'Anyone can see the place where the children died. You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain.
'On the evening of 4 September 2005, Father’s Day, Robert Farquharson, a separated husband, was driving his three sons home to their mother, Cindy, when his car left the road and plunged into a dam. The boys, aged ten, seven and two, drowned. Was this an act of revenge or a tragic accident? The court case became Helen Garner’s obsession. She followed it on its protracted course until the final verdict.
'In this utterly compelling book, Helen Garner tells the story of a man and his broken life. She presents the theatre of the courtroom with its actors and audience, all gathered for the purpose of bearing witness to the truth, players in the extraordinary and unpredictable drama of the quest for justice.
'This House of Grief is a heartbreaking and unputdownable book by one of Australia’s most admired writers.' (Publication summary)
Dedication:
To the Victorian Supreme Court:
'this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief'
–Dezso Kosztolanyi : Kornel Esti
'With the republication of “The Children’s Bach,” a 1984 novel, and “This House of Grief,” a 2014 account of a murder trial, the Australian writer Helen Garner is ripe for discovery by American readers.'
'I had never heard of the Australian writer Helen Garner when I started reading her novel “The Children’s Bach,” and the book puzzled me at first, before I got into the scatty, nonlinear rhythm of its prose. We are immediately introduced to a cluster of characters: Dexter; his wife, Athena; their two little boys, one of them developmentally disabled; the adult sisters Elizabeth and Vicki; Elizabeth’s lover Philip and his adolescent daughter, Poppy. How, I wondered, were the characters connected to one another, and why did Garner’s sentences seem to float through the air like random thoughts?' (Introduction)
'This chapter considers Helen Garners fiction, assessing the evolution of her work from the scandalous diary-like immediacy of the Monkey Grip (1977) through to her minimalist masterpiece The Children’s Bach (1984). Throughout, it considers the house as a core spatial configuration that changes across Garner’s work.' (Publication abstract)
'It's 45 years since Helen Garner published Monkey Grip and perhaps a while later that people realised how fine a writer she was. In 1997 there was that shock of recognition that someone had succeeded in re-creating inner-urban Melbourne, the 'aqua profunda' part of the Fitzroy pool, the tumult and tumbling from bed to bed of shared housing, the heartache of loving a junkie. The initial response to Monkey Grip was a response to a literary brave new world that was also the translation of something real. Indeed, there were critics such as the late Peter Pierce who said that Helen Garner had just talked dirty and called it realism. Yes, and along with this, there was the persistent accusation that she had simply published her diaries and served them up as fiction. This last point had come to seem like the most vulgar misprision by the time I wrote a full-dress defence of Garner in Judith Brett's Meanjin in the mid 1980s.' (Publication abstract)
'Helen Garner’s literary non-fiction book This House of Grief (2014), as well as her two essays ‘Why She Broke’ (2017) and ‘Killing Daniel’ (1993), all deal with instances of filicide. This article begins by offering a reading of these writings in which I argue that they perpetuate a mythologisation of family violence which prevents us from viewing that violence as an ameliorable social injustice. I look at Rita Felski’s injunction to engage more deeply with what she calls ‘ordinary readers'’ uses of literature as a way to question the relevance of the kind of critique put forth in the first section; ultimately, I find that the context of Garner’s popular reception actually vindicates a critical focus on the political import of the writing.' (Publication abstract)
