The First Stone

by Helen Garner

  He sat me down at a large table and set himself up opposite me behind a stack of bulging manila folders, with his hands clasped loosely in front of him, like somebody preparing to be interrogated. I was struck at once by his hands: large, square, suntanned, with well-articulated fingers: they looked like a pianist’s hands. In court he had looked grey-faced, even brow-beaten; but face to face he was an agreeable-looking middle-aged man, carrying a fair bit of weight – a plump Anglican rather than a rangy ‘Presbyterian’. His eyes were bright blue and his face was soft. His hair was grey-white, thinning and wispy on top. His voice was slightly husky, as if he had been talking a lot, or singing. I failed to see in him the marauding beast described in the anonymous leaflet. His manner was loose, informal, not controlled. Something about him was disarming, probably because he was so eager to disarm himself. He seemed to want to please – not just me (and my notebook), but everyone. I thought he was a man with a strong feminine side to his nature. (During our conversation I asked him which of his parents he had got on better with. His mother, he replied, without hesitating.)

  He spoke at length, in great detail, and with feeling. I had expected bitterness, or at least irony; but his face, when he mentioned the ideas and plans he had for the college, lit up with enthusiasm, as if nothing had ever gone wrong – as if he would perhaps still be the one to carry them out. It was clearly a job that excited his imagination. He depicted himself as ‘an evolutionary person’ rather than an enforcer of drastic changes – but still someone determined to ‘change the college culture’, with its heavy student use of alcohol, and the repellent customs that still stream out of the big male private schools. Early in his time at Ormond he had had to get rid of certain ‘yahoos – troublemakers with very bad records of drunkenness and abuse of women’. He and other college heads had succeeded in blocking an attempt by the famous Naughton’s Hotel, where college students drink, to extend its bottle-shop licence to midnight. ‘But it isn’t sufficient just to outlaw things,’ he said. ‘You have to persuade people. I had long, painful negotiations with the Student Club about these things but their committee changes every year, so you’re always re-inventing the wheel.’

  Coming to the job straight from Monash University, with its tradition of vociferous challenges to authority and its powerful feminists, he had, he said, ‘addressed feminist concerns’ from the time he became Master. He appointed two female medical officers and a female librarian; and the two holders of the college’s prestigious visiting Scott Fellowship during his Mastership were women – one of them a well-known Australian feminist novelist. Dr Shepherd had also, he told me, started to follow up aspects of college history, and to add photographs of women students to the displays in the corridors. Most ironic of all, in the light of later events, was his response when he discovered that Ormond had no policy on Equal Opportunity, and no ‘grievance procedures’. To advise him on how to correct this, he had set up an EO committee, composed of tutors, students, and general staff, including cleaners, typists and maintenance people. Ms Rose H—, the resident tutor he had asked to head this group, was one of the college’s senior women, ‘an obvious person’ for the job, and she accepted it. But it was not long before Dr Shepherd’s relations with Rose H— struck snags. On one occasion he had been bewildered when she interpreted what he saw as a routine request, for her to provide him with background information about a visiting woman scholar in her field, as demeaning to her and to women.

  A proposal was put to him for the creation of a senior woman’s appointment, a Dean of women students; but Dr Shepherd did not at once comply. Firstly, he said, the budget at the time would not have stood the creation of another full-time appointment; secondly, though he favoured such a position eventually, he was opposed to the labelling of any position as just for women: ‘It’s too narrowing,’ he told me. ‘It’s divisive. A woman takes a position because of her abilities, not just because she’s a woman.’

  A month after the Smoko, Dr Shepherd told me, he was summoned to the office of the High Court judge who was chair of the college council, and told that complaints had been made against him. The judge had not named the students who complained, but contented himself with a warning. ‘He said, “You should be very careful. You shouldn’t go to student functions. You should watch what you drink. You should never talk to students on your own in your office. However, the allegations have been withdrawn, so that’s the end of it” – boomph!’ Dr Shepherd went back to work shaken but unenlightened.

