Some rise by sin while others by virtue fall

At last, the black fire-proof box that once belonged to my mother was mine. Her hoards of craft materials, projects and dreams had all been extinguished the night of the fire. The police held the box for a while but finally, this trove of unknown treasures was finally mine. Police suspected the fire was deliberately lit, but by whom remained a mystery.

Our family had often discussed Mum’s mental stability. Her insistence that she’d had glimpses into the secret workings of A.S.I.S. was of course quite mad. If a clandestine secret service did exist in Australia it was hardly likely to be discovered by a hotel dishwasher at the public library. She’d learned not to share too much with us especially as we grew into adults and the family dynamic shifted after the major operation that had changed everything.

That was when she had decided to turn her hobby into a business. She was good at it and all the counting kept her from obsessing over a string of conspiracies, counter-conspiracies and murders that had consumed her for decades. She’d been running on adrenalin for years – forever fretful – forever overcautious – forever searching for the answer yet at the same time trying to keep us kids safe.

We had survived and so had this box.

I remember, when I opened it I was surprised at how tidy it was. Birth certificates and old passports were in one orange envelope. Another envelope contained her will, bank and financial details, while a third contained hand written letters to each of us, her surviving family. She’d even digitized all the photos and a list accompanied each CD case. She never did trust the cloud. There was a small box full of USB’s with various coloured lanyards and a small black moleskin book. I recognized it at once. It was THE notebook, full of all her lunatic delusions.

The box was well thought out and tidy. We never knew tidy. Our Mum knew how to clean but everything around her was utter chaos.

At first glance the book was as chaotic as her bedroom. There were lists of the dead and disappeared, timelines, investigating officers, the accused, the sentenced, the punished, the unpunished, the famous, the infamous, alliances between criminals and wealthy individuals, generational political power brokers, possible subterfuge involving suicides and trusted media identities.

It was insanity but I smiled when I saw the reward money list; she’d often promised us a nice life when she got her reward money. To us it was allusive as the lottery. The amounts weren’t excremental, they seemed illogical. Only $100,000. for the brutal murder of a young woman stabbed to death at work, yet $1m for others that seemed to her to be easier to solve.

This little book was the sum of a 30 year obsession. She had seen how a young woman had died in Kings Cross in 1991 and had been told to go away, that she didn’t see anything.

She’d been almost driven mad by the so-called cause and affect game played on her. She’d see a crime being committed; report it and within 12 hours, someone would be murdered in another State. The victims were strangers to her but all the deceased knew one another. This happened three times. Her credibility was destroyed. To the police she was a compulsive liar.

Her obsession with writing everything down made it easier to decipher and with the help of a white board and a former detective the pieces of the puzzle were finally put together.

Books, movies and television series have been made about the contents of my mother’s little black book. True crime may be the name of the genre but I now realise they are far from accurate; so when a media identity who made Mum's list offered to buy my mother’s little black book for $20,000 I politely refused.