On December 12, 1945, my mother murdered her father. Four years later, on the same day, December 12, I was born. This is the story of why my mother killed her father, a Gallipoli veteran. When Louis Nowra was growing up no one talked about his grandfather Robert Herbert. In this book he reveals the truth, and includes the service in The Great War, for decades hidden behind family myths. Louis’ grandfather’s father was a murderer who avoided the law by changing his name. Eventually he and his son ended up in the Victorian hamlet of Strath Creek, an idyllic way of life. His grandfather served from Gallipoli to the Western Front where, at Pozieres, he was buried alive twice and badly wounded. Robert Herbert returned to Strath Creek in 1919 a man changed from carefree larrikin into a brooding, guilt-stricken veteran. He married a local woman and they lived in a soldier settlement farm until their young daughter drowned in a well. The grieving couple left Strath Creek for a nearby town, Broadford. They had four more children. Louis’ grandfather proved to be unstable and violent and was treated many times at the Repatriation Hospital in Caulfield When the second World War came, his older son joined up, and his daughter Gloria, Louis’ mother, a beautiful 18-year-old, married a handsome Indonesian officer in 1944 who then sailed to Java in 1945 to fight in the revolution. It was in her St Kilda flat that she killed her father. The inquest and trial were a sensation, and both eventually revealed the terrible truth about Gloria’s father and the family itself. Louis’ mother remarried but was unstable and prey to horrifying moods that affected her children, including Louis. Even now, this ghostly figure haunts the family. This is a remarkable book about the aftermath of war and the ways that societies continue to disregard the upending of lives and the trauma of service in the war ‘effort’.
