Lech Blaine: Australian Gospel

For Lech Blaine’s family, their biggest worries were the footy scores and the chance that Lech’s foster siblings’ Christian extremist parents would find and kidnap them.

The Blaines and the Shelleys couldn’t have been more different parents and their fierce battles for custody – in the courts, the foster system and the front yard – created enough fear and tension to last many lifetimes. In Australian Gospel: A Family Saga, a stranger-than-fiction tale of love and loss in country Queensland, Lech spins an epic that questions what makes a family.

Hear Lech unpack the makings of memory and inheritance, in conversation with Ashley Hay.