The First Stone

by Helen Garner

  – Right.

  – And I can complete the whole story there. The Vice-Master was next to me in this group. There were a number of couples dancing, then the music changed to more slow-style dancing, or different style, which required traditional dance hold. We danced for approximately a record, whatever it is, three or four minutes, and then I danced with somebody else.

  – I will just read you a passage from Nicole’s statement, and then put that situation to you. ‘I could feel that there was pressure where his hand was being raised up my back. He then moved his right hand across my ribs and placed it flat against my left breast.’ Do you have any memory of that action at all?

  – I deny that emphatically. I did not do that. My hand was on her back, at that stage of traditional dancing. My right hand was on her back, my left hand was holding her right hand, and that was it.

  – I further put it to you, from Nicole’s statement, ‘His right hand cupped my left breast. His hand was completely covering my left breast and he was applying pressure as he did this.’

  – I absolutely deny that totally. I couldn’t do that because my right hand was on her back.

  – I put it to you that Nicole moved your hand away from her breast and placed it back at her waist. Do you have any memory of that?

  – I totally deny that that took place. It was a normal traditional dance. She was certainly a very vigorous dancer and I am not a good dancer – but we just stood and shuffled around a bit, from my point of view.

  – Right. I put it to you that after she placed your hand back on her waist area, the same thing happened again – reading from Nicole’s statement: ‘I placed his right hand to the rear of my waist. He did the same thing again. He again kneaded my back as he raised his right arm up my back, and his right hand came across my ribs over to my front and he placed his right hand over my left breast, exactly the same as before.’

  – I totally deny that.

  – And that again you applied pressure to her breast.

  – Absolutely not.

  – Did Nicole break from the dance? Or did the dance simply finish?

  – No, the dance simply finished. And then I danced with somebody else, and she danced with somebody else.

  – Did you notice any change in character or . . . emotions from Nicole from the start of the dance to the finish?

  – None whatsoever. Not only that, but I had no knowledge that night of any untoward action at all, or that she felt there was – and I didn’t know about it till (the following) March. In the days that followed there was no complaint or indication whatsoever . . . (until) on the fourth of March, a document headed COLIN SHEPHERD SHOULD BE SACKED was placed under everybody’s door at the college, placed over notice-boards and circulated widely in the college and in the university. I became aware of the allegations and the people who were making them on the tenth of March 1992, when I was handed them by a solicitor, who was conducting an inquiry . . . for the college council.

  – Do you have any . . . opinion . . . as to why Nicole would make these type of allegations if they are not true?

  – No. No idea at all.

  . . .

  – Mr Shepherd, at this stage we are going to continue the investigation into the alleged offences. At some later stage you may be charged with indecent assault, with unlawful assault. I just have to warn you again that you are not obliged to say or do anything unless you wish to do so. Whatever you say or do may be recorded and given in evidence. Do you understand this?

  – I understand this and I deny the allegations totally and emphatically.

  . . .

  – Mr Shepherd, I am now obliged to put some questions to you in relation to fingerprinting.

  One morning in August 1992 I opened the Age at breakfast time and read that a man I had never heard of, the Master of Ormond College, was up before a magistrate on a charge of indecent assault: a student had accused him of having put his hand on her breast while they were dancing.

  I still remember the jolt I got from the desolate little item: Has the world come to this? All morning at work I kept thinking about it. I got on the phone to women friends of my age, feminists pushing fifty. They had all noticed the item and been unsettled by it. ‘He touched her breast and she went to the cops? My God – why didn’t she get her mother or her friends to help her sort him out later, if she couldn’t deal with it herself at the time?’ And then someone said what no doubt we had all been thinking: ‘Look – if every bastard who’s ever laid a hand on us were dragged into court, the judicial system of the state would be clogged for years.’

  At this we laughed, in scornful shrieks. There was even a kind of perverse vanity in it, as among veterans of any tedious ordeal. It never occurred to any of us that a man accused of such an act might be innocent. But all that day I experienced repeated rushes of horror. I didn’t stop to analyse these feelings. I just sat down and wrote the man a letter.

  Dear Dr Shepherd,

  I read in today’s paper about your troubles and I’m writing to say how upset I am and how terribly sorry about what has happened to you. I don’t know you, or the young woman; I’ve heard no rumours and I have no line to run. What I want to say is that it’s heartbreaking, for a feminist of nearly fifty like me, to see our ideals of so many years distorted into this ghastly punitiveness. I expect I will never know what ‘really happened’, but I certainly know that if there was an incident, as alleged, this has been the most appallingly destructive, priggish and pitiless way of dealing with it. I want you to know that there are plenty of women out here who step back in dismay from the kind of treatment you have received, and who still hope that men and women, for all our foolishness and mistakes, can behave towards each other with kindness rather than being engaged in this kind of warfare . . .