  In December 1991, two months after the Valedictory Dinner and the Smoko, Rose H—, the senior woman with whom Dr Shepherd had had disagreements, suddenly resigned from her position as chair of the Equal Opportunity Committee. In her letter of resignation she referred mysteriously to certain ‘events in college’ which, she said, made it impossible for her to continue to serve on the committee. Dr Shepherd, puzzled by this reference, mentioned it in January 1992 to the Vice-Master, who said, ‘I think it’s the events after the Valedictory Dinner that’s done this.’ Dr Shepherd had not known what he was talking about.

  In February 1992 the judge called Dr Shepherd again and told him that the allegations had been formalised, and that he had appointed a committee, the Group of Three, within the college to look into them. Next, in March, came the anonymous leaflets, ‘literally thousands of them, circulated throughout the college and the university, on every notice-board, in every toilet.’ The press picked up the story before Dr Shepherd was told what the allegations were and who was making them. It wasn’t till 10 March 1992 that he found out the complainants’ names.

  ‘I was very surprised,’ he said, ‘because Nicole Stewart had been around the college all over Christmas, working in the library. I had seen her during that time and spoken to her, about her bursary and all sorts of things. She’d even asked me for a reference for her articles, just before Christmas, and I’d given her one. It was a great shock.

  ‘I didn’t speak to the press at all – but they were after me. “Real Life”, “A Current Affair”, Doug Aiton – you name it. Reporters came here, into the college grounds. Every time I moved out of the Lodge, I was followed by teams of them. My kids had a rough time. I was a prisoner in here.

  ‘The next thing I got was a phone call from the police, asking me to come down and see them about complaints of indecent assault. My solicitor advised me to say nothing, but I said to him, “Look, I’ve got nothing to hide – I’m not frightened of talking.”

  ‘I told the police pretty well everything, in response to complaints from the two girls. But a lot of what I said was excluded, in the courts. It was ruled not to be relevant. I was horrified to realise how limiting the rules of evidence are. You can’t raise certain things. The only thing that matters is: You’re alleged to have made this indecent assault – did that or did that not happen? All the context is regarded as irrelevant. What I thought was my most compelling evidence couldn’t be brought forward.’

  ‘And what was that?’ I asked.

  ‘I think there was a conspiracy, very well orchestrated and organised. The actual allegations were the tip of an iceberg. When I say conspiracy, I don’t mean people in coats under bushes – but an organised attempt by a number of people to get rid of me. On the night after I lost Nicole Stewart’s case, some of the women who supported the girls had a big party in the college, to celebrate.’

  There is nothing more certain to make a listener shift uncomfortably in her seat than theories of conspiracy. But before I could open the topic further, Dr Shepherd heard his two younger children come home from school. He jumped to his feet and shouted a greeting. They came into the room, two teenagers in private school uniforms, and he presented them to me with unabashed love and pride. He went out to the kitchen to make us some coffee, and the children engaged me in dutiful conversation, smiling. I asked the girl who played the upright piano that was in the room. ‘Dad, mostly,’ she said. When he returned with a tray of cups and some sweet biscuits in a cereal bowl, they wa
ndered away to their rooms.

  Having read the police interview and seen Dr Shepherd being examined in court, I was filled with a mixture of embarrassment and boredom at the prospect of asking him to repeat the Smoko story yet again.

  ‘Can I ask you about the night in question? What are your memories of it?’

  ‘My memories of it are very good,’ he replied promptly. ‘My memories are better than most people’s.’

  So they may have been, but I had to keep steering him back to that painful topic; he had a tendency to swerve away from it, particularly in response to my mention of certain college members who he feels have betrayed him. In my interview transcript there is a huge, eight-page swerve, here, between my question and his answer to it.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I’m terrible. Well – I danced.’ He went on to give an account of the evening that differed from the officially recorded one only in the conversational tone he used with me. It sounded like the same party all right, in its general shape and duration, as the one I had heard Nicole Stewart describe in court; but the landmarks were different, the mood was milder, and the crucial events that the women alleged were simply absent from it. To keep a balance in my mind, as he spoke, between all the versions of the evening I had heard, each one with its convincing circumstantial details and apparent sincerity, was beyond me.

