Helen Garner on murderer Robert Farquharson

Helen Garner’s quest to understand a man who murdered his three kids exacted a personal toll. Was it worth it?

Battle-scarred: Garner absorbs the trauma of her subjects.

Helen Garner began to fidget. She glanced at the moderator, Michael ­Cathcart, then at US writer David Shields. The 2012 conference NonfictioNOW had brought Garner and Shields together on a panel in Melbourne. The catalyst for ­Garner’s ­agitation was Shields’ assertion that “because we experience almost no reality in our actual lives, we crave the real”. In reply Garner said that, ­living next door to her three young grand­children, she did experience real things. She thought there was nothing more real than the company of children and seeing how they understood the world. “It seems to me,” she said, “there is a world and there is a reality.”

Throughout her work, Garner has explored the reality of the world around her: the fraught complexity of relationships, the social experiments of communal living, the balance between ­personal freedom and moral responsibility, the rule of law and, always, questions about sex and power. Significantly, she has also ventured into aspects of the real that by their nature defy easy elucidation: spirituality and death.

Thirty years ago, Garner told the author ­Jennifer Ellison that she would never be so famous as to be recognised when she walked into a room. Now aged 74 and the author of 13 books, two screenplays and a multitude of articles, essays and reviews, Garner is one of the best-known and, some would say, best-loved writers in Australia. That admiration is inspired by a sense that she is honest, authentic and familiar to readers.

And yet, Garner’s work continues to polarise opinion. Some readers maintain the rage against what they perceive to be her ill-informed betrayal of feminism in The First Stone. Others rail against the ways in which she inserts herself into textual dramas of pain and loss. Where some readers applaud her candour, others see a kind of ruthless egotism. Some critics remain exasperated by her refusal to stay within delineated genres. Monkey Grip and The Spare Room, they insist, are not novels. The First Stone, they argue, is fiction. Garner has always been a boundary-crosser. Refusing the constraints of literary genre, she has sought to write across and craft her own versions of them.

I approached Garner in 2014 saying I wished to write a book about her body of work and requested access to her embargoed archives at the National Library of Australia. Garner was worried about what was in the archive. She thought it best that we discuss my intentions. Why didn’t I come to lunch at her home? So began two years of conversation. She established at the outset that she did not want a biography. I did not wish to write one, but I knew that the intersection of her life and art made discussion of the biographical essential to understanding her work. Garner gave me access to the NLA files, but went further in answering every query that I have put to her. She has admitted to anxious rumblings about the book.

Finding the right balance between discussion of a writer’s personal life and published work can be fraught, particularly when the writer is as self-representational as Garner. The many volumes of her diaries will provide rich material for researchers wishing to know more about her reading practices, private musings and intimate relationships, but Helen Garner the writer is best found in her books, essays and screenplays. As the author James Button says of his friend: “Writing is how she tests her intuition, kindness and courage, how she feels alive. I always want to know what she’s been reading and writing; it’s the best guide I have to how and who she is.”

Helen Garner in 1986.

In September 2005, a year after the release of her true crime story Joe Cinque’s Consolation, an item on the evening news caught Garner’s attention. A car was being winched out of a dam near the Victorian country town Winchelsea. Robert Farquharson had been returning his three sons home to their mother, Cindy Gambino, after a Father’s Day visit. His battered Commodore left an unremarkable stretch of road and plunged into a deep dam. Farquharson opened his door and swam to safety. Jai, aged 10, Tyler, seven, and Bailey, two, drowned. Two months later, Farquharson was charged with three counts of murder.

When his committal hearing opened in ­Geelong on August 14, 2006, Garner was there. As it would turn out, that week in the Geelong Magistrates’ Court was only the first of many, many weeks she would spend in courts following this case. It proceeded through the committal to two full criminal trials and three appeals over seven years. There were several irresistible hooks for Garner in this story: an interweaving of betrayal, divorce, depression, evangelical religion, small-town loyalties, decent country folk and vulnerable, almost inarticulate young men.

