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Chapter 1: What adventures did Marelle Day experience while sailing?
Morrell Day invents stories.
She's won a Ned Kelly Lifetime Award for her crime novels and her gothic tale, Lambs of God, was recently turned into a TV series. But Morrell's own life story has had its share of dramatic twists, dangerous adventures and mysterious characters. When Morell was a young woman in Sydney, she fell in love with Tony.
It was the 1970s and for Tony and Morell, it seemed like they could rewrite all the rules of what life was supposed to be. They moved to a ramshackle house on the New South Wales coast and were very happy together. Then one rainy morning, Tony died in a car accident. He was just 28 years old. Morel was torn apart by grief and lost from herself.
She ended up travelling with a friend to North Queensland, and in Cairns, the two spontaneously joined the crew of a yacht. After they anchored in Darwin, Morel and her friend switched boats, joining the crew of a catamaran, skippered by a Frenchman named Jean Kay. And his story turned out to be wilder than anything Morel could have ever invented.
She's written a book about Jean and about that time's long tale in her life. It's called Reckless. Hi, Mireille. Hi, Sarah. This book, as I say, is called Reckless. Were you raised to be a girl to take risks?
No, completely the opposite, actually. The message that I got from a very early age was that the world was a dangerous place. Don't go outside the fence. Don't play on the road. And above all, do not get into cars with strange men. So what do I do as soon as I had a bit of a freedom? I got into not a car with a strange man, but a boat with a strange man.
What did your parents think of your relationship with this first great love, with Tony?
They were very disapproving of it. We were living in sin. That was the way my mother described it. She wanted us to get married and do all of that kind of thing.
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Chapter 2: How did Marelle's relationship with Tony influence her life choices?
But, you know, it was the 70s. We were rewriting the rules. Marriage was a bourgeois institution. It turned a man into a husband and a woman into a wife. So that was fairly traumatic as well, but I'd had Tony by my side to cope with that.
He also came from a family that disowned him because of being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, et cetera, and his father had been, like mine, a World War II veteran, and that was completely rebellious on his behalf to have done something, you know, against the family tradition.
At the end of that awful year when Tony died, you got a writing grant from the Australia Council. What did you spend the money on?
Well, if anybody from the Australia Council is listening, I did do the work. But part of it was spent on buying an old Mercedes-Benz 220S, a second-hand car that I bought from a friend and it was a bit of an old rattle trap and it was very large and I was quite small, probably bit off a bit more than I could chew with that car. A bit was spent on champagne as well, I think, Mireille.
Yes, that's true. I think there was a crate of champagne involved, which I drank most of.
Well, you and a friend drove up in this old Mercedes up to Cairns where you met someone at the youth hostel who invited you to come and work on a yacht with him. Had you spent much time on boats?
I'd never actually been on a yacht. Ironically enough, I met Tony on a boat, but it was one of those harbour cruises that went around Sydney Harbour. but I'd never really been on something that was wind powered or had sails. So, but why not? You know, I was ready to set off and have an adventure and running from the grief to a certain extent, sometimes not making good decisions.
I made the decision, the big decision at some point in that grief early on, about a year after Tony had died, when the anniversary came up again, And all the visual reminders were still there that the place I was in was a terrible place. And I had to decide to either die or live. And I chose to live. And this was part of the living. I had no idea how to do it.
And probably I did it more extremely than I would have, certainly more extremely than my parents would have liked me to.
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Chapter 3: What led Marelle to join the crew of a catamaran?
Adam Troy, that was the character's name, and the actor was Gardner McKay. And he sailed the South Pacific and had great adventures, and I wanted some of that. I'm not sure if I was in love with him or in love with the life. And when I first stepped on board OCAT, Jean was in a similar position. This is the skipper, Jean Kay. Jean Kay, the skipper of OCAT.
He wasn't as tall, dark and handsome, and there was none of that romantic frisson for me. But he was this larger-than-life character. A call to adventure was the first feeling that I had from him. There was an elemental empathy between the two of us as well, which I've kind of thought about later. The boat itself... It reminded me of Adventures in Paradise too.
