Romulus, My Father

Raimond Gaita’s memoir, Romulus, My Father (1998), tells the story of Gaita’s father, Romulus, who immigrated to Australia from Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. Romulus suffered from mental illness and struggled to raise his son, Raimond, after the suicide of his wife. The book won the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1998 and was placed on the Victorian Certificate of Education and New South Wales Higher School Certificate English reading lists as a set text used on both final exams. In 2007, a film adaptation starring Eric Bana and Franke Potente was released in Australia.

Since Gaita is recalling events from when he was quite young, Romulus, My Father is an episodic memoir with gaps and some information missing. It was also written after Romulus’s death, so some parts of his life story are incomplete.

Romulus Gaita is born in 1922 in the Romanian-speaking part of Yugoslavia. He identifies as Romanian, as do many of the people in his village. When he is still young, Romulus receives a prophecy from a local fortuneteller, who says that he will travel across a great body of water, lose his wife, and suffer greatly. Though Romulus does not know what to make of this at the time, all the predictions come true over the course of his life.



When he is thirteen, Romulus leaves his hometown and gets work as a farmer’s apprentice. He does this until he is seventeen, at which point he migrates to Austria. Romulus remains in Austria for more than ten years. He marries Christine and they have a son, Raimond. After World War II, the family migrates to Australia on an assisted passage.

The family spends time in a migrant reception camp before they are sent to a small town in Victoria, Australia where they will work as farmers. Romulus meets the Romanian brothers Hora and Mitru, becoming close friends with them. At the time, Raimond is five years old, but he recalls that his father is a principled and moral person. Though Australia is quite new and different from the places the family has lived before, Raimond remembers a general feeling of hopefulness and optimism among the new immigrants.

When Raimond is ten, the family moves into a farmhouse called Frogmore. Christine hates Frogmore, desiring to live in a bigger city with more opportunities open to her. Romulus, who is now working as a blacksmith is frequently away, and Christine eventually attempts suicide. After this, she and Mitru move to Melbourne. Though Raimond initially accompanies them, after a few months he returns to Frogmore to live with his father. It is only later on that he realizes Christine was having an affair with Mitru and she abandoned the family to be with her lover.



In the narrative, Raimond acknowledges that his mother probably had a mental illness, most likely post-partum depression since her symptoms became more severe after Raimond’s birth. In Melbourne, she and Mitru have two more children. However, Mitru commits suicide before the birth of the second daughter, and Christine commits suicide shortly after she is born. Both the girls are adopted, and Raimond loses track of his half-sisters.

Back at Frogmore, Romulus does his best to raise Raimond on his own with the help of Hora. At one point, Romulus thinks that he has the opportunity to marry a Yugoslavian woman so long as he first helps her immigrate to Australia. He sends the woman money for passage but then finds out that she is already married and used the money to help with her own family’s expenses.

After some years at Frogmore, Romulus also begins to experience mental health problems. His behavior becomes erratic and he is eventually sent to a psychiatric hospital. During this period, Hora moves into Frogmore and takes care of Raimond. Eventually, Romulus recovers and returns to Raimond, caring for him until Raimond leaves home for college.



In addition to being a story about his father, Gaita also writes extensively about the immigrant experience. There was a huge influx of immigrants to Australia after World War II, and at one point, nearly three-fourths of the population had been born somewhere besides Australia. Raimond discusses what it is like to be seen as an outsider by native Australians and how his father slowly came to be accepted as part of the community.

The book also includes Gaita’s own memories of the place where he grew up. Romulus remained at Frogmore until his death, though Gaita moved away after college to become an academic. As a child, he was very fond of his home and the surrounding wilderness, and he fills the narrative with distinctive details about life at Frogmore.