Helen Garner #

Helen Garner is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer and journalist. The New Yorker recently led with the headline:

The Startling Candor of Helen Garner One of Australia’s most beloved writers, Garner—who has published novels, nonfiction, and three volumes of diaries—is finally catching on in the U.S.

A product of the 1960’s agitation for greater social freedoms, especially for women. Moving into many communal share houses with transitory partners resulted in a variety of partners and three failed marriages. Best viewed in her first novel Monkey Grip

While subject to jealousy and resentment, Helen has emerged with a level headed assessment of male female relationships and a generous understanding of men’s predicaments.

Helen was active in the abortion rights movement, Moratorium marches doing street theatre dressed up as Viet Cong, she described the sensation of discovering women’s liberation as an epiphany.

I felt as if I’d been underwater for my whole life. And now for the first time, I’d stuck my head out of the water and taken a breath … looking around and thinking: ‘Now I get it. Now I get why my life is such a mess and why I’ve been so unhappy and wrecked everything’.

Once I got the sort of basic gist of feminism – or women’s liberation as it was called then – I thought, ‘Oh, now I understand everything, and everything’s going to change, because all we have to do is just say to men:

“This is what’s the matter, and if we could just do this, and if you could just do that” …’

And I really thought that was going happen.

She now reflects, in the context of MeToo:

Some things might change, but there’s stuff about men and sex and women that are just not amenable to social control, and never will be.

On love #

First Stone #

The First Stone was about one, relatively minor, incident. It dealt with an Ormond College end-of-year dinner at the University of Melbourne in October 1991, after which two students claimed that the residential college master, Alan Gregory, had groped them.

One woman said he twice squeezed her breast during a slow dance, and the other that he invited her into his office, said he had “indecent thoughts” about her and grabbed her breasts.

The master said none of this happened.

Garner was jolted when she read a “desolate little item” in the Age about Gregory being up on an indecent assault charge in the magistrates’ court over the dance incident.

She put her reflexive reaction in a letter to Gregory that as a life-long feminist, it was

“heartbreaking” to see feminist ideals “distorted into this ghastly punitiveness … the most appallingly destructive, priggish and pitiless way of dealing with it”.

Why did the women go to the police? Why was the punishment of the master – who was eventually cleared by the courts but forced out of the university – so out of proportion to his crime? Garner frets away at those questions, telling of her own experiences of unwanted sexual attention and railing against “puritan feminists” consumed by rage and fear. The women’s supporters loathed her for it, and many still do.

Gay Alcorn of Guardian Australia writes:

Garner’s stance may be outdated. But her questions about sexual harassment aren’t. Its uncomfortable truths remain prescient.

Unjust is the word for the behaviour of men who use their position of power as a weapon in forcing women to endure their repeated sexual approaches, or who take revenge for a knockback by distorting a woman’s career or making her workplace intolerable or sacking her. Consider, Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, guru Don Burke, actor Craig McLachlan, Roger Ailes, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein …..

Unjust does not apply to a clumsy pass at a party by a man who’s had too much to drink. These days, it does, and mostly should, if that man is a leader in an organisation. The Lord Mayor of Melbourne, Robert Doyle, Luke Foley and Ashley Raper …

But her point about proportion, about gradation of offence, rings true today.

The hardline view that every transgression reinforces rape culture and misogyny is a hindrance, not a help.

“The ability to discriminate must be maintained, otherwise, all we are doing is increasing the injustice of the world.”

First Stone on one level is innocent compared with the astonishing tumble of powerful and monstrous men in the United States and the nascent widening of the discussion beyond individuals to structures, to culture.

“After decades of silence, of open secrets in plain sight, women feel the power of looking out for each other, of being heard and believed”.

Yet an independent review of residential colleges at Australia’s “most dangerous university for women” has found student leaders stand accused of several sexual assault and sexual harassment offences. These student leaders are the same people victims are expected to turn to for help when they have been sexually assaulted or harassed. The controversy rages thirty years on.

Farquharson #

Garner writes:

I’m interested in apparently ordinary people who, under life’s unbearable pressure, burst through the very fine membrane that separates our daylight selves from the secret darkness that lives in every one of us.

Why are we ever surprised by the scorched earth around a broken family? Our laws and strictures and conventions have no purchase on the dark regions of the soul into which we venture when we love.

But everyone knows that love is brutal. A thousand songs tell the story. Love tears right through to the centre of us, into our secret self, and lays it wide open.

Surely Sigmund Freud was right when he said,

“We are never so defenceless against suffering as when we love.”

