“Crime stories are often about dysfunction and disadvantage, and this fire took place in a town on the edge of an open-cut mine with views of power stations in every direction. The Latrobe Valley supplies 85 percent of Victoria’s electricity, but job losses and a shift away from coal have hit the region hard. While The Arsonist is about Sokaluk and his trial, it is also a portrait of a town in decline, in Australia’s coal country. 160 of those people died because of failures in our grid – and we don’t have a lynch mob going after the directors of our power companies. Sokaluk’s arrest made it unsafe for him to be in the town. Hooper writes, “In a crescent of near identical houses, a group of boys rode in circles, standing wolfish on their BMX bikes, knowing that something was happening, finally, in this place.” One woman – a “local-turned-security-agent, sickened by a sightseer” – tailgated Hooper until she left town. Once there, Hooper encountered wary locals.

“It’s difficult to justify making a trip like that – I wasn’t writing for any media outlet.” Photograph: Rhys Smith/Newspix / Rex FeaturesĪfter Brendan Sokaluk was arrested, Hooper suspected there might be a much bigger story, and got in her car and drove from Melbourne to the Latrobe Valley to take a look around. If the wind had blown differently, she says, her house would have been in trouble. ‘The day felt apocalyptic’, says Hooper of the Black Saturday fires. “In the wake of those fires, it seemed incomprehensible … Who would become an arsonist?” Speaking to Guardian Australia at a cafe in Melbourne’s North Fitzroy (Hooper and her partner Don Watson left Woodend for the city after having children), Hooper says there’s one question at the heart of the book. Hooper’s account of the terrible crime that traumatised a community is even-handed and nuanced – so much so that, by the end of the book, it’s difficult to discern where her sympathies lie: victims or accused? But when the narrative switches back to the victims and the enormous distress and human toll the fires exacted, our allegiances switch. The Arsonist gives the reader reasons to feel compassion for Sokaluk – a bullied loner who was only diagnosed with autism after he’d been charged. Both are accounts of a marginalised community’s pain and outrage, and the legal system’s attempts to deliver some measure of justice.

And just like her last nonfiction book, the much lauded Tall Man, Hooper gives a cool appraisal of a hot issue.

Chloe hooper the arsonist