by Helen Garner
At this point the judge interrupted to offer Nicole Stewart a glass of water. He asked her if she would prefer to be seated. She said, ‘Could I have a seat, just in case?’ The judge called for a spare seat, and Dr Shepherd’s wife, in a strange reflex of helpfulness, looked around her as if for a chair.
‘I found my friends,’ Nicole continued. ‘I told them that the Master had groped me, that he had grabbed my breast. I was worried that he would ask me to dance again, so I asked one of them to dance with him. I went back to the Junior Common Room.
‘Ten minutes later, Dr Shepherd came into the Junior Common Room carrying two drinks. He appeared to be looking for me, to dance with me again. But my friend grabbed his hand and danced with him.
‘I left the group, and talked for twenty minutes to other friends. I was very shocked. I was attempting to socialise with these people and not managing to.’
The QC asked her about Dr Shepherd’s sobriety.
‘He was inebriated,’ she said, ‘but not drunk. He was flushed, and unsteady on his feet.’
This struck me as a fine calibration of drunkenness, characteristic of someone who had been around drinkers: an Ormond student’s estimation.
‘I went to walk out to the quad,’ continued Nicole. ‘I sat on the front steps with my friend and talked about what had happened, about what I’d do. I wanted some time to myself. I walked home to my boyfriend, and told him what had happened.’
Now the QC really got to work on her. Into his tone, neutral so far, he introduced the acid that chills a listener’s blood, casting doubt, as it is meant to do, upon the whole moral fabric of the witness. He pestered and nitpicked. He described with mock relish the food that had been served at the Valedictory Dinner. He addressed Nicole as ‘Madam’ with the sarcasm that can lie behind what men have traditionally called chivalry. And when he got to the nub of her allegations, he squarely challenged her.
‘The first time,’ he said, ‘you didn’t move away from him.’
‘I didn’t want to believe,’ said Nicole, ‘that someone in that position would have done that.’
The QC leaned forward and turned up his chin. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘didn’t you slap ’im?’
The word rang in the air, sharp as a palm against a cheek. My skin prickled; a ripple ran round the court. You bastard, I thought – every woman in the room could answer that question.
‘I was financially dependent on this man,’ said Nicole. ‘Of course I didn’t slap him.’
‘You didn’t walk away? Did you continue to dance with him?’
‘He was holding me,’ said Nicole. ‘I wouldn’t describe it as dancing. He was holding me. It happened very fast.’
‘Why didn’t you say, “Stop it! Don’t do that!”?’
‘I thought,’ said Nicole, ‘that by removing his hand I’d indicated that.’
The QC charged onwards. He plunged Nicole into a morass of confusing details about the whereabouts, in the Junior Common Room, of the dancing. Then he brought up the matter of Nicole’s having asked her girlfriend for help.
‘You said to your friend, “The Master’s just groped me. Can you come and dance with him? I’m worried that he’s going to try to dance with me again.” He touched you twice on the breast – and you ask her, your “best friend”, to dance with a man who’s just groped you? A man, Madam, who was “inebriated”?’
‘Inebriated,’ insisted Nicole, ‘but not drunk. She’d danced with him earlier, and he didn’t give her a hard time.’
Now the QC attacked what he called discrepancies between her statement to the police and what she was saying to the court. ‘You didn’t say to the police, in February 1992, which hand of the Master touched which of your breasts. You didn’t specify that you and the Master were dancing when the incident occurred.’ He handed her the statement and she scanned it silently.
‘He put his hand flat on my breast,’ said Nicole, ‘and cupped it.’
‘Cup?’ said the QC. ‘You said squeeze.’
‘You have to cup a breast,’ said Nicole with a short laugh, ‘in order to squeeze it.’
No one in the court shared her laughter. She asked for a break. The judge granted it. He was courteous to her, and watchful.
Next, the QC came in on another angle. It was explained to the court that since Nicky was a student whose place in the college was paid for by the Ormond Bursary Fund, the Master was the person she had to consult every year about the continuation and the amount of her bursary.