What people find really hard to bear, I’ve noticed, is the suggestion that they themselves might contain their share of human darkness, hidden inside their souls. Human beings have many shields against this darkness.

There’s a term that would often come up at this point in the conversation. A man like Farquharson, (who drowned his three sons) some people declared, is simply evil. That’s all he is. This means that neither he nor his crime deserves our attention. He is no longer a person.

“He was found guilty by two juries,” one woman said to me. “What else is there to say? I don’t want to hear any more about him.”

Sometimes I tried to argue. More often I backed away with my tail between my legs. But I kept thinking, and I still think, that there are thousands of men like Farquharson out there – hard-working, speechless Australian blokes who don’t understand why their wives got sick of them and turfed them out; dull men whose hearts are broken by rejection and by the loss of their children, and who can’t even begin to articulate their pain and rage. Men like these can be dangerous. Isn’t that worth thinking about? Sydney Writers’ Festival, May 2015.

James Wood of The New Yorker writes:

Robert Farquharson emerges from Garner’s account as limited in intelligence, expression, and will. He lived in the modest town of Winchelsea (not far from Geelong, where Garner was born). He worked as a window cleaner, and had three children with the much more forceful Cindy Gambino, who told the court that Farquharson was “pretty much a softie. He always gave in to what I wanted.” Though he was a “good provider,” she found it hard to stay in love with her husband. Cindy eventually left him, and soon began a new relationship with a contractor, Stephen Moules, a man more vigorous and successful than Farquharson.

She kept the children, and Farquharson had to move out. He was jealous of Moules’s access to the children, fearful of being displaced, and angry that the new lover got the better of the Farquharsons’ two cars. An old friend testified that he threatened to kill his children and rob Cindy of her dearest gifts; Garner wonders if Farquharson was really trying to commit suicide.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation. #

In October 1997, Anu Singh, a law student at Canberra’s Australian National University, killed her boyfriend, Joe Cinque. She had first administered Rohypnol to him and then, when he was asleep, twice injected him with potentially lethal doses of heroin. Singh and a fellow law student, Madhavi Rao, were charged and put on trial for Cinque’s murder. Singh was found guilty of manslaughter and Rao exonerated of any involvement in the crime.

Rose Batty #

At home with Rosie Batty

One hot afternoon in February 2014, in the pleasant Victorian township of Tyabb, south-east of Melbourne, an 11-year-old boy called Luke Batty was playing in the nets after cricket practice with his father, Greg Anderson.

Without warning, Anderson swung the bat and dealt the child a colossal blow to the back of his head, then crouched over him where he lay, and attacked him with a knife. The police shot Anderson and he died in hospital the following morning.

Rosie Batty, the young boy’s mother, came out her front gate to address the media. Her thick fair hair was tangled, her face stripped raw.

“I want to tell everybody,” she said to camera, in a low, clear voice with a Midlands accent, “that family violence happens to everybody. No matter how nice your house is, how intelligent you are. It can happen to anyone, and everyone. This has been an 11-year battle. You do the best you can. You’re a victim, and you’re helpless. An intervention order doesn’t stop anything like this from happening.”

It wasn’t so much what she said as her demeanour that stopped people in their tracks. There was something splendid about her, in her quiet devastation. Everyone who saw her was moved, and fascinated. People talked about her with a kind of awe.

Garner had spent a day with the real Rosie Batty, the singular Rosie, I understood that the quality people find so impressive in her is not merely the authority of the brutally bereaved, but also this wisdom, this trust.

At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps this is what dreaming, and art, are for.

Perhaps this is why we write.

Akon Goude #

WHY  SHE  BROKE

The woman, her children and the lake: Akon Goude’s tragic story

Excerpts from HELEN GARNER

It happened in broad daylight, one April afternoon in 2015, while the citizens of an outer-western Melbourne suburb called Wyndham Vale were peaceably going about their business.

A chef, on her way to get a tattoo, was driving past Lake Gladman, a reedy, rock-edged suburban wetland, when the blue Toyota SUV in front of her suddenly pulled off the bitumen and stopped on the gravel. As the chef drove by, she caught a glimpse of an African woman sitting huddled over the steering wheel with her face in her hands. Kids behind her were rioting: a little one was thrashing in his booster, a bigger one dangling off the back of the driver’s seat. Minutes later a passing teacher saw the Toyota “drive full bolt, straight into the water”. A man who lived opposite saw it hit the water; he heard splashing and wheels spinning as the vehicle moved further into the lake. A young boy raced home on his bike:

“Mum! There’s people in the water!”

Someone was screaming – a long, wordless wail.

