I Had a Father in Karratha

Following the sudden death of her father, Annette Trevitt becomes a regular visitor to Karratha as the executor of her father’s will. What follows is an almost three-year journey to untangle the web he has left behind. Between Karratha and Melbourne, Trevitt balances her career as a tertiary educator and the sole parenting of her teenage son.

I Had a Father in Karratha is a deeply intimate memoir. Trevitt trusts us with the bizarre, messy, and plain ugly of death proceedings. Told in both text message and prose, we are invited to understand the unique workings of her family unit. At the same time, it is a familiar story of greed and misconduct that is a common practice of Australian banks. Trevitt describes her father as a man who ‘trusted the bank in the same way he would have trusted a bank in the 1970s’. She discovers her father’s trust was exploited with unethical lending practices that led to multiple, unsustainable mortgages. Running concurrently alongside The Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking Industry, her father’s experience seems symptomatic of a broken system.

Trevitt’s voice is confident and raw, at times harnessing the authority of the grown up, and at others the bewilderment of the child. She masterfully captures the experience of grief as a largely bureaucratic affair. In handling demands for cancellation fees of landlines, she must nominate the cause of cancellation: death. She also demonstrates how in times of extreme hardships our relationships can be held together by text messages. How we pick up after one another in both life and death. I Had a Father in Karratha is a forceful memoir about losing a loved one, and while that subject matter is not unique, this book feels singular.