Janet Kelly is the pen name of a Melbourne writer. Rather than give biographical details, we present the following article about Janet written by Jane Sullivan and published in the Age 24 October 2003 (A3 p4)

You can never look at the world the same way again

If your husband systematically abused your children, surely it would be obvious. Not necessarily, writes Jane Sullivan.

Janet Kelly is hoping that what she says will matter, because she is the mother who didn't know. Her husband first raped their eldest daughter when the girl was seven. For years afterwards, he regularly assaulted the two eldest daughters, using cunning and violence to keep his crimes hidden. All that time, their mother had no idea what was going on.

Some people might find that difficult to believe. To understand what happened, to try to make sense of how she could end up married to a man like that, how she could have missed any clues, she has written a novel about Erica, the mother who didn't know.

This makes The Colour of Walls a highly unusual, possibly unique book. Kelly says she searched for one like it to help her, and could find nothing.

The events in The Colour of Walls are true, and Kelly describes the story as based on direct experience, though inevitably names and some details are changed in a fictionalised account. "Janet Kelly" is a pen name for the Victorian author. "A lot of the characters are composites," she says, "and although Erica is me, she's not really me."

Her former husband came out of jail 12 years ago after serving just 18 months for crimes of sexual penetration of a child under 10, incest, sexual assault and threat to kill. The abuse left its scars on the girls. In the novel, they begin to wag school and smoke; later, Allison uses heroin and Jo drinks heavily and spends time in a psychiatric ward. But Kelly, 52, emphasises it's the mother's story: "If they'd written it, it would have been a completely different story."

She wanted to write a novel rather than a memoir to bring the reader into her experience - and also, paradoxically, to distance herself from the experience. She names her alter ego Erica after a woman who ran naked across a cricket pitch. "I've exposed myself in that way. But I don't like things not talked about. I hate secrets. I have this real desire to know, and I ask questions, and I want details. People say it's a courageous thing to do. But I'm not courageous enough to even read it."

Everything in the book was difficult to write. But perhaps the most difficult scene, Kelly says, was when Erica discovers that her second daughter Jo, aged 12, has a line of small, raw sores around her wrist.

At first Erica is puzzled, then angry. Jo runs away from her, will not explain. Malcolm, the girls' father, takes her away to get the truth out of her, and Erica is pleased that for once he is taking responsibility for parenting. Jo is very upset. Much later, the elder daughter, Allison, explains.

It was then, Kelly says, that she took the children and left the house and their father. But the story goes back much further than that.

Kelly's novel begins when Erica is four. She grows up in Coburg, where her parents run a sandwich bar. There are traumatic events in her childhood, especially around puberty. She is sexually abused by a neighbour and family friend, Uncle Bob, and sexually assaulted by a stranger who invites her into his house. Her elder brother is diagnosed with schizophrenia.

"I wanted to understand whether the things that happened in my life shaped my predisposition to be attracted to somebody who was violent," Kelly says. "I wondered whether it was because my own father was such a different figure from this man."

Ironically, her own experience of sexual assault as a child was misleading. She was anxious to protect her daughters from danger outside the home, never dreaming it could come from inside.

One of the stereotypes of incest is that it repeats itself through the generations: an abused daughter has children who are then abused by their father. But Erica's father is portrayed as a gentle, loving man.

And when a young man called Malcolm appears in her life, he is not a violent figure. He seems nice, gallant, protective, with an apparently happy family. Erica feels one day she will marry him.

"People thought he was a lovely man, he wouldn't hurt a fly," Kelly says. "But inside the walls . . . I felt he could turn at any moment and kill."

In the book, after the marriage, things gradually go wrong. Malcolm drinks heavily, his anger is frightening. After Allison is born, Erica undergoes electric shock treatment for depression. Madness runs in her family, they say.

Later, it's Malcolm who seems to go off the rails. He repeatedly overdoses on medication and has to be rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped. The doctors say he is suffering from stress and overwork and Erica is putting too much pressure on him. The children are taking up too much of her time.

