers’ experiences onto the names of relatives so abstracted from my life they may as well have been characters in a novel. Perhaps we’re all inclined to make heroes and villains of people we’ve never met, especially if they share our names.

I don’t usually write non-fiction because I have trouble sticking to the facts. I’m an infamous exaggerator, and seldom let reality stand in the way of a good story. Some men are born liars and some have lying thrust upon them. Lying I’m fine with, it’s what I do for a living. But in the future, it would be nice to know when exactly I’m doing it, especially to myself.

I Want Everything by Dominic Amerena is published by Simon & Schuster, $34.99