The Brownout Murders

This suburban noir graphic novel takes us to the uneasy streets of 1942 Melbourne to remind us of a real-life wartime nightmare. Beatrice and her two sisters (one a communist, one a good-time girl) live with their mum, who’s been struggling to keep control over the household, which has been unruly since her husband died. Beatrice is the responsible sister and becomes an air-raid warden, with all the power invested in her uniform and helmet and rattle, trying to make Melburnians adhere to the brownout regulations, keeping lights low in the evenings. But the tension already shaking their household is cranked up by fears about the war, then cranked up again by the arrival of shiploads of American soldiers: ‘over-sexed, over-paid and over here’, as the saying of the time went. Many were housed at Camp Pell, in Royal Park near the Melbourne Zoo. One of them, 24-year-old Eddie Leonski, sexually assaulted and murdered three women, for which he was hanged at Pentridge prison.

Writers Kelly and Luke Jackson deliver a deliberately restricted point of view on this historical horror. The terrors are a backdrop to Beatrice’s Keep Calm and Carry On routine: coping with rationing; assuaging her mother’s worries; visiting the aunts; and Sunday lunch with a dull, ham-fisted, tin-eared suitor. Crashing through the walls of her suburban life, however, are incidents of surreal power triggered by the murders: a desperate informant on a phone line of which Beatrice is the operator; a mannequin dressed in second victim Pauline Thompson’s actual clothes (complete with a photograph of her face tied around the head); and a terrified night search through rainswept Camp Pell.

Visual artist Maya Graham presents stark, black-and-white images of a brownout Melbourne, all offices, suits, dresses and family spats, in the shadows of which a young, charming, laughing serial killer stalked our ill-lit streets in his well-fitting uniform.