by Helen Garner
The man in the train was rather drunk, but not at all frightening; he was just dull. He told me at great length about his experiences in horse training. He had two daughters my age, he said, who would be leading one of his horses in the Grand Parade at the Melbourne Show next spring. He asked me if I would like to lead a horse in the Grand Parade, a suggestion too laughable even to require an answer. All this time he was shifting closer to me along the seat. I try in vain, now, to remember the stages this incident passed through, between conversation and the moment when he put his arm round my shoulders and asked me to give him a kiss. I let him kiss me on the lips, out of embarrassment, or politeness, or passivity, or lack of a clear sense of what I wanted, which was for him to dematerialise at once. No violence, no threat of any kind was involved, no force: only a steady, almost imperceptible persistence. What stopped it was that somebody walked past the compartment and looked in. Suddenly I saw through that unknown witness’s eyes what was happening to me, what I was failing to object to. I saw that it was absurd. And I slid out of his grip and left the compartment.
What was my state, that allowed me to accept his unattractive advances without protest? I was just putting up with him. I felt myself to be luckier, cleverer, younger than he was. I felt sorry for him. I went on putting up with him long past the point at which I should have told him to back off. Should have? Whose should is this? What I mean is would have liked to. Wanted to but lacked the . . . the . . . Lacked the what?
Women fantasise about what we will do if a bloke blah blah blah – but when one does, a strange passivity can swarm through us. Is this really happening? Or am I being over-sensitive, as women are so often accused of being? Surely he’ll stop in a minute. Surely he can tell I’m only being polite, that I’m not liking it. How can he be so completely unaware that I’m actually hating it?
Why isn’t he reading my mind?
A round the traps I ran into a journalist who had begun to cover the Ormond story for a Melbourne paper in August 1992 but had put it down when it went to EO and was delayed. Because she had researched it much earlier than I had, she had spoken to both Elizabeth Rosen and Nicky Stewart on the phone, before they had become guarded. The girls’ solicitor, she said, had also been very frank with her, to the point of having accepted a phone call, while the journalist was in her office, and chatting and joking freely with the caller in her presence.
‘She said to this caller, right in front of me, “Don’t you think it’s a bit inappropriate for me to be giving legal advice to someone on the council?” There was a lot of laughter. Then when she hung up she turned to me and said, “Just to show you what the mood is towards Shepherd – that was a member of the Ormond council – and he was saying, “Can we sack him? Can we sack him?”’
On Christmas Eve 1992 I called Dr Shepherd. He told me that the conciliation had started about two weeks ago.
‘I don’t know what was happening. I sat in one room with my solicitor from eight-thirty till one-thirty. The Ormond business manager sat in another. The complainants with their barrister and solicitor sat in another. The complainants didn’t speak to me. They weren’t interested in me. They must know I’m going.
‘Several weeks ago the Ormond solicitor sent me a letter telling me to resign in seven days. I replied that this was “grossly unfair”, and they backtracked. Now I’m on leave, which gives me time to look for a job.’ People at Monash, he said, who had been negotiating to get him his old job back, had withdrawn the offer after receiving some ‘anonymous threatening phone calls’. ‘I’m too hot,’ he said bitterly. Another eminent university administrator was so upset by this that he ‘arranged for a private business group’ to hire Dr Shepherd. ‘It’s not really my kind of thing,’ he said. ‘Rather a right-wing sort of group. But whatever one might say about that administrator, he delivers. He does what he says he’ll do.’
On Christmas Day I went overseas. I got back in March 1993. The complainants’ solicitor eventually returned my many calls.
‘I’ve been away,’ I said, ‘and I wanted to ask you what’s happened in the story – where things stand now.’
A chill ran down the line.
‘Well, Helen,’ she said, ‘I’m not at liberty to say. And that’s essentially it.’
‘Do you mean you’re legally prevented from speaking to me, or you’ve just decided not to?’
‘Legally.’
‘What law is it, exactly, that prevents you?’
‘Look – you’ll just have to accept that that’s the way it is.’
‘Is there anyone who’s not prevented?’
‘No.’
‘There’s not?’
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘you’re perfectly entitled to ask anyone questions, but if they’re acting correctly, they won’t speak to you either.’
After a long pause, I said goodbye. This was the last time she ever spoke to me.
On 6 March 1993 Truth ran the headline: SEX CLAIM STUDENT ‘DRIVEN TO DRINK’. The story related how one of the two Ormond students who had brought charges against Colin Shepherd had been up in the Magistrates’ Court on five driving offences. She pleaded guilty to exceeding .05, disobeying a red light, exceeding 60 kph, not displaying P plates, and not carrying her licence. Her lawyer claimed that she had been ‘immeasurably’ affected by the experience of the court case, several months before the night on which the driving offences were committed. On the first three charges, the magistrate fined her a total of $400, with $42 costs, and cancelled her licence for twelve months. On the remaining two charges she was fined a total of $175 without conviction.