‘You also,’ said the QC, ‘were employed part-time at Ormond College as a librarian, to help you.’
Nicole bristled. ‘Not just “to help me”,’ she snapped. ‘Others were employed too.’
‘Just answer,’ said the judge.
‘You had a library job,’ pursued the QC. ‘In February 1992 you had a brief conversation with Dr Shepherd about your bursary. When you saw him around the college that summer, did you ever suggest to him that he’d done wrong at the Smoko? Did you say to him, “I don’t feel comfortable conversing with you”?’
‘No,’ said Nicole. ‘But I told the Vice-Master.’
‘In the meantime, though, things had happened. Were you disgusted? Did you feel he should not have remained as Master? You had no respect for him any more? But you asked him for a reference for your articles, in December 1991.’
‘Yes, I did,’ said Nicole, ‘because I felt it would be strange if I didn’t. But I didn’t use it. I used the reference I got from the Vice-Master.’
The matter of Nicole’s dress on the night in question was raised.
‘You were wearing,’ said the QC, consulting his notes, ‘“a black tight short skirt with a low-cut top”.’
‘With straps,’ said Nicole.
‘Otherwise no covering?’ said the QC smoothly. ‘And how was your hair, on that night?’
‘It was out.’
‘Not pulled back, in whatever you call the way you’ve got it today? I’m afraid I’m not very good at this type of thing.’ He smiled at the court, a man bemused by the arcane rituals of women’s self-presentation. No one gratified him by laughing.
The day after the Smoko, Nicole said, she told two senior women members of the college what had happened at the party. They advised her to do her exams first and then deal with it, and this is what she did. After her exams she worked over the summer in the library. She wrote a brief outline of the events, which a fellow-student took to the High Court judge who was then the chairman of the college council. Later she submitted this statement, plus a fuller one, to the ‘Group of Three’ sub-committee which had been set up by the council to assess the complaints. Wanting to go through all available internal procedures, Nicole had also seen the director of the Melbourne University counselling service. It was not till after the Group of Three submitted its findings to the council, upon which the council expressed full confidence in the Master, that Nicole had gone to the police.
A young woman who said she had been good friends with Nicole Stewart for three and a half years told the court she had seen the Master watching their group dancing at the Smoko, and that she had asked him to dance with them. The Master was reluctant, but accepted the offer, and danced with the group. The Master was still dancing when she went outside to get a drink. Soon Nicole Stewart came out and joined her.
‘She asked me to make sure the Master was occupied – to keep him away from her. She said he had touched her, twice. I was shocked. She was very upset, flushed, repeating herself – bewildered and shocked. She tried to get people to come with her, to dance with the Master. I danced with him for as short a time as possible – less than a minute. Out in the quad, with other friends, we spoke about what had happened to Nicky. After half an hour, she couldn’t stay at the Smoko. I talked with her on the front steps for half an hour, and then she went home. She didn’t want to be walked home.’ Asked about Nicole’s sobriety, the friend replied, ‘Approximately the same as mine – she was not drunk.’
Cros
s-examined by the QC, Nicole’s girlfriend tried not to bite; but her tone developed, under pressure, into a kind of casual, slow insolence. She attempted sarcasm. The more she was prodded, the more bumptious she became, until one trembled for the girl, labouring to appear nonchalant.
The QC reminded her of two conversations she had had with Colin Shepherd over the summer that followed the Smoko. ‘You made no allegations to the Master then, regarding Nicky?’
At this, the girlfriend blew her cool. She exploded.
‘What am I gonna do – tell him off?’ she cried. ‘It wasn’t my place to complain about these events! I found my conversations with the Master very embarrassing encounters. When we were in social situations, all I wanted to do was be polite and get away.’
A male fellow student stood in the witness box with his hands clasped and his eyes fixed on a distant point. His style was deadpan, his diction formal, his accent cultivated. He said he had seen Nicole Stewart dancing with Dr Shepherd, who had her ‘backed up against a wall’. After this, he had seen Nicky talking to her girlfriend, ‘angry, waving her arms, very red in the face’.