When you entered the cabin, it was like being in a laid-back casino. There was blue toweling curtains on the windows. There was a blue and red carpet. The cushions had... The blue cushions had red Tahitian hibiscus on them. It was so much like Adventures in Paradise. I thought my dream had come true.
Chapter 4: What was Jean's backstory and how did it affect Marelle?
Books and music too? Yes. What a bonus that was because on the first boat... There had been no books and no music that I recall. I didn't see what the books were for a start, but I knew there were books there and they looked like novels. And he had the music that we liked too, Jacques Brel, a French singer, Pink Floyd.
Neil Young.
Neil Young, yes, all of those 70s, Santana. And Jean the Skipper there, what did he look like? He... He was dressed like Gardner McKay. He was dressed only in trousers the first time with his, you know, his cuffs rolled up. So bronze having sailed from the other half, you know, other side of the world.
This mop of unruly hair and that he looked at you from under and had quite prominent eyebrows too. These extremely dark eyes, dark brown eyes that you never knew what was going on inside that head. They revealed nothing, but they had a very piercing glance that saw right inside of you. So he was charismatic, Morel? He was charismatic, but I wasn't swept away by that.
I think when I thought that there was an elemental empathy... Part of it was, sure, he was the call to adventure. And the other thing was that I felt somehow equal to him. But in charisma, there is a more superior character to another one. There's a charismatic figure and the other one's a fan. It never felt like that ever with Jean and myself.
And I think it was because having taken that journey into grief and still being there in a way, that wasteland of grief, that like him, I had seen beyond the horizon. And as I got to know him, I realised he had trauma in his life too, that I think we both related to deaths. He had deaths in his life too.
Where was he heading on this OCAT?
Where were you signing up to sail to? To go to Sri Lanka, from Darwin to Sri Lanka. That was the plan. Yeah.
But we didn't quite make it there. Well, tell me about your first days at sea on the OCAT. What were they like?
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Chapter 5: What challenges did they face during their journey to Sri Lanka?
How did he look when you saw him? What was it like to see him walk into that restaurant after all those years?
Oh, look, it was a time warp because he looked like the 1970s, which I have to say in the 70s he wasn't quite as unruly as he looked. The hair was much longer then. He had, you know, one of those collarless shirts on, an Indian shoulder bag. He was wearing sandals. I thought that he might turn up bare feet, but that was how he was dressed, the epitome of the 1970s. And did you get on easily?
It was as if we just picked up from where we'd left off. We just looked at each other. We didn't do any handshakes or hugs or the French, you know, cheek kissing. We just looked at each other as if, you know, if we touched each other, the whole thing might explode or take the magic away.
And this trip where you spent time with him and did go and stay at what sounds his very lovely home, an original water mill in the south of France, where he told you about this heist, this crime in 1976, and he ended up wanting you, Morel, to write the book of that period of his life. Was that a hard request to agree to?
I thought, oh, my God, here he is handing me a Cordon Bleu plot and a real person. I could ask him whatever I liked. And so I said yes. He had sent me a short summary, which was about 16 pages of text, And he also sent me a kilo and a half of newspaper clippings about the heist, which was gold. I mean, I could have found a bit of it on Google, but not what he sent me.
It was amazing to have that material.
Did they square up though, Mireille, the 16 pages that Jean had written and what he'd told you and the way it was reported in newspapers? Or were you getting two conflicting views of this event?
Most of the time it squared up, but there were things that it hadn't told me. I mean, he covered quite, in quite a lot of detail, the day of the heist, the day of grand larceny. There was hardly anything on the follow-ups on what happened after, which is what the information I got from the newspaper clippings.
And he had sent me a little proviso saying, just remember, it's my truth that counts, not the accounts you might read in the newspaper who are just, you know, making things up for their own accounts. But I did start to start to doubt him at times, you know, what he was telling me. What was the truth? Was there an ultimate capital T truth or was truth only different versions?
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