  ‘After it all finished at one o’clock,’ he said, ‘I went to bed. Woke up at the normal time next morning, six o’clock, took the kids to school at seven-thirty. A normal day.’

  He stopped talking, gave a little shrug, and looked at me with no particular expression on his face. I didn’t know what to say. What was I doing here, in this man’s living room, asking him to account for himself? I wished I could change the subject, or ask him to play something on the piano. To conceal my discomfort I asked him what he thought of the media coverage of the story.

  ‘The media’s what tipped the scale for me here,’ he said, ‘to push me out. The reason people on the council voted against me is because of the publicity – that’s what’s made my position here untenable. The meeting where they made the vote of no confidence in me was so confidential that when my solicitor rang up to find out what the motion was, he wasn’t allowed to be told. I wasn’t told. And yet a council member rang the Age and told it to the same reporter who was covering it earlier.

  ‘It’s damaged my reputation forever. There’s been a lot of talk about me being in situations of power over attractive female students. Look – I’ve been teaching in schools and universities for twenty-seven years. I had pass or fail power over students – power over their future as teachers. There’s never been a single item of untoward behaviour. My record was impeccable. What power did I really have over Elizabeth or Nicole? Elizabeth was an ex-student. Nicole was on a bursary, yes – but it was covered by a formula. I couldn’t have refused her funds for personal, arbitrary reasons. This alleged power I was supposed to have over these people is an illusion.

  ‘In terms of career I’m finished. My concern now is just getting a job, enough to keep the family happy. My age is against me – I’m fifty-four. Times are bad for jobs.’

  ‘Do you really think your name is terminally smeared?’ I asked. ‘I mean – do you think people believe in their hearts –’

  He cut across me. ‘There’s a senior post going in an Education faculty. What they want is almost written for me. I’ve applied. But I can tell you they won’t have me, because of this. People keep pointing me out, in the street. Other people make jokes. The worst are the really bad male chauvinists, who go “Ha ha ha – I do that all the time, but you got caught”.’

  Apart from having seen Nicole Stewart give evidence in court, all I knew of the two young women in this story was from hearsay. So when my research turned up a couple of black-and-white photos of the students, I examined them as carefully as if they contained coded information that I had to decipher.

  Nicky Stewart’s head-and-shoulders shot is technically and emotionally almost neutral, as if taken for a passport or a driver’s licence. It shows a young woman in a black V-necked top, with smooth, shoulder-length blond hair. Her head is tilted forward and slightly to her left, perhaps to allow the silky hair to clear the eye. She is smiling, looking straight into the camera, showing only a tiny glimpse of teeth. Her eyes, which look dark under the finely arched brows, snap with intelligence: the alertness in this pretty face belies her conservative pose.

  Elizabeth Rosen’s photo, the one she claimed Colin Shepherd talked about during their conversation in his office at the Smoko, is from a different planet. The first impression it creates is one of shining. Then one notices the amount of flesh that is being permitted to shine. The gaze, whether one is male or female, drops like a stone from top to bottom of this photo, then travels slowly up. She is wearing a dark, strapless evening dress, out of which the double mass of her splendid bosom – the only possible word for it – is bursting. Her face and shoulders are tanned, her eyes are glowing, her dark-lipped, enormous mouth is split wide in a frank grin, showing perfect teeth. Her face is so dazzling that her hair, worn up and back except for one free curl over her right eye, is only a shadow. It is impossible not to be moved by her daring beauty. She is a woman in the full glory of her youth, as joyful as a goddess, elated by her own careless authority and power.

  The sight of this photo administers a jolt to men and women alike. First they laugh, in shock. Then the women sigh as they gaze, and the men make lewd remarks – the kind of lewdness that makes women impatient with them, since its function is to conceal from themselves their deeper response, which is something like awe.

