There seems to be no real justification for 65 year old Ian Jamieson murdering three of his neighbours in October 2014; only a series of slights, real or imagined, which Jamieson felt required addressing. Jamieson and one of his victims had previously been friends but both were hard men, stubborn and unwilling to give an inch. Jamieson told police afterwards that “Five years I’ve been putting up with shit from these bastards [the victims] and I just snapped.” Exactly what he had been putting up with never became entirely clear through Jamieson’s subsequent statements, but it certainly was not enough to justify a triple murder. As Cuskelly states in Wedderburn:
”Violence is about exhibiting power and dominance, no doubt, but it is simultaneously about denying or disguising frailty. It is an assertion of boundaries, a shoring-up of status not only in the eyes of others but in one’s own estimation. It is a way of reclaiming honour and a form of ultimate conflict resolution.”
In other words, violence in this form is toxic masculinity at its most virulent.
Cuskelly is a fine writer, sensitive and restrained. She reminds me of Helen Garner and that is a huge compliment. She interviews family and friends of the victims with the guilty knowledge that they will most likely be unhappy with what she writes, and feel betrayed. But still, she tries. She also tries to get a sense of the character of the victims and perpetrator from the people of Wedderburn, while acknowledging the accounts she is given of their character and their actions are often contradictory. She tries hard to be fair, while acknowledging her own very human reaction to the brutality of the murders and the seemingly remorseless perpetrator.
What lingers at the end of the book is a sense of terrible waste; the wasted lives of the victims, the regrets of their splintered families and the almost endless waste of time during Jamieson’s torturously slow and self indulgent progression through the legal system.
The fact is that small men who feel slighted can do terrible things. Cuskelly’s examination in Wedderburn clarifies our understanding of why and demonstrates the damage this kind of poisonous, inarticulate masculinity leaves in its wake.
