The Mushroom Tapes: a compelling deep dive into the trial that gripped Australia

“Between early May and early July of this year, much of Australia’s collective imagination was absorbed by the trial of Erin Patterson,” said Jason Steger in the Financial Times.

The 51-year-old stood accused of murdering her estranged husband’s parents, along with one of his aunts, by serving them a beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms. Patterson was also charged with the attempted murder of the aunt’s husband, who narrowly survived.

Among those present throughout the trial, which ended in Patterson’s conviction, were the writers and long-time friends Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein. Thinking they might make a podcast, they recorded their conversations on their drives to and from the courthouse near Leongatha, the small town in Victoria where “the deadly dish was served”. The podcast didn’t materialise. Instead, what we have is this “hybrid”, which splices their transcribed conversations with passages written in their collective voice. While many might have preferred a “full account” written by any one of the three, this is a compelling book with “pace and staying power”.

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In a media ecosystem glutted with “murdertainment”, there are precious few works of true crime that don’t “make you feel scummy”, said Sarah Ditum in The Times. But “The Mushroom Tapes”, with its “self-questioning about the ethics of its own project”, proves an exception.

The “fascination” the authors feel stems largely from Patterson’s “seeming normalcy”. What led this apparently unremarkable woman to “poison four people, none of whom she had any obvious reason to want dead”? A “true-crime buff” whose closest friendships were with a group of fellow murder obsessives, Patterson planned her crime meticulously, “from foraging for the death caps to the recipe for beef wellington to the fatal dose required”. But in other ways she was “ludicrously sloppy” – failing, for instance, to come up with a “convincing story about where the mushrooms came from”.

“‘The Mushroom Tapes’ offers two spectacles in one,” said Owen Richardson in The Sydney Morning Herald: “the Patterson trial, and famous writers hanging out together”. Although at times there is too much “self-conscious significance hunting” – “the mushroom metaphors sprout like mushrooms” – the authors are “sensitive and insightful” observers. But in the end, they’re defeated by the “black box that is Erin Patterson”.

“I felt that the joke was on us,” said Hooper. “We thought we were going to get Medea and it was actually Karen.”