  Towards the end of November 1992 I wrote each of the young women a letter, asking if they would speak to me once the EO conciliation was over. I said it was not my aim to take sides or make judgements, though since we belonged to different generations our views would tend to differ. I said I wanted to unpick the story and make more complex sense of it than the press had so far been able to. I said that without their experiences, feelings and views I would not be able to write a piece at all. I added that I had a daughter their age, and that it was as much for my own peace of mind as anything else that I wanted to speak to them. I posted these letters to the most accurate addresses I could track down.

  Writing this now, I am amazed that I didn’t go straight to the addresses I had, and knock on the door. It would be nice to think that good manners or journalistic ethics restrained me; but the truth, I admit, has more to do with middle-aged women’s fear of their daughters. They despise us for the scruples and the patience we have had to learn from life. They have stolen from us the crude nerve of youth, and in their unmodulated vision of the human things whose subtleties we have learnt to respect, they charge past us and rush out to fight, calling it politics. This is natural and right. But it is painful; and in the face of their scornful energy we become timid.

  Early that summer I phoned the complainants’ solicitor. She was very frosty with me at first, as she told me that no date had yet been set for the EO conciliation. I told her I had written to the young women.

  ‘Yes,’ she said sharply, ‘they rang me as soon as they got the letters. You must realise, Helen, that this thing is not being played out for the benefit of your finer feelings.’

  There was a tense pause.

  ‘I gather,’ I said, ‘that you don’t think I should have written to them.’

  ‘The girls were a bit appalled that you had their names and addresses,’ she said, heating up.

  ‘Their names? But I was in court!’

  ‘It’s illegal,’ she said, ‘to publish the names of complainants in these cases.’

  ‘Illegal?’ I said crossly. ‘What have I done that’s illegal?’

  ‘Don’t get defensive, Helen,’ she said.

  I took a couple of breaths. ‘I’m not. It’s just that I don’t understand what you’re telling me.’

  She became courteous again. ‘I’m saying it’s illega
l to pass on the names of the complainants – to identify them. Of course the whole college community knows who they are; but for anyone to pass on their names and addresses to you is an illegal act. Also, someone on the council has been leaking its meetings to the press.’

  ‘Who would that be?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the wrong thing to do. I wish I had a crystal ball, to know what the college will do. The girls have been incredibly well-behaved. Other people I was at university with, if there’d been this level of anger, would have been running around doing graffiti or hate mail. But we said to these women, “Do you want to work through the law, or go to the media?” They said “The law”, and they’ve stuck to it. I respect them for that.’

  The leaks to the press from someone on the council, then, which started way back in March 1992, even before the complainants went to the police, had been purely coincidental? I said nothing, nor did I mention the abusive leaflet which had been distributed throughout college and university on 4 March. Nobody supposedly knew who was responsible for that leaflet, yet after its distribution, there was no course but war.

  I was chatting on the phone with a magazine editor I had been working for, a graduate like me of Melbourne University.

  ‘The older generation of men,’ she said, ‘the old blokes in the philosophy department, for example, when we were students – if they did the things they talked about doing, they’d be in jail.’

  ‘What sorts of things?’

  ‘Oh . . . just the presumption of what women are for. As I heard an old journalist say, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about – it’s one of the rights of office.” Droit de seigneur.’

  I tried to recall the experience of being harassed – as distinct from assaulted or frankly attacked – by a man, the actual quality of the experience. I remembered something that happened to me nearly thirty years ago, on a daytime train from Melbourne to Geelong. I was reading in an empty compartment. The door opened and a man came in. He smelt of beer but did not appear dangerous. We sat in the compartment as the train rolled across the grassy plain. I seem to recall that it was a sunny day. He struck up a conversation. He was in his forties, probably, not particularly bright or stupid, just a country bloke. I responded to his sociable overtures out of good manners – or rather, because I lacked the rudeness that is required in order to go on reading something that interests you while someone boring is trying to talk to you; and also out of the middle-class guilt inculcated in me by my male leftie friends at university, who were always saying to us girls, ‘Don’t be a snob. When workers whistle at you or say hullo, you should smile at them. You’re no better than they are.’