A sales manager ran out of his house and waded into the lake. The water wasn’t deep enough to engulf the car. Its roof was still above the surface, but it was filling fast. The driver must have scrambled out through her window: she was standing beside it in the water. The frantic salesman tried to break one of the rear passenger windows with his fist and his elbow. It wouldn’t shatter. He yelled for a rock. A courier on the bank tore off his steel-toed boot and chucked it to him. He smashed the window and fought one child free of his harness. The hysterical teacher on the bank, crying out to triple-0, saw another kid on his back in the water, trying to keep his head above the surface, but sinking. Rescuers were shouting to the mother: Were there more children? How many were there? She stood silent beside the driver’s door, gazing straight ahead.

Her name was Akon Guode. She was a 35-year-old South Sudanese refugee, a widow with seven children. Three of them drowned that afternoon: four-year-old twins Hanger and Madit, and their 16-month-old brother, Bol. Their five-year-old sister, Alual, escaped the car and survived.

What Guode said, when the police questioned her, was so vague, so random that the word “lie” seemed hardly to apply. She denied everything. No, she had not been to the lake. She didn’t even know where the lake was. She was going to Coles to buy some milk. On the way to the supermarket she took the children to a park, to play. She meant to drive home, but she became dizzy. She missed the turn and went straight ahead. She didn’t know how she ended up in the water.

“Dizzy”? Such a feeble word, so imprecise, so unconvincing. Her teenage daughter said it.

The father of the dead children said it. People turned from their screens and looked at each other with round eyes. Hadn’t we heard this before? Was it a copycat thing? I asked a police investigator who worked on the long and gruelling murder trials of Robert Farquharson, the father of three boys drowned in a dam in 2005, whether he had been having flashbacks.

“No flashbacks,” said the detective calmly. “But a very strong sense of déjà vu at the scene.”

It would be hard to imagine anything that looked less like an accident. Not only were there eyewitnesses to the deed, but six houses along the shore of Lake Gladman are fitted with CCTV cameras. The police had been able to put together, with a few small gaps, a video recording of the fact that the mother had driven along the lake five times that day before she planted her foot and went into the water. But Guode pleaded not guilty to all four charges: one of attempted murder for the girl who survived, and three of murder for the twins and for the boy who was not yet two years old.

The court documents tell Akon Guode’s story in broad strokes. She married in South Sudan as a teenager. By the time her husband, a soldier in the rebel army of South Sudan, was killed in the civil war she had two children. As a widow in a country where Christian and African traditional customs often blend, she could never remarry. She would remain a member – or perhaps one could say a possession – of her late husband’s family: she was given to one of his brothers. “This is customary once the husband dies,” explained an “auntie” of Guode’s at the committal, through an interpreter.

“You don’t go out. You don’t go anywhere else. You stay with the same tribe because you got married for cows.

As a dowry.” Guode’s third child was fathered by a man we would think of as her brother-in-law.

With the three children in tow, she walked to Uganda in 18 days, foraging for food along the way. When they got there, another of her late husband’s brothers, already living in Australia, offered to sponsor her and the children: she was granted a global special humanitarian visa. They arrived in Sydney in 2006 and stayed with the brother-in-law until 2008, then moved to Melbourne, where the cost of living was more manageable, and were given temporary shelter by her late husband’s cousin Joseph Manyang, his wife and their three children.

Manyang helped Guode settle into a rented house of her own. Soon she and Manyang, unknown to his wife, began a relationship. In 2009 Guode gave birth to a girl, Alual – the only child who, six years later, would emerge alive from the car in the lake. The family name on the baby’s birth certificate was Chabiet, that of Guode’s late husband.

The relationship continued. In 2010 Guode had twins, a boy and a girl. By now Manyang’s wife was no longer in ignorance. She felt it sorely; she raged. Later, in court, she would deny that she came to Guode’s house and beat on the door, shouting insults and threats while the family lay low inside. There was an unpleasant confrontation at a shopping centre. Manyang moved out of the marital home and set up on his own. He visited each woman and her set of his children once or twice a week. The community hummed with rumours. Guode’s link with Manyang, though it had been so fruitful of offspring, could never be officially recognised: she was obliged to remain forever a widow. Could she have gone on hoping that the relationship had meaning, and a future?

Guode was running her household on Centrelink payments and on Manyang’s sporadic contributions. In 2012 she worked for 12 months at a family day-care centre. Like most refugees she was regularly sending back as much money as she could spare to her parents and her extended family in Africa. Then, in 2013, she became pregnant again. Shortly before the child was born, Centrelink, in a contretemps about an overpayment, suspended her benefits. A repayment scheme was eventually put in place, but she was barely squeaking by from week to week.

