Helen Garner - True Stories: The Collected Short Non-Fiction

TRUE STORIES collects Helen Garners short non-fiction written over a period of almost fifty years.

This marvellous book traverses the whole landscape of her writing life. It includes her most famous essays about family, about love and sex and death, about growing up and growing old, about birth and marriage and separation, about travel and staying home.

Garners command of the form is extraordinary. Her direct gaze, her honesty, humility and humour, her instinct for the right word and for the shape of a sentence, reveal themselves in essay after essay.

True Stories is the companion volume to Helen Garners Stories: The Collected Short Fiction.

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 drivers 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! Theres people in the water! Someone was screaminga long, wordless wail.

A sales manager ran out of his house and waded into the lake. The water wasnt 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 wouldnt 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-O, 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 drivers door, gazing straight ahead.

Her name was Akon Guode. She was a thirty-five-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 sixteen-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 didnt 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 didnt 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. Hadnt 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 dj 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, three of murder for the twins and for the boy who was not yet two years old.

Like several of my women friends, I flinched from the story yet followed the media reports out of the corner of my eye. We emailed each other, we texted, about women we had known (or had been)single mothers who slammed the door and ran away, or threw a screaming baby across a room, or crouched howling with one hand on the phone, too ashamed to call for help. The flashpoint was the glimpse that the chef had caught as she drove past the clumsily parked Toyota: the frantic mother hunched over the steering wheel, going off her head while in the back her children went berserk. How many times have I been there? whispered my neighbour, a grandmother. I have to know why she broke.

I heard that at the committal hearing, in June 2016, Guode collapsed wailing in the dock. Her counsel had to get down on the floor with her to comfort her. The magistrate found the evidence against her sufficient to commit her to a trial by jury.

Then, at the turn the year, I heard that the Crown had agreed to change the third murder charge, of the toddler, to one of infanticide. Once she was arraigned on this new charge, Guode pleaded guilty to all four counts. This meant that there would be no jury trial, but just a two-day plea hearing in the Supreme Court before Justice Lex Lasry, who in 2010 had heard Robert Farquharsons excruciating second trial and given him three life sentences, with thirty-three years on the bottom.

~

The court documents tell Akon Guodes 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 memberor perhaps one could say a possessionof her late husbands family: she was given to one of his brothers. This is customary once the husband dies, explained an auntie of Guodes at the committal, through an interpreter. You dont go out. You dont go anywhere else. You stay with the same tribe because you got married for cows. As a dowry. Guodes 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 eighteen days, foraging for food along the way. When they got there, another of her late husbands 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 husbands 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, Alualthe only child who, six years later, would emerge alive from the car in the lake. The family name on the babys birth certificate was Chabiet, that of Guodes late husband.

You had no idea you were the father, Joseph Manyang was asked at the committal, until the child was one year old?