Since its general election a month ago, Australia’s politics have endured their biggest upheaval in fifty years. Its Labor government was re-elected by a massive majority, when just months ago it was in danger of being tossed out, and the conservative opposition parties are in existential turmoil and even briefly severed their coalition.
Erin Patterson is a a frumpy, middle-aged woman, with a mien unfortunately drawn by nature as a mask of permanent misery
Yet Australia’s epicentre of interest this past month hasn’t been the nation’s capital, Canberra. Instead, it’s been Morwell, a dying industrial town in the Gippsland region of the state of Victoria. There, Australia’s Trial of the Century is playing out a sordid tale of love, hate, lust and intrigue. And mushrooms.
Erin Patterson is a a frumpy, middle-aged woman, with a mien unfortunately drawn by nature as a mask of permanent misery. She has been estranged from her husband and his family for several years. Yet, in July 2023, Erin invited her spouse Simon, parents-in-law Don and Gail Patterson, her sister Heather and her husband Ian Wilkinson to a dinner party at her home in Leongatha, another regional town that has seen better days. In the end, Simon Patterson did not attend, a decision that likely saved his life.
The menu that night featured a fatal Beef Wellington, found later to have included deadly mushrooms. By then, Don and Gail Patterson, and Heather Wilkinson, were dead, and Ian Wilkinson was fighting for his life. Those deaths were excruciating painful as toxins destroyed their bodies. Ian Wilkinson barely survived, but only after months in hospital and a liver transplant.
From the time the news broke almost two years ago, Erin Patterson’s dinner party quickly became a national soap opera, culminating in the Morwell trial. Australians became engrossed, and true crime enthusiasts around the world have too. The case’s notoriety extends even to Britain: the Daily Mail accordingly sent a reporter from London to cover Patterson’s committal hearing last year, returning for the trial, and it’s been the subject of in-depth reporting, including extensively by the BBC.
The trial itself, now in its sixth week, is not about how the dinner party turned fatal. Death Cap mushrooms are the undisputed killer ingredient. The issue is whether, as the Crown alleges, Patterson deliberately poisoned her family members, or was it all a horrible accident. Over the weeks of the trial, the story of the dinner party, how Patterson sourced the ingredients for her fatal Beef Wellington, what knowledge she had of the mushrooms she used, and how she researched it, are gradually being pieced together. The sole surviving guest, Ian Wilkinson, is a witness for the prosecution.
This week, however, interest in the trial became even more intense, as Erin Patterson herself went into the witness box in her own defence. For three days, she was led through her side of the story; now the Crown’s leading barrister is cross-examining her with a King’s Counsel’s cold, forensic ferocity.
With Erin Patterson in the spotlight, steady interest has risen to a frenzy. In Morwell, the Patterson trial is the only show in town. Every day, there hasn’t been a spare seat in the court. All this week, on unusually cold and frosty southern Australian winter mornings, pre-dawn queues of rugged-up and puffer-jacketed hopeful spectators formed outside the rural courthouse, breath steaming in television spotlights as people stamped their feet to stay warm. Journalists competed with each other for the handful of seats available to them, and TV reporters and other reporters use the stream of half-frozen punters as a backdrop for their previews of the day in court. It was mayhem the normally sleepy country town has never seen.
Why? Because it’s huge news and the Australian public is lapping it up. It’s a trial that has everything: whether or not there was a Borgia-esque family dinner in country Victoria; personalities to love and hate; dysfunctional families; the ‘did she or didn’t she?’ question. It’s provided thousands of pages of newspaper copy, many hours of television and radio, and every development, every piece of evidence has been reported and dissected in live blogs and updates in mainstream media, debated in podcasts and fuelled fierce, even partisan, arguments in social media.
On Thursday, Melbourne’s two major dailies, broadsheet the Age and tabloid Herald-Sun, gave over their front pages to Patterson denying allegations from her estranged husband that she used a dehydrator to prepare the fatal mushrooms. ‘Is that how you poisoned my parents?’, Simon Patterson had asked, a question denied by Erin and splashed by both papers with sensational and near-identical, attention-arresting, headlines.
The trial, as they say, is continuing. It’s knocked politics out of the headlines here, but it’s done something even more remarkable: relegated Australian Rules football to the inside pages in football-mad Victoria.
In the feeding frenzy, however, it’s been too easy for we of the prurient public to forget that the heart of this case is an awful tragedy for the three people who died in agony, the now-widowed sole survivor and their families and that, for Erin Patterson, her already miserable life is in ruins, whatever the truth of that fatal dinner, and whatever the verdict of the Morwell jury.
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