Matthew Horder is the first person to tell you that he was never a writer. At school, he wasn’t a fan of English class and essays were a chore.
But when his life was turned upside down in the most traumatic of circumstances, he found himself reaching for pen and paper.
The result? A gripping true story that has been endorsed by one of Australia’s top political figures.
On the morning of July 18, 2014, Matthew awoke in his Sunshine Coast home to find multiple missed phone calls from his two brothers. He knew something wasn’t right and quickly dialled his brother Adam back.
Adam answered and had trouble speaking, as Matt’s heart pounded in his chest.
“Is everything okay?”
“I think Mum and Dad’s plane has crashed.”
Head spinning, confused and unable to believe the words he was hearing, Matthew listened as his brother told him to turn the television on. Vision of a burned-out wreckage of a plane played on a loop; the words, ‘Malaysia Airlines flight crashed – no survivors’, emblazoned across the bottom of the screen.
Commercial flight Malaysia Airlines MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers and crew on board, including 38 Australians. Among them were Brisbane residents Howard and Susan Horder, Matthew’s parents, aged 63 and 62, respectively. They had been returning from a wonderful holiday in Europe.
The plane had come down near a small village in the Donetsk region, an area that was already deep in conflict. What had once been home to wheat and sunflower farms had become scarred by fighting between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists. By mid-2014, with the war taking to the skies, airspace below 32,000 feet was closed, but commercial flights, just like MH17, were still flying above that height.
When MH17 disappeared from the radar, suspicion turned to the separatists controlling the territory. At the time, Russia’s role was strongly suspected, but not yet formally established.
The Australian government worked closely with the Netherlands to secure a landmark United Nations Security Council Resolution, which enabled officials to conduct a legal investigation.
What transpired was months and years of joint research, both on and off the ground – criminal trials, DNA and repatriation processes. For Matthew and his family, it also meant nerve-racking and emotionally draining travel to the Netherlands, as well as navigating the grief of losing their loved ones in the most unimaginable way.
Working closely alongside the Australian Federal Police and political leaders, including the then Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Minister of Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop, Matthew was entrenched every step of the way. He was a son who didn’t want the details to disappear. And so a seed of an idea began.
“If I’m being really honest, I was never going to write a book,” he tells salt. “Writing a book would have been one of the worst things on my ‘to do’ list.
“But when Mum and Dad died, right from the early part of it all, I started to say things like, ‘I should really write all this down. I should record it so my kids have it’. That talk turned into, ‘I should write a book’. Not necessarily to publish it, but just to have it.”
One thing led to another, and now Matthew is the proud self-published author of the soon-to-be-released, The Day the Sky Fell – A Family Forever Changed by MH17.
“I can honestly say until now, the biggest thing I had ever written was 3000 words and now here’s my book, sitting at 63,000 words,” he says.
“It was an incredible challenge just to write the first draft. Everything was in there, inside, I just had to get it out. Some days it wasn’t easy. The topic and the content are quite heavy. I would literally be in tears some days. I am still in tears when I read it. It’s horrific, but it’s all true, and it happened to our family.”
The Day the Sky Fell begins with a foreword by Ms Bishop, who credits the book for its raw honesty.
“Grief is portrayed not as something to be overcome quickly, but as a lifelong companion that reshapes identity and purpose. Matthew’s access to the investigative process offers key insights into the dedication of the investigators, police and forensic experts who laboured tirelessly to turn wreckage into testimony. Their work honoured the victims and gave voice to the families’ demand that truth prevail,” she writes.
“This memoir is more than a personal story. It is a testament to resilience, to the enduring power of love in the face of loss and to the importance of pursuing justice, no matter how protracted or challenging.”
Matthew says writing his family’s story has given him the opportunity to process the loss and his subsequent post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“There’s no tidy sequence of emotions when you lose someone suddenly, violently and without warning, especially not in something as public, political and brutal as MH17,” he writes in the book.
“The grief isn’t neat. It’s chaotic. It comes in waves that knock you down when you least expect it. And in those early days, the waves don’t stop coming. There is no doubt that I was in shock, a kind of numb disbelief. There is sadness, anger, guilt and fear. There is no order, no way of knowing what will come next.”
The anger remains to this day, but it has mellowed somewhat. Matthew says he still struggles with knowing he will likely never be able to visit the crash site and pay his respects due to the ongoing conflict in the region.
And while his trauma is evident in his writing, the real thread weaving its way through his words is the story of hope.
“So much of what happened and is still happening, we simply can’t control. When I think about the perpetrators and the Russian regime… it is easy to be angry and hateful, but I don’t want to live my life like that. I choose to be happier and do things that are much more meaningful,” Matthew says.
“I keep circling back to something I knew but has proven to be true: writing the book has been really important from a healing and personal perspective.
“There is an acceptance now of what I can and can’t do and what I can put my energy into.”
One of these more positive outcomes is the Seeds of Hope project. In 2014, in a beautiful gesture, Australian journalist Paul McGeough collected sunflower seeds from the crash site for the victims’ families. The seeds were quarantined and grown in a secure lab before being released. Matthew received 17 of those first-generation seeds, planted them in his backyard and has since harvested successive generations each year.
The seeds are now donated to Sunshine Coast-based charity endED, where they are grown at the House of Hope in Woombye and shared as part of the project, which supports people recovering from eating disorders.
“It’s a nice legacy to keep going. These seeds are benefiting so many more people than just me or the other victims’ families. It’s about sharing that hope.”
This is the message that Matthew wishes readers will take from his book.
“It is not about Russia or the criminals. It is about family. About family, strength and connection. For people who have gone through sudden loss or grief, I hope they can read our story and see there is a way through.”
The Day the Sky Fell will be launched at an event on April 18. matthewhorder.com.au