Telling Tales

by Melissa Katsoulis

  The story of Marlo Morgan began, like that of so many new-age attention-seekers, in a boring suburb. Born and raised in Idaho in the 1930s, she moved to Kansas, Missouri to become a wife and mother and work in a pharmacy. After twenty-five years of marriage, however, she got divorced and headed off to Australia for a trip of several months. It was there she became interested in the natural remedies and folk culture of the native population, and when she returned to America she gave up pharmacy work to become a peripatetic salesperson for a company specializing in tea-tree oil. After a while of giving potential clients the specified blurb about the products, her sales pitch for the Melaleuca brand of herbal remedies began to include a rather extraordinary story. She told people that when she was in Australia she had been kidnapped by a tribe of native people who had never seen a white person before, and over the course of a four-month trek across the parched country with them they taught her the secrets of health and wellbeing, curing her sore feet with tea-tree oil and coming to respect and even honour her as a member of their group. At some point she started to write this story down and sell it in pamphlet form along with her wares, at which point her company realized she was making unsubstantiated claims for their product (which is a natural antiseptic, not a mystical cure-all), and they – and the Missouri Department for Consumer Affairs – had to reprimand her.

  But by this time she knew she was on to a good thing. It was 1990 and self-help books were flying off the shelves as fast as new-age remedies and healing aides, and the industry was no longer limited to the cash-rich, reason-poor burghers of California. She decided to make her tall tale into a full-length book, adding descriptions of the health and lifestyle secrets of her Aboriginal friends (who she called the ‘Real People’), and tried to get it published. Initially unsuccessful, she resourcefully went ahead and published her spiritual travelogue herself, enlisting the help of her children to illustrate and publicize the work. That was in 1991 and soon after it seemed her prayers had been answered when the publishing arm of a new-age centre in New Hampshire, the Stillpoint School of Advanced Energy Healing, bought the rights to her book for $2,500. Just days before the presses began to roll, however, Stillpoint decided to heed the warnings of the experts they had asked to look over the book for authenticity, and cancelled the whole project, selling back the rights to the author and reckoning they had escaped an embarrassing reputational crisis.

  Across the country in California, however, an agent with her eye on the new-age dollar had heard about the book and, recently disappointed by having missed out on the chance to represent the author of The Celestine Prophecy, contacted Morgan with an offer. Now big money was being talked about, and with a bit of editing by one of her associates in the mainstream publishing world, Candice Fuhrman sold the manuscript to HarperCollins for an astonishing $1.7 million. To top it all off, United Artists bought the film rights and began a series of meetings to set up production.

  Morgan’s cottage industry, based on the fanciful holiday myth of a middle-aged divorcee, was suddenly one of the hottest commodities in American media. And happily, on publication, the book proved to be every bit as successful amongst the snake-oil-hungry reading public as everyone had hoped. Those inspiring pep-talks the author had been giving to her tea-tree customers in Missouri had blossomed into full-blown lectures, where she spoke to hundreds at a time about her experiences as ‘walkabout woman’ and the marvellous truths she learned in the bush.

  But while America was lapping up her spurious literary product, the book – although not published in Australia – had reached some key Aboriginal commentators in the southern hemisphere. Copies began to be circulated privately amongst writers and readers in indigenous communities and without exception everyone was utterly horrified. What they read in Mutant Message was a hotchpotch of offensive, ill-conceived lies – not even half-truths – based, seemingly, on a smattering of knowledge about Native Americans and a thorough grounding in Crocodile Dundee. On almost every page there were glaring inaccuracies, cruel misrepresentations and, it was widely claimed, out-and-out racism.