Later in March, someone sent the Truth cutting to Colin Shepherd in the mail, anonymously.
‘Universities,’ said a classics graduate in his thirties, ‘have always been places built on neuroticism and timid aggression. But I’m surprised it’s got this nasty at Ormond. Ormond’s got that easy-come easy-go feeling – I didn’t think anybody would care that much.’ He told me that he had gone there to dinner one night, with his wife. ‘She’s got a sort of genial contempt for university colleges. Her father went to one, and wanted her to, but she wouldn’t. During the meal she went outside; when she came back she told me a couple of young blokes had bailed her up out there and said, “You’ve got a nice set. You get an A.” She was laughing. Just because that stuff’s got the potential to offend doesn’t mean it does offend.’
On 23 March 1993 the Age reported that an EO settlement had been reached the day before, between Ormond College and the two women students. The college had been obliged by the settlement to issue a statement in which it acknowledged that the women’s complaints ‘could have been handled differently . . . with more sensitivity and with a greater degree of apparent impartiality. The college,’ continued the statement, ‘accepts that the students acted honourably and brought the matter to the attention of appropriate persons in a discreet and mature manner. The college regrets any hurt and distress suffered by the students.’
The council also said that adequate policy and procedures, which would have allowed the complaints to be resolved within the college, had not existed. However, future complaints, it said, would be dealt with ‘more appropriately’.
Dr Shepherd, according to the Age, had been asked by the college solicitors to approve this statement before it was released, but had declined to do so.
The two women, whose names cannot be published, said last night, We hope that the actions we have taken over the last eighteen months have ensured that women students who are sexually harassed will not be placed in the same vulnerable position in which we found ourselves’.
This remark struck me as dignified. I wanted to ask the young women about this vulnerability. Did they mean vulnerable to sexual harassment in the first place, or were they referring to their college’s failure to give them a proper hearing? Vulnerable to what? Oh, I did want to ask them these questions.
At lunchtime that day I phoned, at the university where she worked, another o
f the Ormond women whose names Michelle B— had given me: Mrs Barbara W—. I identified myself and told her I was planning to write an article about the recent events at the college. There was a short silence.
‘Now that the settlement’s been reached and confidentiality’s over,’ I said, ‘I wondered if I could have a conversation with you about the case.’
A longer silence. Then she said, in a tense voice, ‘Helen – no.’
‘Can you tell me why?’
She took a deep, quivering breath, and launched herself. ‘I am extremely disappointed, Helen, that someone like you, someone in your position, should have taken the position you did on this matter. You have been incredibly stupid. You have been amazingly, unbelievably stupid. Coming out in public –’
‘In public? I haven’t made any public statements. How do you know what my “position” is?’
‘I’ve seen the letters you wrote to Colin Shepherd!’
‘How did you come to read those letters?’
‘He photocopied them! And I read the letters you wrote to Nicole and Elizabeth. Can you imagine how your letters upset them? You must realise, Helen, that this story is not being played out for the benefit of your finer feelings. Do you realise how you upset the girls, by continually ringing them?’
‘I’ve never rung either of them – I don’t even have their phone numbers!’
‘Well – you must have been ringing their solicitor, then,’ she said in a deeper, more challenging voice. ‘Have you?’
She was working me as a headmistress works a fourth-former. I was having to take deep breaths, to control a wild desire to giggle – and hadn’t somebody else mentioned my ‘finer feelings’?
‘Of course I’ve rung their solicitor,’ I said. Why shouldn’t I? What makes you so sure I’ve got a frozen position on this? What makes you think it can’t be changed by argument? This is why I need to talk to you – because you know more about it than anyone else.’
‘Listen,’ said Barbara W— between clenched teeth. ‘I haven’t spent eighteen months of my life on a matter like this in order to talk about it with someone like you.’
Too amazed to speak, I let out a nervous titter.
‘It doesn’t matter how long you talk to me on the phone,’ she said in a low, shaking voice. ‘It doesn’t matter whether your position is “frozen” or not. I’m not going to talk to you. Maybe in five years, when I’ve recovered – then I might consider talking about it – but right now, Helen, the answer is no.’
There was a breathless pause. I exerted massive self-control.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Thank you for giving me even this amount of your time.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said stiffly.
‘Well – goodbye.’
Silence. I hung up.
