MORE than two years after the death of Victor Chang, and after finishing this book, I attended the 60th birthday party of a doctor friend, the head of a division of a Sydney teaching hospital.
Throughout the night as the word spread that I had been writing on the topic, a stream of guests came up to me - doctors, nurses, administrators - all, in different words, putting the same question: was there a sinister secret behind the killing? A couple of people articulated the question more precisely: was the killing something to do with the triads? They were not necessarily suspicious of Victor Chang - perhaps he was being blackmailed? - but there was the feeling that there was something, some fact about the killing, that remained hidden out there.
Behind the questions, which I had heard in different ways a hundred times before, was the sense of something alien, not in a racist sense, but nevertheless in a sense of foreignness.
When I started looking at the crime, it became clear that this kind of reaction, the creation of urban myths, was a part of the story. It was not just a question of what the killers, Chiew Seng Liew and Choon Tee Lim, were about - there was also the whole history of the relationship between Australian Chinese and the rest of the Australian community.
It is not a pretty story.
The term 'love-hate relationship' is a modern cliche, but it is not one that can be applied in this case. For most of the time there was more hate than love in Australian attitudes to the Chinese who lived alongside them. The death of Victor Chang, the waste of a man who had done so much for so many, was an occasion for genuine emotion, but it also stirred some of the deeper currents in Australia's national psyche.
IN their characteristic slipshod style the pair were late, but that morning of all mornings Victor Chang slept in.
