With the RED Group going under, causing massive sales at Borders and Angus and Robertson, the amount of crap literature that’s become available is astounding. My brother thought it was a great idea to pick up a couple of books for the JB and me. On a recent visit, the JB was gifted Wayne Carey: The Truth Hurts and I received the above. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which is the better deal.
Well, what can I say. I honestly had no intention of reading this; then over my toast yesterday morning I picked it up and read,
“My grandparents’ names were Giuseppe and Giuseppa – similar names – and my father had three names: Emanual, Giovanni and some other woggy name.”
How could I not go on? So with everyone out of the house yesterday I did. Roberta starts from her childhood days in the Frankston/Seaford area. She didn’t have the most idyllic childhood becoming a ward of the state at the age of eleven. She clearly holds a lot of angst toward her mother.
“I have often thought about it since, how I was taken away and put into custody by police because my mum could not deal with me or cope with all of her kids, so I was the one taken away by the jacks. What about her? Isn’t the real crime that a mother treats her kids like shit? No police came around to lock her up for the way she treated her kids. No-one was putting her in front of a judge and saying you have been treating your kids like shit and now they are all in trouble. No, they took the kids away one by one and told a twelve year old girl it was her fault her mum couldn’t control her and sent her to a jail for kids. I mean, how fucked is that?”
That’s pretty much the style the entire book is written in. As I was reading it felt like Roberta was narrating the story over my shoulder. I don’t know how much ‘the ghost’, Michael Gleeson, did in writing this story but to me it rolled along as though Roberta was verbalising her version of events and Gleeson transcribed them.
Roberta sounds like she was a wild child in the purest sense. She fell pregnant at 17, then was married to an abusive husband before meeting Carl Williams through her sister, who was incidentally married to Graeme Jensen. It seems all these people run in the same circles.
The book goes on to detail Roberta’s version of the events that were so public. She doesn’t add any new detail and spends a fair chunk of the book correcting what she saw as flaws in the television version of Underbelly. But Underbelly was only based on true events, it was never an accurate depiction of actual events – that’s entertainment.
It’s a really easy read; not what I’d describe as a literary masterpiece, but if you’re in at Borders at it’s in the bargain bin for $3.99 you could spend your money in worse ways.