Meanwhile, somehow, her six children were well cared for. Their education mattered to her: they went to school, they did their homework. Akoi Chabiet, her eldest child by the husband who had been killed in the war, was an assiduous helper in the house and a keen high school student. The girl had plans for a life. She wanted to go to university, and was prepared to work for it.

Around Christmas 2013, Guode made it home with her new baby, a boy called Bol. Postnatal checks of mother and baby raised no concerns, either physical or psychological.

None of her other children’s births had brought on postnatal depression, but plainly Bol’s birth and its aftermath had knocked her around emotionally and psychologically. She thought her debility was due to the cannula that had been put into her neck. She complained occasionally of headaches and dizziness. Often she could not get out of bed. She slept all day and was unable to do the work of a mother and a house-keeper. She became distant from her children. She stopped going to social events. Her community, she felt, was turning its back on her. Rare visits from other Sudanese women she experienced as meddling rather than assistance. Gossip intensified. When Bol was six months old Guode had to ask Manyang to undergo a paternity test, to put paid to rumours that he was not Bol’s father. The test showed that he was.

Akoi described her mother as “ill”. Her teacher suggested “depressed” as a more accurate term; she tried and failed to find a support group in the area for Guode. She thought there might be a stigma against mental illness among Guode’s people. Indeed, a leader of the South Sudanese community, a respected lawyer who is held in equally high esteem in the world outside it, told the committal hearing that Sudanese people “are highly unlikely to suffer … mental illnesses, due to a chain and a web of support that surrounds us individually and as a community. So when someone … is in trouble, whether they have seek or not seek, and people notice, people will go out and support that person, and they will go above and beyond.”

Joseph Manyang told the committal that he had had no idea Guode was in financial trouble. He said that if she had asked he would have given her money. But by March 2015 the debt collectors were after Guode for unpaid phone bills to the tune of hundreds of dollars, and for gas and power bills that topped $3000. To Centrelink she owed $12,000. Between 2008 and the day of the lake she had managed to send tens of thousands of dollars back to her family in South Sudan, and her obligation to provide money was ongoing. Call it what you will, this woman had been reduced to little more than a conduit for babies and for money. Is it any wonder that she laid her burden down and turned her face to the wall?

The prosecutor, Kerri Judd QC, laid out the Crown case. On a smartscreen she drew with one finger a wobbly blue worm that traced the wandering path of Guode’s blue Toyota on the afternoon of 8 April 2015. At 1 pm Guode loaded the four youngest children into the car and set out, telling Akoi they were going “to visit Grandma” and to take Alual to a medical appointment for her diabetes. But they went instead to Manor Lakes Boulevard in Wyndham Vale. She drove in several slow, random passes along the lake and back and along again. At 2.18 she called Joseph Manyang. He did not answer. At 2.45 her mother called her from Sudan and they spoke for several minutes. She paused at a park and briefly let the stir-crazy children out to play, then drove on. Just after three, Akoi called her twice. Guode said she would be home soon. At 3.40 the passing strangers saw the car airborne and heard it hit the water.

The thrust of the Crown’s opening was that Guode’s crime against four vulnerable and helpless children – this “gross breach of trust” – was “not a quick, spontaneous act”. She had driven back and forth along the lake several times and chosen the only possible entry point. Once in the water she accelerated. She did nothing to save her children or to help strangers who rushed to the scene, but got out through the window, leaving the children inside. She lied to rescuers about the number of children in the car, and she lied to the police investigators. She had shown little or no remorse.

First he named the elephant in the room – “the inevitable comparison with Farquharson”. He dealt with it by quoting a blunt general statement made to a 2004 Victorian Law Reform Commission review of defences to homicide: “While men kill to control or punish their children or partner, women kill children because they cannot cope with the extreme difficulties that they encounter in trying to care for their children.”

At a very young age, it seems, she had learnt from brute reality the pointlessness of protest. She had been obliged to develop what the defence’s forensic psychiatric witness, Dr Danny Sullivan, called “a personality style of extraordinary resilience and stoicism”. And in the face of her many displacements and disappointments she maintained this stoical carapace, said Dempsey, all the way to 2015, by which time she was “utterly broken”.

Justice Lasry pressed Dr Sullivan to point to some specific event that might have pushed Guode over the edge from her “major depressive disorder” – a malaise that everyone agreed strikes much deeper than “normal human misery”, and from which there was no doubt that she profoundly suffered – into a state in which she was capable of killing her own children.

