This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial - Softcover

Garner, Helen

 
9780593470770: This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial
Softcover
ISBN 10: 059347077X ISBN 13: 9780593470770
Verlag: Vintage, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • The engrossing true-crime classic from "a master anatomist of ordinary people in difficult times" (New York Times), that follows a man and his broken life, a community wracked by tragedy, and the long and torturous road to closure

On the evening of Father’s Day, 2005, separated husband Robert Farquharson was driving his three young sons back to their mom’s house when the car veered off the road and plunged into a dam. Farquharson survived the crash, but his boys drowned. Was this a tragic accident, or an act of revenge? The court case that followed became a national obsession—a macabre parade of witnesses, family members, and the defendant himself, each forced to relive the unthinkable for an audience of millions.

In This House of Grief, celebrated writer Helen Garner tells the definitive and deeply absorbing story of it all, from crash to final verdict. Through a panoply of perspectives, including her own as a member of the public, Garner captures the exacting procedure and brutal spectacle of Australia’s criminal justice system. The result is a richly textured portrait—of a man and his broken life, of a community wracked by tragedy, and of the long and torturous road to closure.

Considered a literary institution in Australia, Helen Garner’s incisive nonfiction evokes the keen eye of the New Journalists. Brisk, candid, and never dismissive of its flawed subjects, This House of Grief is a masterwork of literary journalism.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HELEN GARNER writes novels, stories, screenplays, and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, and her diaries Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This, and How to End a Story.

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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 south-western 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.

A year passed between the committal hearing and the trial. When Farquharson’s name came up in conversation, people shuddered. Tears would spring to women’s eyes. Everyone had a view. The coughing fit story provoked incredulity and scorn. The general feeling was that a man like Farquharson could not tolerate the loss of control he experienced when his wife ended the marriage. Again and again...

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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059347077X
ISBN 13 
9780593470770
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
300
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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Softcover