  I posted this letter and went about my business, thinking that this would be the extent of my involvement in the matter. Like any other scanner of the local news, I followed the case with sporadic attention and the occasional sharp twinge of alarm. I noted that the magistrate had found proven the charge that Dr Shepherd had indecently assaulted the girl he was dancing with, but that no conviction was recorded; Dr Shepherd planned to appeal. Then, late in August, the second set of allegations appeared in the papers. They made painful reading, in the blunt language of the Age court reporter.

  The woman, a 21-year-old law student, alleged that Dr Shepherd assaulted her in his locked office during a late-night student party . . . The woman, who cannot be identified, has alleged that Dr Shepherd had locked his study door and turned the overhead light off. She said he had told her she was really beautiful, and that he fantasised about her photograph and often had indecent thoughts about her. She said Dr Shepherd cupped her breasts in his hands and squeezed them. Dr Shepherd denies the allegations. The woman alleged Dr Shepherd had asked her whether he could make ‘indecent advancements’ towards her. Dr Shepherd said this phrase offended him in its grammar and immorality, and he never used language of that kind.

  Dr Shepherd said he had spoken to the woman in his study. She had started the conversation in a bizarre way by provocatively asking whether he would have her name, followed by the words ‘for ever’, tattooed on his body. Dr Shepherd said it was clear what reply she wanted, so he decided to call her bluff and say ‘Of course’. He said he spoke to the woman about her course, and university and college matters, but it was an unsatisfactory and weird conversation because it jumped from one subject to another. ‘I felt that she was very dazed and confused,’ Dr Shepherd said. ‘I was not exactly sure of the reason. I had my own theories.’

  In denying the student’s allegations that he had knelt by her chair when making these approaches to her, Dr Shepherd produced evidence that because of a hip condition he was unable to kneel at all, ‘even in church’.

  Cross-examined by Dr Shepherd’s QC, the woman said she had told Dr Shepherd that her three aims in life were to own a Ferrari, a diamond necklace, and for someone to have her name ta
ttooed on them. She denied she had asked Dr Shepherd whether he would be so tattooed.

  She said her sister had applied to Ormond College and because she was concerned about harming her sister’s chances she did not make a complaint about the incident to the college until early this year, after her sister was accepted. ‘Going to the police was the last resort after the college had failed to deal with it adequately,’ she said.

  What sort of people could these be? On 2 September, the morning when the judgement was to be delivered, I got on a bus and went downtown to the Magistrates’ Court.

  The room was very small. People were shoving to get in. I couldn’t see anything but the backs of strangers’ heads. The magistrate took only a few minutes to announce his findings, in a muffled voice. He said that although he thought something had occurred to distress the young woman who had brought the complaint, doubt remained in his mind as to what had happened in the study. The student, he said, was a spirited, forthright person, with many friends who cared about her; and Dr Shepherd had led an unblemished life privately and professionally, and was highly regarded. The case came down to oath against oath; and Dr Shepherd received the benefit of the doubt. The magistrate dismissed the charge. The police were ordered to pay Dr Shepherd’s costs of $15800.

  The footpath outside the court was thronged with camera crews and press photographers, cruising like sharks for meat. I was ashamed and walked away. As I stood on the corner of Russell and La Trobe Streets, a group of young women from the court drifted past me and waited at the lights. They were striking girls, stylish in the understated manner of middle-class university students; full-faced, red-lipped, long-haired, wearing flat heavy shoes. They moved on to the pedestrian crossing in loose formation, not speaking to each other. They looked vague and confused, as if they hadn’t yet grasped what had just happened. I wondered if the girl in the study, and the dancing one, were among them. For the first time I felt sorry for the young students. They were of an age to have been my daughters. I wondered who was looking after them, or advising them. I asked myself what advice I would have given them. I thought, They don’t know what to do next.

  Anyone who is familiar with the inner suburbs of Carlton and Parkville knows Ormond College. It is the most spectacular (though not quite the oldest) of Melbourne University’s residential colleges, a massive Scottish neo-Gothic pile across the road from the Melbourne General Cemetery. Crowned by a high, pointed tower, flanked by tennis courts and deep gardens and car parks, it is shielded from College Crescent by thick pittosporum hedges which blossom sweetly in spring. But Ormond is famous for more than its size and its beauty. It radiates power. Its foundations are deep in private patronage and in the Presbyterian (now Uniting) Church; it is the site of the Theological Hall, where clergy are trained; and it is a way-station, for the ambitious and privileged middle class, between the big Protestant private schools of Victoria and the professions of law, medicine, engineering and science. Who’s Who is thickly studded with Ormond alumni. Ormond is an institution which cares about its reputation.

  Non-university people are sometimes puzzled by the function of Ormond’s resident tutors, of whom there might be as many as fifty in any given year: like all residential colleges, Ormond offers tutorial classes additional to the teaching provided by the university proper, but these classes are not compulsory: they are an integral part of an old dream – the college not as a glorified dormitory but as a community of scholars.