So this was how they got the Ormond blokes on the run. I was winded by the exchange. Nobody had taken that tone to me since I was a teenager. Her scathing reference to my ‘finer feelings’ echoed almost word for word the crack made by the complainants’ solicitor. This path to Elizabeth Rosen and Nicole Stewart was plainly not only blocked but mined and ambushed. How could I write about these people if they wouldn’t speak to me? This was the moment to put the whole thing down and walk away. But if I dropped it now I would never understand it – and for some obscure reason I needed to. The ruder and more secretive these women got, the more determined to retreat into their faceless group, the more curious I became. What sort of feminists were these, what sort of intellectuals, who expected automatic allegiance from women to a cause they were not prepared even to argue?
Like most people I functioned from day to day on a set of assumptions that I was rarely forced to examine: the adjustments I made under pressure of events were semiconscious and usually motivated by a desire to avoid taxing mental activity. I was still skating along on ice that had frozen in the early seventies. But now I felt I was on the verge of finding out things that would cause an upheaval in my whole belief-structure, particularly where men and women were concerned, and the way power shifts between them. I was working so slowly that by the time I got anything coherent written, the newspapers would have got bored with the topic and moved on. I needed a purpose for the questions I wanted to ask. I would have to write a book. I had no idea how to do it, how long it would take, or whether what I eventually wrote would be publishable: I thought I would just keep ploughing forward, asking questions, taking notes, and see where I ended up.
That same afternoon in March 1993 I pedalled down to Queen Street, where the High Court of Australia has its Melbourne office, to interview the judge who had taken the chair of the Ormond council not long before the girls’ complaints had come to light, and who had resigned from the position soon after. The judge, a thin man in tie and shirtsleeves, ushered me into his office, which had such a splendid view to north, east and west that I had to turn my back on it in order to concentrate. On what little wall-space remained between the bookcases and the huge windows hung several black-and-white photos of wigged justices.
I had to work hard, while we spoke, to counterbalance an extra sympathy for the judge into which Barbara W—’s barrage on the phone had thrown me. I kept reminding myself that if I had been a law student in her twenties, a Nicole or an Elizabeth bringing unwelcome complaints, his manner towards me might well have been less charming: that my knees would have been knocking. As it was, however, he was the soul of courtesy. He outlined at once three reasons for having left the Ormond council when he did: the limited time he had to deal with the extra work the council chairmanship involved; the political overtones of the matter of the allegations, which sat ill with his High Court position; and the potential conflict between the activities of investigative bodies and the High Court, which might be called upon to review those same activities.
Out of the blue, towards the end of 1991, a young woman had phoned him in Melbourne and asked to see him in order to discuss sexual harassment. Applying a lawyer’s caution, he got his associate in, so as to have three people present. The young woman, Fiona P—, who was an Ormond student and not one of the complainants, was acting simply as an emissary. She produced several anonymous statements, which contained certain allegations.
The judge told Fiona P— he would like to see the women who had made the complaints: it is written on every lawyer’s brain not to act on hearsay allegations, let alone ones that are unsigned. Off she went, to arrange for them to come. Some hours later, on the same day, she rang the judge and told him that the students had changed their minds – that they wanted him to tear up the statements. The judge refused to do this. He asked her to return, bringing the women. Later still the same day, the judge received a phone call from the college Vice-Master, saying that Fiona P— didn’t want to return, because the judge had been aggressive.
The judge called Dr Shepherd and told him that allegations against him had been made. He said that, though he himself would not proceed on the basis of anonymous allegations, and though he would not disclose to Dr Shepherd the precise nature of the allegations, he thought Dr Shepherd should know that they existed. Some months later, the judge was informed by another council member that there were now two complainants, and that they were not going to go away. Nicole Stewart had already signed her complaint, and Elizabeth Rosen, who had not been among the initial complainants, had now emerged with her statement, and entered the story.
Within forty-eight hours of getting the second round of statements, the judge stressed, he had formed a group of three council members to deal with them, and had made a point of including in this group one woman who, he was sure, would be far from uncritical of the college. The only way to get to the complainants by this time was through one of their supporters, Vivienne S—. The complainants would not come to a meeting of the Group of Three at the downtown law office of one of them because they said it would be ‘intimidating’. Here the judge gave a laugh of genuine bafflement, perhaps, I thought, at the idea that a law office might ‘intimi
date’ these young women and their supporters who, so far, had given the impression of being anything but shrinking violets. To get around this problem, the meeting was held in a borrowed, neutral room in the city. Present at this meeting were the complainants, the members of the Group of Three, and Vivienne S—.
Soon after this, a Melbourne colleague of the judge had faxed to him the abusive leaflet which had been distributed throughout the university and the college, warning people against Dr Shepherd and accusing the council and the judge of delay in dealing with the complaints. The judge was incredulous and outraged. After the appearance of this leaflet, the women’s supporters had placed a statement on the college notice-board dissociating their informal investigating group from the production of the leaflet. The judge had found this odd, since there had been no suggestion that the women’s supporters had been implicated in it.