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Faraday: A Community Rediscovered
by Robyn Howarth
Self published
$25.00

Reviewed by Robyn Black

More than a book

Sometimes a story sneaks up out of nowhere and lands unexpectedly. Faraday – A Community Rediscovered is one of them. Six little girls. A nineteen-year-old teacher on her first assignment at an isolated, one-teacher school. A small, rural community that should have been a safe place.

On Friday October 6 1972, two masked, gun-wielding maniacs burst into a small country Victorian school at Faraday, near Bendigo, taking the young teacher and her students hostage. Robyn Howarth, the eldest of the children at ten years-old, distinctly remembers thinking – ‘I’m going to tell Dad as soon as I get home. He will be so wild!’ – as a balaclava’d Edwin John Eastwood waved his gun around in a dangerous manner. Working together as plasterers, Eastwood and co-kidnapper Robert Clyde Boland, had hatched a get-rich-quick plan of kidnapping the small school group. They announce: ‘We have nothing to gain by killing you, … but nothing to lose either.’ They leave a note on a desk demanding $1 million dollars and threaten ‘annihilation’ of the hostages if police are involved. This is early 1970s Australia.

Kidnapped and bundled into a van, driven deep into the bush, no food or water, their day clothes are not nearly enough to keep them warm overnight. Menaced by the belligerent, unstable and threateningly violent bandits, the little girls and their brave young teacher are reeling from the sudden change to their normal, safe lives.

Extraordinary events see Premier Dick Hamer approving the payment of the ransom, Education Minister (and Deputy Premier) Lindsay Thompson travelling to the small town of Woodend carrying the $1 million dollars to deliver to the kidnappers, with future Chief Police Commissioner Mick Miller hiding in the back of the car, under a blanket, with a high-powered rifle. The driver was Assistant Police Commissioner Crowley and he was packing a Derringer pistol. Lindsay Thompson had been instructed to duck if anything happened, ‘to give Miller a clean shot.’ The local community sent out search parties and – extraordinarily – rallied to raise ransom funds. The result of it all is a community fractured forever by a tsunami of after-effects from that day.

It has taken Robyn Howarth, whose two little sisters were snatched alongside her, a whole lifetime to get to the point where she can open up and talk about it. And talk she does. The imprisoning in the van. The brave young teacher kicking a back panel of the vehicle out with her knee-high platform-heeled leather boots so they could escape into the bush. Their rescue by local rabbit hunters who were initially mistaken by a country copper’s wife as the kidnappers and who ordered her teenaged son to train a shotgun on their every move until the truth slowly unfolded and the Sergeant returned to the police station. The quietly insidious effect on the children and their parents and families, and the close community, that stretches still, malevolently, over the years.

This is not a sophisticated book. It is not a literary tome, nor edgily contemporary or edited to a slick, smooth degree. This book is an uncomplicated, tender, imperfect yet perfect account of that event and those times from the point of view of a central, young protagonist.

Howarth takes us on a journey through her ten-year-old eyes and the rawness of her simple, yet deeply poignant, intuitive account of those events. It addresses the effects on those closest to the eye of the cyclone and the ever-rippling effects that emanated out over the succeeding years. There was no support or counselling for anyone – it was the age of ‘just getting on with things’.

Howarth initially approached several mainstream publishers with the idea for this book. She was informed it was old news, the story had already been told, and no-one would be interested. They were wrong. With a deep need to tell her story, she self-published.

Howarth says: ‘I am not a writer, I am a nurse,’ yet she beautifully recounts a hauntingly tragic yet stoic story. Howarth may not be a conventionally structured writer, but she is a storyteller. An excellent one. This book is an extremely important account of those events from one who was central to the core. This book addresses and records all the important things that were missed by police, reporters and all the other media stories over the years. This book will open up a whole side of the story you will never have known existed. This book will make you cry.

Book available for purchase from www.robynhowarth.com.au

To read more about author Robyn Howarth click HERE.

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