  Like many ordinary citizens I had often, over the years, used Ormond’s grounds as a thoroughfare on my way to work or to the city, and around the time of Colin Shepherd’s trials I took up this habit again. I would ride my bike along a lane fringed with old peppercorn trees, behind a row of pale stone houses where the theology professors lived, and through a wire gate on to the Ormond grounds. The casual eye saw no signs of trauma. Hoses swung their arcs over lawns and shrubbery, and in the tall eucalypts magpies warbled. In the upper storeys of the huge main building, windows stood open on a sunny morning. Except for the odd overalled gardener, no one was about. The students had bolted their breakfast and rushed away to their classes at the university. This was a place where people lived, and slept: a sort of home.

  Once or twice, stirred by a vague curiosity, I chained my bike to a post and pushed open the vast front doors. The hallways, permanently chill whatever the weather, were built on a scale so grandiose as to be almost comic, like the haunts of robber barons. Photographs from earlier eras had been blown up, mounted and hung along the passage walls: black-and-white pictures of sombre sporting teams, of the casts of Greek plays, of students puffing on manly pipes beside open fires, or lounging insolently in doorways with their hands plunged deep in the pockets of high-waisted trousers which gave surprising prominence, in several cases, to their genitals. The only women to be seen in this gallery of privilege (apart from a couple of intellectuals with Ormond connections, whose portraits had obviously been added as a recent afterthought under feminist pressure or by some committee with a guilty conscience) stood with clasped hands beside tables at which young men prepared to attack their food in the enormous, shadowy dining hall. These women wore white caps and large white aprons: they were maids.

  Stepping in from the beautiful gardens, with their flowing lines and spring foliage, I felt the halls in their grandeur to be overwhelmingly masculine: spartan, comfortless, forbidding. I had to pinch myself to remember that Ormond College, though originally established for men and their needs, had been admitting women as resident students for almost twenty years. To the passing observer, the presence of women seemed to have left no mark.

  On 21 September 1992, the Age reported that Colin Shepherd’s appeal against the guilty finding on the dancing charge was to be heard that morning in the County Court. Again, I went, hoping to see the central characters in the drama, to learn something from their faces about what had brought them to loggerheads; and this time, though it was rather late in the piece to be feeling what Janet Malcolm calls ‘the familiar stirrings of reportorial desire’, some instinct made me put my notebook in my bag.

  In the crowded hall outside the court I noticed a huddle of young women sitting on a bench. They were leaning forward, silent, intent on what was being said to them by a thin-faced, thin-bodied woman in her forties. I hurried past them, keen to get a seat.

  The court was filling fast. The mood in the room was severe. Two sorts of people, caricaturally different from each other, stood out in the crowd: old, thin, grey-haired, grey-suited Ormond men with stern faces and upright spines, a type I had privately thought of, since childhood, as ‘Presbyterian’; and young women (also some young men) with the fresh skin, free body language and easy clothes of students.

  A middle-aged couple was seated close to the front. I could see only their backs, but from the attitudes and glances of the people around them, I knew they must be Colin Shepherd and his wife. The man’s pale grey suit was stretched tightly across his bulky shoulders. His hair was whitish, thinning, fly-away. The woman had pinned up her long brown hair, but strands of it had come loose and rested against her neck and on her shoulders. On the man’s other side sat a teenage boy. The angle of his neck and the shape of his shoulders in his suit resembled the man’s: plainly he was the couple’s son. The three of them sat motionless, speaking to no one, looking straight ahead, like people waiting for a church service to begin. They made a small island of stillness in the flurry of the court.

  The first witness called was Nicole Stewart. She stepped gamely into the box, a slim, pretty woman in her early twenties, with dark eyebrows, and blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. She wore spectacles, pearl earrings, a red jacket. She looked physically slight, but her presence was impressive and firm: I had imagined an uptight ideologue, not this composed person. The only sign of agitation was that her hands looked purple, as if with cold. She stated that she was a fourth-year law student, and that at the time of the alleged incidents she had been studying arts/law at Melbourne Unive
rsity.

  The barrister acting for Colin Shepherd was a dapper, fit-looking individual of forty-something. He drew from Nicole Stewart her account of the evening in question.

  After the Valedictory Dinner, she said, she went to the Smoko in the Junior Common Room. She had not drunk any alcohol before the dinner, and the ‘College red wine’ served at the meal was not, she said, ‘something I particularly enjoyed drinking’. Several people in the court laughed. At the Smoko, she went on, alcohol was being served from a bar set up in the quadrangle. There was music, but no food. She drank ‘two small cups of cider’, and spent this part of the evening ‘talking, dancing and socialising’.

  Then, at about a quarter to twelve, she saw Colin Shepherd in a corner of the Junior Common Room. Her friend invited Dr Shepherd to join their group of four or five people and dance with them.

  Three fast numbers were played, then came a slow one. ‘Dr Shepherd,’ said Nicole Stewart, ‘pulled me into a ballroom stance. He had one hand on the small of my back, and the other on my shoulder. Kneading as he went, he moved his right hand up my ribs, then placed it flat on my breast and squeezed it.

  ‘I removed it, and placed it back down on my waist. But Dr Shepherd repeated the action. I was very upset at this. I said, “Excuse me – I have to go and get a drink.” I went outside to my friends.’