“There are some things I need to know – as their mother,” says Cindy Gambino in Helen Garner’s This House Of Grief. It’s a line that cuts to the heart of Dua’s Monthly Read for August.
In her Service95 Book Club interview for August, Dua explores Helen’s haunting account of a true crime that shook Australia: the trial of Robert Farquharson, a father accused of deliberately driving his car into a dam, killing his three young sons. This House Of Grief not only recounts the courtroom as theatre – it’s a meditation on justice, grief, and the unfathomable complexity of human behaviour.
That’s the discomfort that This House Of Grief lingers in. “People make judgments very quickly in these kinds of matters,” Helen explains. “And then they start to throw around psychiatric terms, like ‘psychopath’. Over all the years that I’ve been going to trials, I read about something in the paper… and my first thought is, I wonder what that person looks like. So I used to hop on a bike and ride down to the court, and I’ve go in there expecting to see some horrible beast… but what you see in the dock is a broken person. A person whose foot’s gone through the floor. Who’s done the sort of terrible thing that any of us might be driven to do by the pain of our lives.”
In her clear and painfully compassionate prose, Helen recounts the horror and ambiguity of the trial. “People would say, ‘But he loved those boys,’” she reflects. “And I thought, But since when has loving someone meant you would never want to kill them?”
She also confronts the emotional toll of telling such a story. “It’s just this big knife that keeps going into you… the horror of people’s loss and grief, and you don’t know if you’re going to be big enough to hold it and convey it in an honourable way, in a dignified way.”
Through This House Of Grief, Helen invites us to look, not turn away. To witness not just the facts of a crime, but the ripples it sends through everyone it touches – families, courts, readers.
As for how it’s all landed? “I feel very gratified,” she says. Not, perhaps, because the story offers resolution, but because it was told with honesty. In sharing the story without judgment, Helen also offers something rare: a deeply human lens on the unimaginable.
This House Of Grief by Helen Garner is Dua’s Monthly Read For August – discover their full conversation and more...
WATCH Dua’s interview with the author, Helen Garner
LISTEN to the interview on the go with the new Service95 Book Club podcast
BOOKMARK the novels that inspired Helen Garner’s writing
READ why Helen is the fearless Australian voice the world is finally listening to