“There must have been something, mustn’t there?” said the judge. “Does it not follow from what she did that there must have been something dramatic which accentuated her condition?”

“In many cases,” said the psychiatrist helplessly, “it can just be the ebb and flow of human suffering, and the person reaching the threshold at which they can … no longer go on.”

No one in a court speaks the language of psychoanalysis, I know, but listening to this description of an ironclad endurance forged in extreme adversity, I remembered a remark by the British analyst Wilfred Bion that had always mystified me but now made sense:

“People exist … in whom pain … is so intolerable that they feel the pain but will not suffer it and so cannot be said to discover it.”

A woman psychiatrist in Melbourne who has worked with many refugees from the Sudanese conflict had described Guode’s experiences to me as “unprocessed – repressed”. Guode was lost in her own numbness. How could she ask for help, or admit – even to herself – how far down she had slid? A woman with seven children to raise, but with no adult companion to love her and help her and hold her together, is not free to let herself go into grieving for her losses.

And perhaps the trigger event that the judge was seeking was not proximate to the crime, but went back to the existential battering she had suffered a year and a half earlier, at the bloody birth of her seventh child. A moment that still haunts me was Guode in the holding bay, refusing to go into the operating theatre – face turned from the fast-talking doctors, eyes closed, hand up: no, no.

Could it be that this woman, widowed, passed from hand to hand and abandoned, overwhelmed by her own fertility, estranged from her community and up to her neck in debt, was prepared to risk bleeding to death on a hospital gurney rather than consent to the surgical removal of the sole symbol of her worth, the site of her only dignity and power: her womb?

Surely, a woman whose life had lost all meaning apart from her motherhood would kill her children only in a fit of madness.

What would follow if he were persuaded by Dempsey’s eloquent plea to consider all Guode’s actions under the merciful shelter of infanticide? Imagine the screaming of the tabloids. Weak judges! Soft on crime! These refugees – they come here and think they can get away with anything!

If Akon Guode did go to prison, she would almost certainly have her visa cancelled once she had served her sentence, and would be deported. If the government paid attention to the country reports issued by its own Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, it could hardly send her back to Sudan, a land racked by civil upheaval and famine, where rape as a tactic in areas of conflict is common and accepted, and women have no protection. The only avenue open to her here would be to apply for a protection visa, and that would be a long shot. Where else could she be sent? Most likely to a detention centre, where she might languish for years, a stateless pariah.

On the train one morning I struck up a conversation with a thoughtful-looking VCE student who was carrying a copy of Euripides’ Medea. I asked her what she made of the famous play. She reeled off the things that students are taught to say about it. I wanted to know if she shared my anxiety. I said, “She did a terrible, terrible thing. But she was very badly treated. She was betrayed. She was —”

The girl flushed and leaned forward. She put out both hands to me, palms up, and whispered,

“But she was – a mother.”

I had no reply.

I was troubled, and I still am, by the finality of the word “mother”, this great thundering archetype with the power to stop the intellect in its tracks.

“The herculean task of being a mother,” said Marcus Dempsey in his final submission, “has now fallen to Akoi.”

In the shadow of this ancient duty, so implacable and profound, can mercy hold up its head?

HELEN GARNER

Helen Garner is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, The Spare Room and This House of Grief.

James Wood writes: Helen Garner inspects both herself and her subjects with savage honesty.

In the early nineteen-sixties, when the Australian writer Helen Garner was a student at the University of Melbourne, she had a brief relationship with a twenty-four-year-old man who was her tutor. With characteristic briskness, she tells us that she learned two things from him:

“Firstly, to start an essay without bullshit preamble, and secondly, that betrayal is part of life.” She continues, “I value it as part of my store of experience—part of what I am and how I have learnt to understand the world.”

A writing lesson and a life lesson: Garner’s work as a journalist and a novelist constantly insists on the connection between writing about life and comprehending it; to try to do both responsibly and honestly—without bullshit preamble, or, for that matter, bullshit amble—is what it means to be alive.

“Honesty” is a word that, when thrown at journalism, unhelpfully describes both a baseline and a vaguer horizon, a legal minimum and an ethical summum.

Too often, we precisely monitor the former and profligately praise the latter. In Helen Garner’s case, we should give due thanks for the former and precisely praise the latter. As a writer of nonfiction, Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life’s secular apocalypses—“a small grim figure with a notebook and a cold,” as she memorably describes herself. She has written with lucid anger about murder cases, about incidents of sexual harassment, about the experience of caring for a friend dying of cancer.