  To list every one of the errors in Morgan’s account would take up as many pages as are in her book, because almost every claim she makes about Aboriginal culture is unfounded. To name but a few, her ‘Real People’ are supposed to be nomadic, but they travel with an astonishing amount of paraphernalia such as cooking utensils and musical instruments. They have a designated tool maker and a counsellor called Secret Keeper who helps people with their emotional problems: anathema to a people for whom everyone is a tool maker and there is no therapy culture. They praise Morgan’s remarkable talent for self-sufficiency. They use the Native American phrase ‘the medicine of music’, the European concept of the composer, and eventually put on a Western-style concert for Morgan: none of the ritual ‘singing the country’ that Aboriginal culture is famous for. They call each other by clumsy made-up names rather than the authentic ‘skin’ or family names. They approach Morgan unbidden and are not afraid to whisk her off on walkabout with them nor instantly initiate her into their group, whereas in fact even indigenous groups who have known many white people are still slow to integrate with them. Finally, one of the nomads speculates that Morgan must be from ‘outer space’ – a phrase and a concept that no tribesperson who has never had contact with the white world would be able to enunciate.

  Of course, Morgan’s get-out clause was her assertion that these people were a hidden, secret tribe who had escaped the attentions of the authorities and never been moved into reservations. So whenever anyone criticized her she merely responded that of course no one could verify her memoir – no one but her had ever known these people. But what about spinifex? Famously, that viciously spiny plant grows all over the dangerous ‘red centre’ of Australia and anyone claiming to have walked for months across the bush would necessarily know a thing or two about it. They would know, for example, that far from growing in an unbroken ‘lawn’, cutting your feet to shreds wherever you step, it grows in clumps surrounded by sand which are easy to circumnavigate. And then there is the highly secretive ceremonial artefact of which Morgan claimed first-hand knowledge, the bull-roarer: an instrument it is forbidden for women ever to hear. Apart from in the film Crocodile Dundee, that is . . . And how about the phone box that Morgan claims she chanced upon on her way out of the desert? It took a quarter, she said. But every Australian knows that in the 1980s you needed two coins to make a local call (let alone one to America). After making the call, she claims she used a telegraph office to have money wired to her – but there was no such thing in the area.

  There was no good reason for her to lie about these elements of mainstream Australian life, so her fate as a fantasist seemed sealed. Just to make sure, however, a group of Noongah Elders organized a survey of all the people on the land she claimed to have travelled through. None of them knew anything of a group of sixty heavily-laden, concert-playing, white-woman-revering Aboriginals having passed by at any time in living memory – and with the deeply ingrained traditional law of always alerting others to your presence when crossing their land, they all agreed that these ‘lost people’ could not be Aboriginal at all.

  Letters and papers were written but to no avail. In America, Morgan answered critics with accusations of racism, claiming that nobody black had ever criticized her worthy work, only bitter white people. Finally, determined to get an apology out of her, a group of Elders sought a grant from their government to make a trip to America to confront this woman who had belittled their precious culture and made them look stupid to millions of foreign readers. Lead by Robert Eggington, the coordinator of the Dumbartung Aboriginal Corporation, seven men arrived in America and arranged a press conference and a meeting with the team at Warner Brothers who were planning the Mutant Message film. Stating their case, they managed to get Morgan on a telephone conference call from New York and each man put to her their doubts about elements of her story. Quietly, she assured them that the matter of her official apol
ogy would be settled by her lawyers, who would forward them a written confession that the story was made-up. Those who heard the call say she seemed contrite and willing to make up for any hurt she had caused. Doubtless she had also been advised to avoid a PR disaster by placating this pesky delegation from the bush.

  But the Message machine trundled on: reprints, lecture tours, an appearance on Oprah and new spin-off titles such as the spiral-bound vade mecum, Making the Message Mine. In 1997 a lecture tour to Japan was beset by PR problems when another band of visiting Aboriginal critics gained access to a talk in front of a thousand people in Kobe and protested using music and traditional cultural displays. Undeterred, readers still bought more and more copies of the book and a few months later HarperCollins sold its millionth copy.

