The Shark Net

Robert Drewe

I've never been to Australia. I never really got the itch to go backpacking around Australia that everyone else seems to get when they leave school or university. But when friends and family used to come back after six or nine months and say "fantastic country, I could move there tomorrow" and then when anyone asked "well, why don't you?" their replies were always the same. Too remote.

And the most remote city in that remote country is Perth in Western Australia. Perth boasts it's the most remote city in the world. "City of Light" it's also known as, after one night in the fifties when the people of Perth lit every light in their houses for the entire night and astronaut John Glenn was said to have seen it while orbiting the earth. A tiny dot of light on the edge of a dark and empty continent.

The John Glenn story is one of Robert Drewe's memories in The Shark Net. The book is Drewe's own story of growing up in Perth in the fifties and sixties. His family uprooted from Melbourne and moved "out west" when he was a small boy and Drewe tells his own quiet story from that time until his early twenties when he returned east to join a big New South Wales paper as an up and coming journalist.

Drewe's story is the ordinary enough stuff of memoirs: stealing comics as a small boy, swimming, surfing, shark scares, urinating on moss ("it was second nature ... perhaps growing up in the dry heat among the cardboard coloured vegation and pale dunes had given us an aversion to anything lush and green"), kissing his first girlfriend (she vomits over his shoulder seconds later), receiving the same pair of hopelessly unfashionable Dunlop shoes every birthday (his father was manager of Dunlop's Western Australia division).

All this would be an interesting enough portrait of growing up in an outpost in the innocent and optimistic 1950s but year after year as Drewe grew up people were also being murdered in Perth. They were being shot, stabbed, raped and strangled and it was all the work of a single killer. One victim was a friend of Drewe's, a couple of others were known to him. This was a small city, an intimate city. And when the killer was unmasked, Drewe realised he had known him too, indeed had often seen him in the family home. The killer was a delivery driver for Dunlop.

And so, Drewe has created a remarkable story, his own childhood story gently weaved in with that of Eric Cooke, Perth's most famous serial killer. A great read.