The story below was Highly Commended in the 2026 Grace Marion Wilson Emerging Writers Competition Non-Fiction category, written by Lisa Hunt.
Lisa is a Victorian writer whose creative nonfiction explores memory, trauma, faith, coercive control and the complicated work of reclaiming a life. A survivor of a high-control religious group, she brings lived experience alongside a background in theology, pastoral leadership and survivor advocacy. Her work examines what happens when private experience intersects with power, belief and belonging. Her writing is on Substack: https://cultylove.substack.com/
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.
Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Some people enter a room, and the air changes. When Leo Garbi came near us, the temperature dropped. I was three, maybe four, when he visited our florist shop on High Street Preston, where we lived. I didn’t know what he had done, or what he was capable of, but every time he appeared, my body responded before my mind could catch up. My skin prickled as if tiny ice shards slid beneath it. My hands turned cold and sweaty
When I think of Leo, I smell sardines. I loved sardines on toast, but only if my mother lined all the little tails up so they pointed the same way. I was eating breakfast at the dining room table one morning when I heard the bell above the shop door tingle. I looked up to see Leo Garbi marching through the shop like he owned the place. He didn’t wait at the counter like everyone else did. As soon as I saw him heading towards the living room, I bolted and flew beneath the dinin table. Pressing myself into the shadows, I held my breath until my lungs burned. His coat smelled of oil and tobacco. From beneath the table, all I could see were my mother’s legs and Leo’s as they stood talking. His boots were black and shiney. I remember wishing my father were home. Their voices floated above me while I sat silently, clutching my knees, waiting for him to leave Fea doesn’t need explanation. It recognises its own.
Leo Garbi was always on the edge of our lives, never really part of them, but never gone either. He was Gary’s stepfather. Gary went to primary school with my brother. I was still very young when he came to live with us after my father heard that he was in juvenile court for vagrancy. The judge asked, who would stand up for this boy. My father said that he would and brought him home. He had run away from Leo’s violence. Leo was always spoken about in fragments. His name would surface, then disappear. Conversations stopped. Adults became guarded. As children, we were told both nothing and everything at once. It was hard to know what was a warning, what was a memory, and what was imagination. My fears settled into the spaces between them until even the silence felt dangerous.
I attended the local kindergarten where we learned a song about Leo the Lion, the King of the jungle. One morning, our teacher gathered us in a circle on the old brown carpet and strummed her guitar. The children swayed from side to side singing:
Leo the Lion is the King of the jungle and
His jaws are big and wide,
Leo the Lion, when he roars,
It’s a warning that you’d better run away and hide.
My heart pounded as I sang, but I couldn’t look at the pictures she held up. I was certain the song wasn’t about the Lion. It was about Leo. That’s how fear works in children. It fills the gaps with myth. He became terror walking. Later, much later, the fragments began to make sense.
Leo Garbi went by many names. For years, we thought Leo was short for Leopold. Decades later, I discovered his birth name was Leonardas Garbačauskas. He was Lithuanian, born in 1920. He had six wives, and his children were scattered across families and countries. Behind them lay a trail of violence and silence. Years later, still trying to make sense of the images that had haunted
my childhood, I rang one of his daughters. She answered in a flat, exhausted voice.”He was a Nazi, she said. “I found all his records in a tin chest after he died.” What she confirmed was not a family myth. It was a historical fact.
This wasn’t family rumour or a loose connection. Leonardas Garbačauskas had served in the SS during the Second World War. His name and photograph would later appear in Australian media reports and Holocaust archives in Melbourne. He never tried to hide it. He kept a metal army chest filled with photographs from the war and showed them to the children. He spoke about it almost casually. “If you didn’t join the SS, your family would be killed,” he would say.
History did not stay in Europe. It followed him here. Gary and his family grew up in a state of constant fear and terror. When police finally came for Leo in New South Wales, the family panicked. “Quick, we’ve got to go.” They lived in a caravan for years, always running and hiding. The children were locked in wardrobes to keep them quiet. Their mother and aunt kept loaded guns by the door in case he came back.
He was a violent man. He fired shots into the air “to keep them in line.” He put loaded guns to their heads for a laugh. He broke his daughter’s ribs. Broke her leg. He locked his son in the cupboard for hours. Even after his family escaped, he continued to hunt them. Ringing around to all the neighbours, stalking them from Sydney, refusing to relinquish control. This is what monsters look like in real life. Not horns or fangs, but ordinary men who mistake domination for authority, and violence for discipline. And still, he orbited our world.
I would spend years wondering how a man like Leo Garbi had managed to disappear into suburban Australia. In the summer of 1977, I was fourteen. It was a hot Sunday afternoon. A group of my friends were at our home in Canterbury, eating lunch and swimming between Sunday services. The phone in the hallway rang. I ran to answer it, trying not to drip water all over the carpet as I had just come out of the pool.
“Hello, are you Lisa? Are you Joe Cooper’s daughter?”