  Morgan never reaffirmed her apology to the race she had disrespected, and continues to be vague about which bits of her book were imagined, which were distorted to protect the identities of the people she went walkabout with and which were true. Her final word on the matter, printed in the Seattle Times in September 1994, seems to be this:

  The Australian government says these people don’t exist; they couldn’t still be there after the last roundup to send Aborigines to the reservation. In the eyes of the government, they would be criminals, walking on government land without a permit, not on any census or tax rolls, not registering births. But the government doesn’t pursue fictional people or places . . . I did go on walkabout. Everything that I say happened did happen. Nothing in the book is embellished. It’s fiction because of what I left out, not what I put in.

  But anthropologists, Aboriginal commentators and historians all agree: if Morgan really did find a lost tribe of nomads in the bush who bear little or no resemblance to any other indigenous Australian group known to man, her achievement is far greater than even she is giving herself credit for.

  HELEN DEMIDENKO

  THE STORY OF the Australian hoaxer Helen Darville aka Demidenko has attracted indignant interest from all corners of the globe thanks to the subject-matter of the book that made her famous. The Hand that Signed the Paper won the Australian/Vogel literary award in 1993, the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal in 1995 and the prestigious Miles Franklin award in the same year. The book claims to be written by the daughter of a Ukrainian peasant and his brother, now living in Australia, who in the 1940s decided to join the Nazi death squads after being mistreated by Russian Jewish ‘commissars’ in their homeland. These hated communists, Demidenko wrote, inflicted terrible institutionalized suffering on the native population, causing them to rise up in anti-Semitic hatred and join Hitler in his fatal cause. In the book, Demidenko says that as an Australian-Ukrainian she often found herself having to explain why her forebears acted as they did, and from these discussions grew the idea for a book in which she could retell a particular chapter of twentieth-century history from the less well-known side. The side of the perpetrators. Of course there is nothing wrong with this, as sensitive and gifted German writers like Sebastian Hafner have shown. But coupled with a sideline in anti-Israeli journalism and a prose style that is at best hysterical, at worst sensationalist, Demidenko immediately attracted the attention of Jewish groups in Australia and beyond.

  After accusing her of writing a book that hardly sought to disguise its pro-fascist sympathies, commentators from the Jewish and non-Jewish intellectual communities alike began to ask just who this Helen Demidenko was. She replied that she was a young woman in her twenties who had an uncle and other relatives who were keen for her to tell – perhaps to justify – their side of a very dark story. Her family had allegedly been blighted by events in Eastern Europe before fleeing to Australia: events which included witnessing loved ones being killed by Stalin’s invading Jews, then being liberated by the Nazis. Ultimately, one member of the Demidenko clan had become a concentration camp guard and another took part in the 1941 massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev. ‘An apology for genocide’ is what one highly respected Australian academic called it.

  If the testament of the Demidenko uncle had been proven to be true, The Hand that Signed the Paper could be relegated to an unpleasant but necessary footnote in the annals of Europe’s lowest decade. But the fact that after only a little nudging by resourceful readers and critics Helen Demidenko admitted that she made it all up, casts it in a far stranger and more unsavoury light.

  For Helen Demidenko was actually Helen Darville and her Australian family, far from fleeing the horrors of 1940s Ukraine, had come over from Great Britain and lived in the suburbs of Brisbane. They were neither educated nor rich, but Helen was studying English at the University of Queensland when the book was published. In 1993 she was an unworldly twenty-year-old, as evidenced by the fact that she made public appearances wearing Ukrainian folk costumes and regaling fans with tales of her vodka-soaked heritage.

  There was no very dramatic debunking of Helen Demidenko, because everyone who knew her at university and at home was well aware that she was 100 per cent English-Australian. As she said herself, in her trademark plain dealing style on Australia’s Radio National, she just got tired of putting on the Demidenko act: ‘I felt trapped by constantly having to go out and perform it . . . I can pull the wog accent, and sound like Effie and do the Ukrainian-Australian accent really well . . . I grew up around these sorts of people.’