­Garner’s friends and peers questioned her interest. Why would she want to immerse herself in such darkness? Was there some masochistic or self-destructive strain in her personality? She replied that she wanted to know why men kill their children. She was driven to understand the forces required for seemingly ordinary ­people to surrender to their darker selves. Farquharson, she insisted, was not a psychopath or a monster. Neither was he evil. He was an unimaginative, boring, ordinary bloke.

Garner was alert to the “moral mess” she might find herself in and was on dangerous territory personally. Within days of the committal opening in August 2006 she told her sister, “I feel like I’ll never get over this.” Many times during those seven years she regretted having become involved. Periodically she would record in her journal the Beckettian mantra: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Yet, as before, once she was in this story she was incapable of walking away.

Psychologically, Farquharson’s guilt or innocence was central for Garner herself. Some part of her wanted him to be found innocent of the charges, not because she believed him to be so, but because she could not bear to countenance the idea that a father would wilfully kill his children. Having listened to 27 witnesses, seen his police interview and heard the forensic evidence submitted at his committal, Garner felt from early on that Farquharson might well be guilty. But even as the evidence seemed increasingly incontrovertible, she fluctuated. And she was unsettled by her uncertainty.

Garner was haunted by a piece of evidence in a witness statement that was never admitted in court. On the day in 2004 that Cindy asked him to move out, saying she no longer loved him, Farquharson requested that his GP refer him for a vasectomy. Had Farquharson, all those months earlier, wanted “to amputate his fatherhood, to annihilate everything that he and Gambino as a couple had brought into being?” Had Farquharson killed his children as payback for Cindy’s humiliating rejection of him?

Early on, Garner writes of visiting the dam and the children’s graves with her friend: “We were women in our 60s. Each of us had found it in ­herself to endure — but also to inflict — the pain and humiliation of divorce.” Garner knew all too well that humiliations were “the hardest things to forget” and that the pain of humiliation could lead to a desire for retaliation and destruction. She felt a deep empathy for men who had also been humiliated. She recognised “their fragility, their sorrows and struggles, their smashed hopes, their stoicism”. Some critics have suggested that Garner excuses Farquharson’s actions. She never does. But she tries to find an explanation for them, precisely because he is such an ordinary bloke.

Garner was shocked by the pity she felt for Farquharson. Within the first year of his trials, he had transformed from an awkward, shy man who smiled and held the door for her, to someone who could manage “only a teeth-baring grimace that did not reach his eyes”. As he shuffles into court she thinks, in an echo of her language from The First Stone: “You poor bastard.” Although he is known in Winchelsea, his home town, as “little Robbie Farquharson”, his family call him Rob. Throughout her journals Garner refers to him always as “Robbie”. She wonders if he inspires maternal instincts in women. The senior journalist in court repeatedly castigates Garner for her tears and pity for him. Garner knows she will attract the ire of others for her sympathy, but she owns it unashamedly.

At the heart of her sympathy lay the broader question she asks in each of her three major nonfiction works: Who are the victims? As always, the answer is: almost everyone involved.

“Orindary bloke”: Farquharson in custody. Picture: Craig Borrow

Over the weeks, and then months and years of the case, Garner became exhausted and ill, partly due to the demands of straining to hear every word in court, but also because of disturbed sleep. Repeatedly she records feeling “100 per cent alert” and “razor sharp” in court, only to emerge into the world and stagger home in a “stupor of horror”. She had unsettling dreams of the trial and would wake anxious and confused. She was perplexed by the intensity of her “persistent, aching, leaking sadness”. At one point she felt she’d become “porous”, absorbing Farquharson’s “states” – “the endless dullness, the stunned plodding” — and the torrent of emotions thrown up by the trial. She described herself as being “in a sort of hell-paradise”.

Stories of fathers, and occasionally mothers, killing their children appeared from everywhere; Garner amassed clippings from Canada, Denmark, Germany, France and the US. She interrogated her network of psychiatrist, psychologist and psychoanalyst friends. She read up on similar cases. She attended the 2012 Freud Conference in Melbourne, hoping to gain insight from discussions about the psychoanalytic understanding of killing. But she was no closer to comprehending such dark human motivation.