Some very eminent men spoke up as character witnesses for Dr Shepherd: a professor from Monash, the Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University, and an Anglican bishop, purple-chested and wearing a big silver cross. Their testimony, though sincere, slid past in a welter of clichés. The women who spoke for Shepherd were less illustrious, but they made more of an impression because they were so upset. ‘I look at men,’ said a female colleague in Education at Monash for twenty-two years, ‘with a more jaundiced eye than I do at women. I felt compelled to speak in defence of a man, this time.’ She described Shepherd as ‘courteous and gentle’, a man who ‘didn’t stand over people or oppress them’, and who had always ‘looked after the less-loved students’. An earnest young woman, who worked as a secretary in a charity organisation and had engaged in glee club activities with Dr Shepherd, declared that they had ‘practised alone together in a closed room, many times’; he was, she said, ‘an utter gentleman’.
The judge, by now, was constantly shifting his wig around on his head, as if struggling against sleep.
Colin Shepherd at last took the stand. Like Nicole Stewart, he was quite different from my mental picture. He was heavyset, with a forward-angled neck and a slightly protruding top lip. He did not impress as powerful; if anything, he looked dogged, even meek. Perhaps he himself, when young, had been one of the ‘less-loved students’.
Dr Shepherd told the court that before he took the Ormond post on 1 August 1990, he had worked full-time since 1969 in the Education faculty at Monash University. During this period he had been senior lecturer, Sub-Dean, and head of one department in the faculty. He had attended social functions involving the students he had taught, where alcohol had been available; there had been no accusations of impropriety before the current allegations.
The official guests at the Valedictory Dinner on 16 October, the night in question, had been a famous erstwhile Master of Ormond, by this time Governor of Victoria, and his wife. Dress, for this formal evening, was ‘black tie, its equivalent for women, and doctoral robes for High Table’. A strict timetable had been worked out with the governor’s aides, and was submitted to the court. The QC seemed to have an obsession with time-discrepancies in people’s accounts of this immense, wandering, un-pindownable saga of a party. ‘The fruit cocktail,’ said Dr Shepherd, ‘was on the table, grace was said, the royal salute taken, then the fruit cocktail was consumed. A citrus fruit cocktail was picked because it doesn’t go off.’ Speeches were interspersed with courses throughout the evening. After the dining hall formalities, the official party was piped out of the hall, and assembled in the Senior Common Room.
‘The governor and his wife,’ said Dr Shepherd, ‘left the function with my wife at ten-thirty. They went to their motor vehicle.’
After the departure of the official guests, Dr Shepherd and his wife went to his office and removed their academic dress. ‘My wife retired, and I moved around the corridors talking to the students, specially the valedicts. There was a slide show in the quad, of the year’s events. I met the Vice-Master in the corridor, and went to the quad with him, to the bar, where we had a drink. At the bar we were joined by other tutors and students.
‘I was persuaded to join in the dancing. First I danced with a tutor, then a student kindly invited me to dance with her. While we were dancing I teased her – it was a light-hearted conversation – I pretended that I didn’t recognise her without her glasses.’
Speaking levelly, without emotion, he went on to describe his dance with Nicole Stewart very much as he had done in his interview with the detective. The accusations of his ‘kneading’ and touching Nicky on the breast were, he said, ‘totally incorrect’.
He spoke about his alcohol intake on the evening. He said he had started, but not finished, a glass of champagne and orange juice before the dinner. At High Table, where eight people had dined, one bottle of red wine and one of white had been served, he said, plus orange juice and mineral water. Dr Shepherd said that he himself had drunk two glasses of red wine and a lot of mineral water. He had drunk no port, though port had been served. After the governor had left the college, Dr Shepherd had drunk one beer ‘in a plastic glass from the student bar’. After dancing he had drunk another beer, and further drinks in his office during the night. In his room he had had whisky but this had been ‘nominal rather than actual’.
‘My high spirits,’ he said, ‘had nothing to do with the drinks. They had to do with a very successful dinner.’