“Yes,” I replied, confused.
“My name is Leo Garbi. Do you remember me?”
Quietly, with dread, I whispered, “Yes.”
He snarled. “I’ve just been released from prison. I know what your father is doing. I’m going to blow his fucking head off. Then I’m coming to your house and I’m going to blow your fucking head off.” Silence. The receiver felt cold against my ear. Three sharp cracks rang out. Gunshots. Just like he used to fire into the air to terrify his own children.
“Did you hear that?” he yelled.
“Yes,” I breathed.
“Then you know I’m deadly serious.” The line went dead.
I was shaking, sobbing, incoherent. My sister Kerry and Gary herded us all into a bedroom while Gary ran through the house locking every door. They called the police. Two detectives from Camberwell Police Station arrived. Leo was known to them. Armed and dangerous, they said. The threat was real. We were told to leave the house immediately. “Is there somewhere safe you can go?” one of the detectives asked Kerry. “Take the children away from here. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going until we contact you.” Parents were called. Children were quietly ushered out the back door. My baby sister and I were bundled into my sister’s car and disappeared for four days. No school. No church meetings.
Inevitably, we returned home. I don’t remember being told much else. One day, we were on high alert; the next, life resumed. At fourteen, adults don’t tell you everything. The police, for all their warnings and authority, could only move us for a few days. Once we returned home, their influence ended. In our world, the authority of the church was absolute. The cult leader’s word an that of his elders overruled the police. Obedience came before personal safety.
On Thursday afternoon, I was summoned to a private meeting at Immanuel Church on Mailing Road. I was summoned often. When I entered the office, Ray Jackson sat behind his desk Six male elders were seated on the plush burnt-orange modular couch against the wall. Ray, or “Broer” as he was known, was the unquestioned authority in this world. His word overruled police,
common sense, and even mortal danger. The elders’ faces were grave and withdrawn. None of them met my eyes.
The interrogation began. Why hadn’t I attended the Sunday night service? Why had I missed the Tuesday youth meeting and Wednesday night’s choir rehearsal? I tried to explain. The police. The threat. The fear. Even to me, it sounded like the plot of a B-grade movie. Broer reached for a length of timber beside his desk. He slapped it rhythmically against the palm of his hand. Then he told me to lie face down across the desk.
I had walked to church from Canterbury Girls’ High School, so I was still wearing my short summer school uniform. As I lay across the desk, my underwear was exposed. I was mortified. None looked away. No one objected. These were men who had shared family meals, holidayed with my family, and called themselves friends. As I stared at the floor as I lay across the desk. Wit
humiliation burning through me, a single thought surfaced. I do not deserve this. It was only a flicker, barely enough to hold, but in that moment, it was mine.
Broer spoke calmly. “God comes first, Lisa.” Obedience mattered more than safety. If I truly trusted God, I would have ignored the police. I had a rebellious spirit and, for the sake of my salvation, it had to be beaten out of me. After the beating, I was made to kneel and pray aloud in front of those men. Begging forgiveness, renouncing my rebellion and proving my repentance. I
was fourteen.
When I left the building, something inside me gave way. I walked outside onto the street before the sobs came, great heaving gulps that I couldn’t stop. My older sister Kerry was in the car out front waiting for me. We drove in circles around the Canterbury suburb for more than an hour until I could breathe again. “Why aren’t we going home?” I asked. “If Gary sees you like this,” she said, “he might kill one of them.” That sobered me instantly. This is what I learned that day. There is no terror great enough to excuse disobedience. No danger outranks the cult leader’s authority. There is no mercy. There are only rules.
Those men, the leaders of God’s church, did not protect me. They did not report a credible threat against a fourteen-year-old girl. They did not intervene, advocate, or even pause. Not one of them stood between me and the timber in Broer’s hand. Not one of them said, “This child is not safe.” Instead, they closed ranks. They watched in silence as I was exposed, beaten and humiliated.
They listened while I was forced to grovel and repent for the very act that had saved my life. Their faces were not shocked or conflicted. Their gaze was settled, unwavering, and certain. This was no discipline. It was complicity. No theology explains this. No doctrine redeems it. At fourteen, I learned that evil belongs not only to those who commit it, but also to those who witness it and choose silence.
When Leo Garbi finally died, there was no neat ending. No relief. No closure. At his funeral one of his daughters walked to the front of the room where his body lay in an open coffin. She stood there for a moment next to her brother, looking down at him. Then she reached into her jacket, pulled out a shiv, and stabbed him several times in the chest. Then she walked away. Some would
call it madness. Some would call it a crime. But those words belong to people who have never lived inside terror.
What happened at that coffin was not violence out of nowhere. It was the final, embod truth of a lifetime lived under threat, a lifetime of harm, a body remembering what language could never hold. A reckoning that came too late to protect a child, too late to stop the damage and too late to make it right. It was not justice. But it was testimony.