Crime Scene: HELEN GARNER This House of Grief: The story of a murder trial. Reviewed by Lou Murphy

Tags: Australian women's writing/ Helen Garner/ True Crime

Questions of masculinity and notions of guilt and innocence are probed in Helen Garner’s disquieting examination of the tragic death of three young boys and the murder trial of their father.

Most Australians will be familiar with the high-profile case at the centre of this story. On Father’s Day 2005, Robert Farquharson was returning his three sons to the custody of his ex-wife when he drove his car into a dam, drowning the children. He survived, claiming the tragedy was an accident caused by him losing control of the vehicle after a coughing fit. Others weren’t so sure, accusing him of killing the boys deliberately to get back at his ex-wife.

This House of Grief follows Farquharson’s murder trial as the writer embarks on her own personal quest for the truth.

Garner steers through the machinations of the legal system, observing the statements of those who take to the witness stand with oblique concentration, focused not only on what they say but also their emotions, character and body language. Personalities are deftly portrayed ­– the paramedic, the CFA volunteer, the diver, the forensic pathologist, witnesses, medical experts, traffic analysts, and the police. The Crown calls 40 witnesses and the case stretches for over six weeks to the verdict. Garner wades through the evidence with an overwhelming sense of the gravity of the situation, and the heavy burden of the eventual judgement.

This is not a sensationalist account, nor is it sustained by a need to apportion culpability. Rather, it is a study in how people cope in extreme circumstances:

‘What’s worse? – living with suspicions and various possibilities and never knowing the truth, or living with the truth of something too horrible to contemplate?’

Every week the news is full of heartbreaking stories, tragedies that affect ordinary people, stories of evil and hopelessness. So what drew Helen Garner to this particular story? Why did she dedicate so much of her life to following it? This question is as much a part of the fabric of the book as the tragedy itself. In quiet musings she reflects on her own experience of divorce, children, and grandchildren. She embraces ambiguity as the only real truth of human interactions, including love, rather than the stereotyped ‘sentimental fantasy of love as a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our own destructive urges …’

It is these destructive urges that must be examined in order to shed light on whether or not Farquharson deliberately killed his own children and Garner analyses the effects of Farquharson’s marriage breakdown on his psychological wellbeing. His ex-wife, Cindy Gambino, stated:

‘I didn’t want the marriage any more. I asked him to leave.’

There it was, the unbearable blow she had dealt him – expulsion from his family and his home. Like so many emotionally numbed, inarticulate and stoical husbands, he had failed to see it coming.

Was Farquharson’s devastation at the break-up deep enough to incite him to murder? It certainly led him down a path of depression. Garner focuses particularly on his reaction as a man to the inevitable disempowerment and humiliation of the divorce. She also centres on the pressures uniquely faced by men: somewhat old-fashioned ideals that a certain class of Australian men still subscribe to – to appear strong, to be good providers, to be in control. She diligently records the interview between the police and Farquharson. Played to the court it captures poignantly the detached vernacular of the Aussie male:

… they put it to him squarely: did he deliberately drive off the highway into the dam? No, he says, very quiet and firm. He did not. He had a coughing fit, blacked out, and found himself in water. Did he help with the boys’ seatbelts? He doesn’t know. It’s all just a big blur. He’s got nothing to hide.

Clanchy and Stamper swerve away to his mortgage, his maintenance payments, his medication, never raising their voices, always polite, always thoughtful and patient, always looping back to what happened in the water. Under their sustained pressure, Farquharson flares out into passages of rhetoric. He feels pretty shithouse. The boys were his life. His world. He throws up his hands and lowers his head. His chin stiffens and goes grey; his mouth turns upside down and his voice trembles.

In This House of Grief Helen Garner documents an important case. Ambivalent in her own response, she does sympathise with the family and share their pain, while refraining from blaming anyone for the events. In tackling this harrowing subject matter she weaves legal argument and social commentary into a compelling narrative that is a deeply moving rendering of grief and human behaviour.

(Robert Farquharson was convicted of murder and given a lifetime sentence. In 2009 he won his appeal and was granted a retrial. He was again found guilty.)

Helen Garner This House of Grief: The story of a murder trial Text Publishing 2014 PB 288pp $32.99

Lou Murphy is the author of the crime novel Squealer, available from http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LouMurphy

You can buy this book from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.

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