Obituary by Peter Craven – SMH
JOHN BRYSON: 1935 – 2022
John Bryson was an extraordinary man. He was born to inherited wealth but he did everything in his power to give his money to anyone who needed it. He was a talented writer both of fiction and non-fiction but his masterpiece, Evil Angels, is an extraordinary examination of the case of Lindy Chamberlain who had been wrongly found guilty of murdering her daughter Azaria.
Bryson’s book represented a decisive turning point because it convinced a large number of people that the prosecution’s case was full of false evidence and if it showed the formidable forensic intelligence of a former barrister it was also a magnificent literary re-imagining of all the faces of prejudice and fantasy that the case brought into play.
Evil Angels was made into a film by Fred Schepisi with Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain and Sam Neill as Michael Chamberlain in 1988.
Bryson’s book was published by Brian Johns, the head of Penguin Australia, in 1985 and, together with new evidence, led to Lindy Chamberlain’s release the following year, to the Royal Commission, and her ultimate exoneration and financial compensation from the Australian government.
Michael Chamberlain said, “I can never thank John Bryson enough”. The eminent American lawyer Alan Dershowitz said it was “an extraordinary chronicle … of an entire nation’s obsession with a whodunit which is unique in the annals of legal history”. It lead to Bryson being named as one of the 100 great journalists of the 20th century in 2000.
When the book first appeared reviewers compared it to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood because it captured the bewitchment and hysteria of a headlong derailment of justice with a sweeping literary power and command of point of view that was no less imaginative for being in the service of truth.
His daughter Fran Bryson remembers the book being written when she was at high school: “He would hand me the day’s writing. I read the book as it was literally being written. He had a huge Spanish table two metres long and one metre wide, and it was covered with hundreds and hundreds of pages.” She recalls how he would come down the stairs and say, “It was a good day. I wrote a good sentence.”
The story goes that Bryson rang Brian Johns, himself a great former journalist who knew the power of a story, and said when Lindy Chamberlain was arrested, “I think there might be a story in it”. Brian Johns said, “Give me a minute,” and then came back. “There’s $2000 in your bank account. Get on a plane.”
Bryson did not come from old money. His father, Jack Bryson, a New Zealander of modest background, succeeded in becoming the sole agent for Jaguar cars at the moment when the market had turned away from the great German firm of Daimler-Benz and made a fortune. John was educated at Melbourne Grammar, though he abhorred every trapping of class and privilege. He rowed, he debated, he was in cadets, and after studying law at Melbourne University he became a barrister with Galbally and O’Brien in the days when Frank Galbally ran the show.
When his father died suddenly he put the law behind him – or imagined he had – in order to run the family business while also tinkering with his literary ambitions, which were encouraged by the writer Morris Lurie and yielded books such as Whoring Around (1981), full of bite and talent.
The financial fortune led him to give money to people who needed it. John Timlin, the sometime entrepreneur and agent who ran The Australian Performing Group and then the agency Almost Managing, tells how Bryson became the honorary secretary of the Pram Factory, because it needed legal advice. Timlin says that when he wanted to do Max Gillies live shows in 1981 Bryson gave him $50,000. “I paid him back but The Gillies Report on television would never have happened without him.”
Bryson said to me once, “Sometimes people have to be sorts of chiefs. I suppose I’m some kind of chief.” There was the suggestion of Maori blood from the Kiwi past.
“On his mother’s side,” Fran Bryson recalls. “The name I remember is Huia Mahitena. I remember being told she was a Maori princess. A lot of people called him ‘chief’. He was a patriarch and that was inescapable. He was a patriarchal figure to a lot of people.”
That impulse might lead him to buy a crayfish boat. It might lead him, after he won a literary award in London, to order “your best port” and end up lavishing on his guests a port old enough and grand enough to have adorned the table of Napoleon or Talleyrand.
Although his brother Hugh died racing cars John Bryson competed in the devil-may-care sport. He had state titles in hill climbing, and the Lord knows what. He used his wealth to give and enjoy. I saw him once fish out the Grange Hermitage to honour the visiting Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. I saw him sitting a bit like a duke and a bit like a priest through all the long alcohol-laden nights at Percy Jones’ hotel at the corner of Lygon and Elgin streets with sportspeople to the right of him, and literary hacks to the left. When he had to have surgery at one point, he insisted that it be from his hotel companion John Goldberg, who loved the pokies.
Chaucer’s epithet “A parfit gentil knyghte” – a perfect gentle knight– applies to John Bryson. He was a man of chivalry who was both instinctively aristocratic and disarmingly modest. His novel To the Death, Amic (1994) honours two Catalan brothers who defied Franco and could assassinate for their cause. In Backstage at the Revolution (1986) there is a vivid essay in which he finds himself in an internecine and troubled world and, with an introduction from Dinny O’Hearn, he meets first Seamus Dean, the critic partisan and then, shrouded with drama, a great warlord of the IRA.
He didn’t perform hakas but in his self-effacing way John Bryson rode into battle. Evil Angels is Australia’s supreme atonement for the injustice suffered by Lindy Chamberlain. John had two clues that put him on track. He knew the first magistrate and coroner who said a dingo had taken Azaria was a good lawyer, and he also knew, from holidaying with them as a little rich boy, that Seventh Day Adventists were as a good and kind and human as anyone else.
No one ever captured the drama, as well as the sorrow and pity of the jury system going crazy, better than John Bryson. In Evil Angels he’s a master of point of view, of dramatic tension, of evidential clarity. Who could forget his account of the fairness of Justice Muirhead summing up in Lindy Chamberlain’s favour that seemed so clearly to presage acquittal that her barrister, John Harber Phillips (later Chief Justice of Victoria), just ordered a crate of champagne to celebrate.
I asked Helen Garner, who has written about dramas and doubts in the vicinity of courtrooms, how she thought about John Bryson.
“Evil Angels, with its brilliant, fearless, compassionate knowingness of the world, was the first Australian book that showed me the literary power of non-fiction. I didn’t really know Bryson personally, but one night, 30 years ago, I happened to run into him in a Carlton pub. The question of writing about living people came up. He listened to my fears, and quietly offered me two pieces of advice. One of them I have forgotten. The other was so psychologically sophisticated and yet so humbly obvious that I’ve carried it in my pocket ever since. I’ll always think of him with gratitude and huge respect.”