Following the June 2009 appeal, Garner ­produced a draft manuscript titled The Dam. It was dull. The details of the case overwhelmed her. She could not let enough of them go. The publisher Hilary McPhee offered her a radical critique. Ashamed, Garner destroyed the version with McPhee’s notes. She could not contain the story in any meaningful way. She was fearful of the ethical burden she had taken on. She began a fresh page in her journal, paraphrasing British psychologist Marion Milner: “I have nothing. I am nothing.”

By September 2009 Garner had produced a revised 30,000 words. She later likened the process to “dragging great shaggy ropes of seaweed out of my guts”. There was little to be salvaged from that draft, either. In December the Victorian Court of Appeal ordered a retrial, which began on April 20, 2010. Farquharson was again found guilty of three counts of murder and sentenced to a minimum of 33 years in prison. When it came time to write, Garner wanted to smash through the sentimental, sensational tone of the magazine and tabloid articles on the case. She wanted to “drag” this story “up out of trash territory & into Greek myth where it belongs”. And the years of patiently waiting for the court proceedings to end would ultimately give Garner the necessary space and perspective to write this story in such a way.

On November 17, 2011, Farquharson’s lawyers lodged the papers for a second appeal. The next month Garner’s sister admitted being too bored to finish reading Garner’s third draft of the manuscript. She did not want to know more about this man who had been found guilty twice, and could not understand why Garner persisted. Garner once again contemplated dropping the whole project, but she could not break free. Then, in February 2012, she received a letter from a police officer’s wife. In part it read: “The issue of why men kill their children is enormously important … Your book will also be read by people like my husband, the police detective, who may gain an insight that will help him deal with the issue on a professional level. Or at least gain a sense that his own bewilderment is shared.”

On August 16, 2013, the High Court dismissed Farquharson’s final bid to appeal the second guilty verdict. The trials had finally come to an end. Garner was free to write. By early 2014 the manuscript was complete, and This House of Grief was published on August 20, 2014. The first of the congratulatory letters to arrive came from the Victorian Chief Justice, Marilyn Warren, who found the book “utterly riveting”. As a judge she praised the way in which This House of Grief sought to educate the general public about the “demands of the criminal justice system”. Praise followed from a raft of lawyers, including the three silks involved in the trials. Justice Lex Lasry, the judge who presided over the second trial, told Garner that his wife loved the book but that he could not read it. The submergence videos, he said, were the worst part for him. He never wanted to revisit them.

As Garner set about publicising the book, the physical and psychological toll of the seven years became startlingly obvious. In October 2014, while speaking to journalism students at La Trobe University, she suffered an attack of transient global amnesia. She was forced to cancel all public appearances and rest for some months. When she fronted the sell-out Sydney Writers’ Festival crowd in May 2015, she began a little tentatively. Her talk — On Darkness — traversed the territory of trauma she had navigated in writing both Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief. The address danced lightly between pain and gentle humour. About 10 minutes in, something shifted. Garner began to relax and enjoy herself, to perform. I could not help but think that the battle-scarred, self-flagellating Garner, who had spent so many years writing about and living with pain, rage and humiliation, had all the while been serving a necessary apprenticeship. Early on in her journal she had written: “I was BORN to do this kind of work.” It turns out, she was right.

A few days prior to her address, she received an email that delivered unexpected affirmation: “Dear Helen, On Thursday I will attend your session on writing about darkness with 10 dedicated colleagues who make up the child death and child protection review team for the NSW Department of Family and Community Services. This team write review reports on as many as 80 deaths of children every year. They write about hard subjects and distressing stories, nearly all of which are set against a backdrop of poverty and disadvantage. Your writing has inspired the work of this team and I wanted you to know just how important it has been for them to have a mentor who writes with such honesty and clarity. The team is so looking forward to this presentation to keep them strong in the important work they do.”

But the trauma had not worked its way through her body yet. A few weeks later, Garner was struck down with pneumonia.

Edited extract from A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her Work by Bernadette Brennan (Text, $32.99).