Several witnesses of modest demeanour declared their belief that Dr Shepherd had not been drunk at the Smoko. ‘Effusive’, yes, because the evening had gone so well – ‘happy’, but not drunk.
And then out of left field appeared another witness from Ormond College, a student with a ponytail. He was not at the dinner on the night in question because he was working at the Camberwell Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. After work he took a tram back to Ormond, changed out of his uniform, and went down to the quadrangle. He had not entered the Junior Common Room at once, but had climbed on to a small bench outside it, and looked in through a window. He recognised the Master dancing with someone whose name he did not know. She was ‘moderately tall, with blond hair of reasonable length, and she was wearing a black dress.’ The length of this dress? ‘Short.’ The witness watched the Master and ‘this female’, as the QC put it, for several minutes. He couldn’t say what kind of dancing they were doing, but thought it might have been ‘both sorts’. He had had nothing to drink. He observed no signs of distress. He got down off his bench and left while the Master and the girl were still dancing. This Mozartian figure with his queue, this passing Cherubino standing on a bench and peeping in at the action, plays no further part in the story.
At 11 a.m. the next day, 22 September 1992, the judgement was to be given. I arrived early and found a seat on the aisle in the second row, right behind the broad back of Colin Shepherd, who was once again accompanied by his wife and son. A young student near me began to spread her jacket on the chair beside her, to save it for a friend; but two old men, whom I had seen the day before among the phalanx of grim-faced Presbyterians, arrived at the end of the row and saw what she was doing. One of them called out to her in a stern, loud voice, ‘You’re not entitled to do that!’ Her smile faded. She quickly gathered up her coat and moved along one place. The two old men pushed past me into the row, shoving hard against my legs although I tried to turn them aside to allow passage. Their manner was so peremptory that I thought they must have had a prior right to these particular seats, or needed to sit behind the Shepherd family in an official capacity. I looked up at the men as they forced their way past me, and said, trying to co-operate, ‘I’ll get my bag out from under your seat.’ They did not answer, but stood in the row and waited, blank-faced, staring into the distance, without the slightest acknowledgement that a fifty-year-old woman was down on her hands and
knees among their legs, trying to shift her belongings out of their way. Flustered, I sat down again on the end seat. The men installed themselves at their ease. One of them took out a newspaper, spread his arms and began to read it, taking up so much space that I was forced to lean sideways out into the aisle. They were completely unaware of my discomfort. These were ‘Ormond men’, then. They expected to be deferred to. I was in the way and they behaved as if I were not there. Much later I was informed that their aim had been to form a buffer between the embattled Shepherd family and people who had previously sat near them and muttered hostile remarks. As an unknown woman, I was told, I would have been ‘prima facie suspicious’. At the time, however, as I removed myself to a seat in one of the side rows, I noticed that my neck was prickling and my heart was beating fast.
The QC strolled into the courtroom. Seeing that the place was overflowing, he made a little moue of surprise, and shook his head, making his eyebrows into an inverted V, like an actor pleasantly surprised by the size of the house.
The judge took his seat and read the judgement, holding the paper up in front of his eyes as if he were shortsighted or wanted to hide his face.
Nobody, he said, saw the act in question. Nicole Stewart was ‘an excellent witness’ and he did not disbelieve her. She had an impeccable record for honesty. But he could not find Dr Shepherd guilty, because the allegations were not proved beyond reasonable doubt. It came down to a matter of oath against oath. The judge set aside the magistrate’s decision, and found the appellant not guilty. He ordered that the Crown pay Dr Shepherd’s costs for both hearings.
The court cleared fast. As the Shepherd family rose to leave, the son, a plump, pale boy of nineteen or so, having controlled himself as long as he could, suddenly burst into loud, racking sobs. The sound of his weeping echoed off the bare walls and the ceiling of the courtroom. His mother cried too, in the arms of one of the two grey-suited men. ‘I can’t believe she did it to him,’ she kept saying over his shoulder through her tears; ‘I can’t believe she did it to him.’