When Helen Garner, an award-winning Australian author, first saw the TV news images of the car being dragged out of the water, she uttered a prayer: ‘Oh Lord, let this be an accident.’ A strange, pessimistic, almost paranoid prayer. A car had swerved off a dark highway outside her hometown of Geelong, Australia, and plunged into a reservoir.Why wouldn’t that be an accident? But Garner seems to have had a premonition. This House of Grief is her account of the murder trial, and ultimate conviction, of the car’s driver, Robert Farquharson, who had escaped and swum ashore while his three young sons drowned.
One surprising absence from the book is any discussion of the wider phenomenon of what criminologists call ‘family annihilation’, in which men (almost always men, Medea notwithstanding) kill their own children out of hurt pride. But Farquharson’s may well have been a textbook case: the boys’ mother had recently left him for a man they’d hired to pour a concrete slab in their garden (a process, according to Garner, ‘so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect’).
Of the couple’s two cars, Farquharson had been left with what he indignantly called ‘the shit one’, and had to endure seeing ‘his wife and her lover flying around in the newish car’ — an ordeal that, Garner appreciates, ‘would be mortifying to many a man’.
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