  One of the striking things about Helen Darville, as we can now call her, although recently she has been going by the name Helen Dale, is that far from slinking away with her tail between her legs, she has swept off accusations of being a racist fantasist with élan. Some might say that is easier to do in Australia than it might be in the UK, say, because of the comparatively mainstream nature of far-right politics there, but it is also credit to her self-confidence that she has reinvented herself as a right-wing lawyer and commentator for ultra-conservative magazines like Quadrant (the right-wing publication founded by the Ern Malley hoaxer) and blogs like Catallaxy. She is now happy to give interviews and write articles in which she discusses her youthful escapades as a literary trickster. And although she never admits to being a hoaxer per se, claiming her book was always supposed to be a work of fiction but that she felt a Ukrainian name would give it more credibility, she agrees that she was keen to prick the ‘pretentiousness’ of the literary scene – just like McAuley, the Jew-baiting Quadrant founder did before her – and decided to start blogging against the left-wing critics in order to ‘humiliate a group I considered spineless’.

  But deeper clues to the motivation behind her hoax came in a surprisingly revealing interview she gave to the ABC programme All in the Mind in April 2006. In it she reveals that far from being the ordinary child of quiet suburbanites, she faced challenges from the outset. Badly dyslexic, she recalled ‘not being any good at anything – well certainly not anything academic – when I was young. I can still remember the sensation of being the class idiot.’ But a keen intelligence meant she found strategies to overcome her literacy problems, as many clever dyslexics do, and so went ‘from the bottom to the top of the class inside six months, and that was very freaky. I’ve never forgotten that.’

  If this sudden success and respect at school was thrilling, there was little such upward mobility at home, where her loving but uneducated mother was battling to keep the family together in the face of that recurring figure in the annals of literary hoaxers – the absent father. And Darville’s was absent in a quite spectacular way. Always what she called ‘a serial philanderer and petty criminal’, her dad, she says, ‘wasn’t worth too much’. After years of humiliating the family with his infidelities and run-ins with the law, he finally died while in flagrante delicto with a prostitute at a local brothel.

  What did young Helen have to lose? Merely a past filled with ignominy which was leavened only by her discovery that she was smart enough to outwit the powers that be. And so she did, for a while. But doubtless she considers herself to have got the last laugh, as she is on the way to becoming a
high-earning lawyer. Literature, she has said, was never going to earn her a decent crust, and ‘If I’m going to cop that much aggro, I want to be paid better for it’. Fair dinkum? You decide.

  NORMA KHOURI

  FORBIDDEN LOVE IS the story of Dalia, an ambitious, compassionate, beautiful young Jordanian woman who, after falling in love with a Christian man, was murdered by her father in a so-called honour killing. Throughout her short life she had had but one confidante, her best friend Norma – they not only shared their romantic dreams and secrets, but even set up as hairdressers together in a ground-breaking unisex salon in Amman. But when Dalia was stabbed to death with the full knowledge of her family, her friend was determined to tell the world about her unjust end – and to publicize the shameful institutionalized killings that went on behind closed doors in the Middle East. Moreover she wanted to tell the story of her and Dalia’s lives in repressive Amman. To do this, however, she would have to get out of the strict, secretive world of 1990s Jordan. It was only with the help of Dalia’s boyfriend, Michael, that she was able to be smuggled out of the country, initially to Greece and then to Australia, where she made a new life for herself as an author and campaigner for women’s rights.

  Writing Dalia’s story was, Norma told journalists on the book’s publication, a very hard thing to do because it brought back so many painful memories of her dear friend, the beguiling young woman whose affair with the wrong man had, anyway, been totally chaste. But ultimately she found the experience cathartic and was motivated by the desire to tell the world of the injustices perpetrated in the name of Jordanian patriarchy and the chance that by raising awareness – and money, with the proceeds of her book – she might be able to save just one girl’s life.