Then, one day, Erica finds a letter under Allison's mattress marked 'Don't Let Mum See This'. It's from Jo, her younger sister.

What did Kelly feel then? "Numbness. Horror." Her daughters came home from school to find her lying on the floor, the letter in her hand.

In the novel, Allison tells her that Malcolm had been drunk and had thought the little girl was her mother. Jo had got it wrong. He didn't remember anything and he had never done anything again. "Please don't tell him. I'll run away if you do."

Remembering that moment from her own life, Kelly says she was trying to respect her daughter's wishes."I thought, I can't cause my daughter to run away and I can't cause him to kill himself. It will be my fault if all that happens. I was trying to save everyone."

Nonetheless, she was so bewildered and disturbed she confided in her husband's social worker. How could her husband have mistaken a child for his wife? Astonishingly, she was told not to go to the police. Her husband had alcoholic blackouts and could remember nothing of what he had done, the social worker said. She should keep the secret and take him back, because the truth would destroy him.

Kelly felt then that she had no choice but to listen to the experts. Whatever her husband had done, it was some strange thing that had happened once only, that he didn't know anything about. Now, after writing her book and undergoing counselling, she feels differently. After a long time, she realised that her husband knew exactly what he was doing, and everything fell into place.

"All those suicide attempts were a direct ploy to take my attention away from what was really happening," she says. "A lot of research has been done into how they groom women. Looking back, you can see the manipulation and the amount of cunning that must have gone into setting it up."

In the novel, Malcolm is overheard on the phone asking exactly what overdose of drugs would be fatal: he always takes slightly less. He draws up plans for a house extension and changes them so the girls' bedroom is at the other end of the house, out of earshot.

Kelly says she can never forget the moment when she went to the police. "I read my statement and I turned to the policewoman and said 'He knew what he was doing'. And she put her arm around me and said 'Of course he did'. And it only dawned on me then. It was a revelation."

The trial and the aggressive cross-examination of the girls was at least as bad as the incest itself, Kelly says. Her husband denied everything. "I have vivid memories of my second daughter as a 12-year-old hyperventilating, and the police saying 'We can't watch her go through this, we'll pull the charges'. That was horrendous."

But the rules have been changed since, so the ordeal of a trial would not be quite so bad for children today, she adds.

The exposure was horrible. "We didn't know who the jury were. They were just a mass of men. We could be out on the street or on the train, they'd recognise us. They are strangers and they know the explicit details that have been told in the courtroom."

Another thing she wanted to show in her book was that things don't end with a trial and a conviction. Erica and her children have lived in fear for a long time. They move house, keep watch, put knives in handy places in the hallway in case the house is invaded.

"For my whole life I was fed that fairy-tale story of the man, the protector, the family, the prince and I wholly believed it," Kelly says. "No matter what happened, I still wanted to hang onto that. And when it explodes you're left with nothing.

"There's no trust. I look at men and their daughters walking down the street holding hands and I wonder. It's something that never goes away. People say 'Can't you forget it and put it behind you?'. You can't. You can never look at the world the same way again. It's quieter, it doesn't scream as much, but it's still there."

Kelly's four daughters are now aged between 23 and 30, and she has three school-age grandchildren. "They are all just beautiful, amazing people, coming to terms with what happened in their own ways," she says. They love her book.

Could she ever forgive her ex-husband? "No. Never. Telling the story, I can feel this terrible rage. Sometimes I'm frightened of what I would do if I saw him."

In one exuberant scene in the novel, on a hot night soon after they have left Malcolm, Erica and her daughters start scribbling on the walls in coloured pens. They write things like Dead Men Don't Rape and Keep the Peace: Kill All Men. They play Pat Benatar songs, laugh and sing and write until all the walls are covered with coloured scribble, then they cool off with the hose and drive to the beach.