Read This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial Online
Authors: Helen Garner
‘This has taken nearly a decade of my life,’ she said quietly. ‘My boys are at peace.’
The couple turned to walk away. From the back they looked forlorn, diminished somehow,
as they stepped out of the limelight and down into the bluestone gutter to cross
the road.
If there is any doubt that Robert Farquharson drove into the dam on purpose, it
is a doubt no more substantial than a cigarette paper shivering in the wind, no more
reasonable than the unanswered prayer that shot through my mind when I first saw
the photo of the car being dragged from the black water.
I come back and back to the old Commodore in the Kmart car park. When Farquharson
pulls in, he finds that the youngest child, Bailey, has nodded off in his baby seat.
Farquharson has forgotten to bring the stroller, so, to pass the time until the toddler
wakes, he turns on the radio. The sad father sits with his boys in the shit car,
listening to the football. This clapped-out bubble of steel and glass is the only
home he has to offer them.
I was born and brought up in Geelong. I remember winter Sunday afternoons in that
part of the country, their heavy melancholy. The Barwon flows between its neat banks.
Cars glide in silence through the colourless streets. Along the bottoms of fences
dank weeds sprout. The air is still and chilly. The steely cloud-cover will never
break. Time stalls. There is no future. One’s own desolation is
manifest in the worn-down
volcanic landscape. The life force burns low in its secret cage.
By nightfall the shit car would become a weapon, and then a coffin.
When I let myself think of Jai, Tyler and Bailey lying in their quiet cemetery, watched
over by the golden emblems of Bob the Builder and the Bombers, I imagine the possessive
rage of their families: ‘You never knew them. You never even saw them. How dare you
talk about your “grief ”?’
But no other word will do. Every stranger grieves for them. Every stranger’s heart
is broken. The children’s fate is our legitimate concern. They are ours to mourn.
They belong to all of us now.