This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial
Read This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial Online
Authors: Helen Garner
ALSO BY HELEN GARNER
FICTION
Monkey Grip
(1977)
Honour and Other People’s Children
(1980)
The Children’s Bach
(1984)
Postcards from Surfers
(1985)
Cosmo Cosmolino
(1992)
The Spare Room
(2008)
NON-FICTION
The First Stone
(1995)
True Stories
(1996)
The Feel of Steel
(2001)
Joe Cinque’s Consolation
(2004)
FILM SCRIPTS
The Last Days of Chez Nous
(1992)
Two Friends
(1992)
Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. Her award-winning books include novels,
stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
textpublishing.com.au
Copyright © Helen Garner 2014
The moral right of Helen Garner to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of
this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner
and the publisher of this book.
First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2014
Cover and page design by W. H. Chong, typeset by J&M Typesetters
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Garner, Helen, 1942- author.
Title: This house of grief / by Helen Garner.
ISBN: 9781922079206 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781921961434 (ebook)
Subjects: Farquharson, Robert, 1969-
Gambino, Cindy.
Filicide—Australia.
Children—Crimes against—Australia.
Custody of children—Australia.
Mothers of murder victims—Australia.
Murder—Australia.
Dewey Number: 364.15230994
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
To the Victorian Supreme Court:
‘this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief’
DEZSÖ KOSZTOLÁNYI:
KORNÉL ESTI
CONTENTS
‘Are you going to the Farquharson hearing? I’ve got two reactions to this. He can’t
possibly have done it. But there’s no other explanation.’
LAWYER WALKING PAST THE SUPREME COURT OF VICTORIA, 16 NOVEMBER 2007
…
‘There is no explanation of the death of children that is acceptable.’
LEON WIESELTIER:
KADDISH
…
‘…life is lived on two levels of thought and act: one in our awareness and the other
only inferable, from dreams, slips of the tongue, and inexplicable behaviour.’
JANET MALCOLM:
THE PURLOINED CLINIC
Once there was a hard-working bloke who lived in a small Victorian country town
with his wife and their three young sons. They battled along on his cleaner’s wage,
slowly building themselves a bigger house. One day, out of the blue, his wife told
him that she was no longer in love with him. She did not want to go on with the marriage.
She asked him to move out. The kids would live with her, she said, and he could see
them whenever he liked. She urged him to take anything he wanted from the house.
The only thing she asked for, and got, was the newer of their two cars.
The sad husband picked up his pillow and went to live with his widowed father, several
streets away. Before long his wife was seen keeping company with the concreter they
had hired to pour the slab for the new house. The tradesman was a born-again Christian
with several kids and his own broken marriage. Soon the separated wife began to accompany
him to his church. Next, the husband spotted the concreter driving around town in
the car that he had slaved to buy.
Up to this point you could tell the story as a country-and-western song, a rueful
tale of love betrayed, a little bit whiny, a little bit sweet.
But ten months later, just after dark on a September evening in 2005, while the discarded
husband was driving his sons back to their mother from a Father’s Day outing, his
old white Commodore swerved off the highway, barely five minutes from home, and plunged
into a dam. He freed himself from the car and swam to the bank. The car sank to the
bottom, and all the children drowned.
…
I saw it on the TV news. Night. Low foliage. Water, misty and black. Blurred lights,
a chopper. Men in hi-vis and helmets. Something very bad here. Something frightful.
Oh Lord, let this be an accident.
…
Anyone can see the place where the children died. You drive south-west out of Melbourne
on the Princes Highway, the road that encircles the continent. You bypass Geelong,
resist the call of the Surf Coast turn-off, and keep going inland in the direction
of Colac, on the great volcanic plain that stretches across southwestern Victoria.
In August 2006, after a magistrate at a Geelong hearing had committed Robert Farquharson
to stand trial on three charges of murder, I headed out that way one Sunday morning,
with an old friend to keep me company. Her husband had recently left her. Her hair
was dyed a defiant red, but she had that racked look, hollow with sadness. We were
women in our sixties. Each of us had found
it in herself to endure—but also to inflict—the
pain and humiliation of divorce.
