When Raimond Gaita published Romulus, My Father in 1998, an account of his father’s life that stemmed from the eulogy he delivered at his father’s funeral, it stirred something deep in Australia; the book “changed the quality of the literary air in this country” as Helen Garner once wrote. It told the story of Gaita’s childhood in Frogmore, Victoria, in the 1960s, an isolated, ancient land that his parents fled to from postwar Europe. Raimond’s mother, Christina, had manic depression and soon left her son and husband to start a new life with one of Romulus’ friends, Mitru. Father and son muddled on through poverty and pain, weathering the sorrow that tied all these lives together.
When actor Richard Roxburgh was given a copy of Romulus, My Father by his sister, he knew immediately he had to adapt it. “When I told my sister, she said, ‘I knew you’d say that.’”
