Two things I never expected when I started I Had a Father in Karratha by Annette Trevitt –

1. That the very last line of a book would make me burst into tears (especially having not cried prior to that)
2. That a memoir about being the executor of a will would be one of the best books I’ve read this year (and will most certainly be in my favourites for 2024).

When Annette was very young, her father (bankrupt) abandoned the family and moved to the remote town of Karratha. He began a roofing business and, as the region was in the middle of the mining boom, he did well. He invested in seven properties; was much-loved in his community; and drove 5,000km each year to see his children.

Dad never had a plan. He would just turn up sometime in our school holidays. The visits were tough going, emotional, especially the departures. I knew Dad loved us but it was hard to understand why, if he loved us, he still wanted to leave us.

In 2016, he died unexpectedly at the age off 77. Over the following two-and-a-half years, Annette was tasked with untangling his estate – decades of hoarded junk, bank debts, rundown properties and lost paperwork.

I felt we were cleaning up the aftermath of 40 years of dad’s people-pleasing and problem-fixing.

To add complexity to an already stressful task, Annette lived in Melbourne (so was essentially a FIFO executor!); was a single parent to her teenage son; and was in the middle of escalating work issues and job insecurity. As the extent of her father’s debt became evident, Annette’s anxiety rose –

One house’s insurance premium was $1,242 a month. The house was an ordinary four-bedroom Pilbara corrugated iron house. (The rent was $1,600 a month.). How was that possible?

Annette notes that her father ‘…trusted the bank in the same way he would have trusted a bank in the 1970s…’, a time when banks were an integral part of communities, particularly in regional towns, and when bank managers personally knew their customers.

The focus of the book is on the misconduct and unscrupulous lending practices of the banking and insurance industry, and in particular their lack of care for vulnerable customers. Annette provides plenty of evidence, with details of her father’s multiple unsustainable mortgages, his overdraft and the small business loans taken out to cover the never-ending interest.

My father was a private man. He was a proud man. If he had told me his financial situation, he would never have been in this terrible situation. I would never have let a retired 77-year-old man, who spent 42 years on hot tin roofs in the Pilbara, allow himself to be set up to lose everything.

Snapshots of Annette’s visits to Karratha and life in Melbourne were beautifully written. Her reflections on parenting and suburban Melbourne were so relatable, it was as if she had access to my passing thoughts –

Today, instead of marking, I had a neck/shoulder massage by a woman called Song who called me, Sir, and had the thumbs of a carnival strong man. Sublime.

Marlon played footy on Sunday in a field of white goods hurling themselves at each other. Fridges with wispy moustaches.

On the plane. Already made a nest of books, notes on the meeting’s agenda, sudokus and unread photocopied articles around me. When, in ten minutes, we know, I’m going to flick on the inflight entertainment and watch whatever comes on for the next four hours.

– and her writing was engaging, with glimpses of the grief that she was clearly working hard to keep at bay. In textbook terms, people generally need to deal with their losses ‘in order’, therefore it is not surprising that much of Annette’s story is focused on her dad leaving the family rather than the immediate grief over his death –

For years I thought I had one memory of living with Dad. A time when I had gone to his chest of drawers looking for one of his hankies. The hankie drawer was too high to look in so I had to feel around. All I felt, and can still feel, was the dry plywood lining of an empty drawer. The memory wasn’t of him. He had already gone. It was a memory of loss.

I Had a Father in Karratha is a cautionary tale. Annette is not the first person to battle the bureaucracy of death, but her story stands out (and if my recommendation is not enough, check out Lisa’s review).

4/5

Dad loved lots of things – words, word play, cryptic crosswords, old Warner Bros carttons, Calvin and Hobbes comics, Jacques Tati films, garlic prawns, family members getting on with each other, the colours of the Pilbara, his gum trees, the iron-ore trains, the Rec Club, his Bible, his friends, his roofs and singing.