It was a spring day. We passed Geelong and were soon flying along between paddocks
yellow with capeweed, their fence lines marked by the occasional windbreak of dark
cypresses. Across the huge sky sailed flat-bottomed clouds of brilliant white. My
companion and I had spent years of our childhoods in this region. We were familiar
with its melancholy beauty, the grand, smooth sweeps of its terrain. Rolling west
along the two-lane highway, we opened the windows and let the air stream through.
Four or five kilometres short of Winchelsea we spotted ahead of us the long, leisurely
rise of a railway overpass. Was this the place? Talk ceased. We cruised up the man-made
hill. From the top we looked down and saw, ahead and to the right of the road, a
body of tan water in a paddock—not the business-like square of a farm dam but oval-shaped,
feminine, like an elongated tear drop, thinly fringed with small trees. Its southern
bank lay parallel with the northern edge of the highway, twenty or thirty metres
from the bitumen. I had imagined the trajectory of Farquharson’s car as a simple
drift off the left side of the highway; but to plunge into this body of water on
the wrong side of the road, the car would have had to veer over the centre white
line and cut across the east-bound lane with its oncoming traffic. As we sped down
the Winchelsea side of the overpass, forcing ourselves to keep glancing to the right,
we saw little white crosses, three of them, knee-deep in grass between the road and
the fence. We flew past, as if we did not have the right to stop.
We had a vague idea that six thousand people lived in Winchelsea, but a sign at the
entrance to the township gave its
population as 1180, and by the time we had rolled
down the dip to the bluestone bridge that spanned the Winchelsea River, then up the
other side and past a row of shops and a primary school, the outer limits of the
town were already in view. In a place this size, everyone would know your business.
A mile or so beyond the township, we turned down a side road and found a grassy spot
where we could eat our sandwiches. We felt awkward, almost guilty. Why had we come?
We spoke in low voices, avoiding each other’s eye, staring out over the sunny paddocks.
Do you think the story he told the police could be true—that he had a coughing fit
and blacked out at the wheel? There is such a thing. It’s called cough syncope. The
ex-wife swore at the committal hearing that he loved his boys. So? Since when has
loving someone meant you would never want to kill them? She said it was a tragic
accident—that he wouldn’t have hurt a hair on their heads. His whole family is backing
him. In court he had a sister on either side and an ironed hanky in his hand. Even
the ex-wife’s family said they didn’t blame him. But wasn’t there weird police evidence?
The tracks his car had left? And didn’t he bolt? Yes. He left the kids in the sinking
car, and hitched a ride to his ex-wife’s place. He looked massive in the photos—is
he a big bloke? No, he was small and stumpy. With puffy eyes. Did you see him close
up at the committal? Yes, he held the door open for me. Did he smile at you? He tried
to. Maybe he’s a psychopath—isn’t that how they get to you? By being charming? He
didn’t look charming. He looked terrible. Wretched. What—you felt sorry for him?
Well…I don’t know about sorry. I don’t know what I was expecting, but he was ordinary.
A man.
The cemetery, on the outskirts of Winchelsea, was a couple
of acres of wide, sloping
ground, open to the sky. Nobody else was around. We wandered up and down the rows.
No Farquharsons. Perhaps the family came from another town? But as we plodded up
the path to the car, I glanced past a clump of shrubbery and saw a tall headstone
of polished granite that bore a long surname and three medallion-shaped photos. We
approached with reluctant steps.
Some AFL fan had poked into the dirt beside the grave an Essendon pinwheel on a wand.
Its curly plastic blades whizzed merrily. In the upper corners of the headstone were
etched the Essendon Football Club insignia and a golden Bob the Builder. The little
boys faced the world with frank good cheer, their fair hair neatly clipped, their
eyes bright. Jai, Tyler, Bailey.
Much loved and cherished children of Robert and
Cindy…In God’s hands till we meet again.
I studied it with a sort of dread. Often,
in the seven years to come, I would regret that I had not simply blessed them that
day and walked away. In the mown grass sprouted hundreds of tiny pink flowers. We
picked handfuls and laid them on the grave, but the breeze kept blowing them away.
Every twig, every pebble we tried to weight them with was too light to resist the
steady rushing of the spring wind.