The Woolshed Falls near the Victorian town of Beechworth carry a torrent of water after rain.
The water tumbles down a fairly steep drop. Adjacent is a sheer cliff, some 20 to 30 metres high. At its base is the pool into which the water from the falls pounds.
I was reminded of the falls this week when hearing of the death of a mother and her five children near Perth. The mother drove her car into an isolated sport, ran a hose from the exhaust and sealed the doors.
Her children, aged two, four, eight and five-year-old twins, died with her. The murder suicide was done with horrible premeditation.
I heard comment through the week that the Perth deaths showed modern society was going haywire. Television was promoting violent solutions. Government polices were causing economic woe and social isolation. And there was the inevitable talk of the “”good old days”.
I grew up in the “”good old days” in Beechworth in the 1960s. And thus I recalled Woolshed Falls this week.
One day in 1961 Mrs Robinson pushed her four children over the cliff next to the falls and then jumped herself. With the same horrible premeditation she pushed them one by one.
My father, who was the Anglican minister in Beechworth at the time, was faced with consoling the husband and conducting the funeral. He said after his retirement that it was the most difficult thing in his life. And he had worked in London in the Blitz, providing funerals for bits of bodies and was chaplain of Beechworth jail and Mental Hospital where practices in the 1960s were not all sweetness and light.
Someone had to take the funeral from beginning to end with the four little white coffins in the Beechworth church – children of our small town in our small church.
At the funeral, the media crowded, mostly press and, I think, either Movietone news or Cinemascope were there. Maybe television people, but Beechworth didn’t have TV then, though Melbourne did. The press photographers had those big cameras with large circular flashes. They jostled and hassled. Some things do not change.
Others do.
One of the cousins of the dead children was in my class, Grade 5, at Beechworth State School. The day before she returned to school after only a few days away our teacher, Mr Rassmussen – primary school teachers didn’t have given names in the 1960s, — told us we were not to talk about the case among ourselves or certainly to Gwen on pain of the strap.
It was the best-intentioned cruelty.
A silence stole through the school and the town. The town’s secret was put away. In so far as it was dealt with it was a matter for religion. There was no other help. Otherwise the event was treated with superstition, as if to recall it invited bad luck. As if to recall invited unwelcome personal apraisal of responsibility. As children we never knew what adults thought of it, or what we should think of it. Was the whole town responsible? The idealised close-knit communities of 1961 – pre-drugs, pre-permissiveness, pre-pill – could no more prevent the deaths or be responsible for them than today’s society. Both societies fall short in supporting women with small children — women who get no peace, no let up. Going back to the 50s or 60s is no solution.
In Perth this week, I suspect the aftermath of the tragedy is being treated differently. More professional help in addition to religious help. More questions being asked, more discussion and, no doubt, the school will do better than my school in the “”good old days” in Beechworth.