CANCELLED into the Void

89 women were killed by their current or former partner between 2008-10. This equates to nearly one woman every week. ANROWS Fact Sheet. Tanja Ebert was 19 when she arrived in Australia as a backpacker from Germany. Four years later, she was married with two children to a man twice her age, running a sheep station the size of Antigua in outback South Australia. It seemed a fairytale come to life: the young blonde German who married the handsome, monied grazier.More Description

89 women were killed by their current or former partner between 2008-10. This equates to nearly one woman every week. ANROWS Fact Sheet.

Tanja Ebert was 19 when she arrived in Australia as a backpacker from Germany. Four years later, she was married with two children to a man twice her age, running a sheep station the size of Antigua in outback South Australia. It seemed a fairytale come to life: the young blonde German who married the handsome, monied grazier.

Then, in August of this year, she disappeared. A week later, her husband shot himself in the presence of police.

What happened in the months before Tanja's disappearance? What went wrong? Will we ever find her body? Why did love quickly turn to murder and suicide?

But there is another equally interesting mystery at the heart of the story: Tanja. Why does a well-travelled 19 year old German woman throw herself headfirst into a life that many of us would find impossible?

Tanja was intriguing and charismatic. I know this because I spent an intense week with her in the Bahamas just three months before she disappeared. Even then I had imagined writing her story such was the novelty and power of its narrative. As a traveller and German speaker, I felt a special connection with Tanja. At the same time, she was also so unusual I was almost left reeling. Tracing her story - from Germany to Australia, from adolescence to early motherhood, from backpacker to farmer - will form an essential part of the book's narrative power. But the book will go beyond mere true crime reporting, probing uncomfortable but important questions about male-female relationships, Australian culture, and media crime reporting. It will discuss the broader societal context of Tanja's likely murder - why did the Australian media cast events as romantic tragedy and not another grim case of domestic violence?

Along the way, the book will explore ideas of life in the bush, of travel, of German-Australian relations, of coming of age and adulthood. It will vividly evoke life in rural Australia, bringing to life the voices of people who choose to live remotely. These questions will be answered not in the abstract but with colour, depth and intensity: I intend on travelling to and spending extensive time in Germany and Mannahill; conducting extensive research into the police investigation; and talking to a range of experts about how this could have happened.

Ultimately, Into the Void will respond to difficult questions that lie beyond the realm of formal narrative. Why do men kill women? How close can we get to understanding another person's motives? In the way of Anna Krien's Night Games or Helen Garner's This House of Grief, this book will be an even-handed account of a life set against a broader social context. It will spark conversations about intimate partner violence and the role that by the state, the media, and the community plays in facilitating it.