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This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

Helen Garner

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Apr 27, 2015
Category: Non Fiction

WARNING: What follows is a strong recommendation for a story of death in Australia. Three deaths, actually, all children, all young, all drowned when a car driven by their father went off the road and into a pond. It’s a convention of books about violent deaths that the reader is invited to play judge and jury; here you are also asked to consider more difficult questions. First, was a crime committed — or is this a story of a tragic accident and a terrible misunderstanding? And then a deeper, darker question: How can a man kill what he swears he loves most? Trust me on this: the exploration of that question will bring you pain. And tears. And more than tears — a hard-to-bear but useful questioning of your basic assumptions about who we are to one another and how well we can ever know one another. These may not be questions you feel like grappling with right now. If so, perhaps you should read no further.

The book starts like this:

Once there was a hardworking 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. 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 10 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.

Helen Garner learned about the tragedy on that night in 2005:

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.

Garner is little known in the United States, but she’s highly regarded in Australia, mostly for her books about crimes and their aftermath. She’s the kind of writer who goes to court, for months if necessary, and pays attention not just to the defendant and the lawyers and judges and jurors but also to spectators — and to her ideas about what happened. The result is two books in one: an expertly reported, brilliantly written story and, woven into that, Garner’s meditation on the meaning of that story. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

At the start of the first trial — there were two — Robert Farquharson seems like just another guy whose wife divorced him, who took it hard and was just starting to bounce back. Then he had the bad luck to have a coughing fit while driving and suffer a rare syncope. He passed out, and the next thing he knew, his car was sinking and his kids — aged 10, 7 and 2 — were dead and he was asking for a cigarette.

Then Garner starts filling in the pieces of the story, beat by beat, in real time, starting with the one verifiable fact: Robert Farquharson made no effort to rescue the boys. He saved himself. He never once went back into the water.

Did the man kill his kids — on Father’s Day — because, in the divorce, his wife got the new car and he got the piece of shit with 387,000 miles on it and, just months later, he had to see his wife’s new lover driving the better car?

How could that be?

It can’t. Garner describes the boys’ mother at the trial: “A puff of wind would have carried her away.” Farquharson’s tears are epic. In the first trial Farquharson and his ex-wife seemed to Garner to be “two broken people grieving together for their lost children, in an abyss of suffering where notions of guilt and innocence have no purchase.”

The pain is so intolerable that Garner tumbles into magical thinking: “If only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not be dead.” I know that longing. Once, as a child, I chased a young bird into the street. A car crushed it. The sound was small — a squelch — but in bad moments I relive the moment. I thought of it as I was reading “This House of Grief.” You too may recall your worst, cruelest moment. And then consider what might weigh on the soul of a man whose children died on his watch.

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