The First Stone

by Helen Garner

  Around this time, the Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University had offered to the Ormond council the conciliation services of the university’s counselling director, Janet F—.

  The judge was puzzled by the vigour with which the complainants had pursued the case. He admitted that before these incidents he had had little awareness of sexual harassment in general, though his wife, he said, had experience of it. Even the term ‘procedures’, in this context, had been foreign to him until recently. He remarked with a perplexed distaste that in the United States there seemed to be a doctrine that the family is inimical to the feminist cause, and that motherhood exploits women. He had also seen, while swimming in the Beaurepaire pool at Melbourne University, posters on display which encouraged women to ask themselves whether they had been sexually harassed.

  During our conversation he returned several times to Fiona P—’s request on the phone, after her meeting with him, that he tear up the statements. He made it clear to me that he felt very strongly indeed that it was not proper to make complaints of such a serious nature, ones that could wreck a man’s life, and then to withdraw them five minutes later with no explanation.

  As I pedalled home through the remains of the summer afternoon, I thought that the High Court judge was certainly an honourable man, in the dictionary sense of the term: a man with ‘a fine sense of and allegiance to what is due or right’; but he seemed to me also a man whom nothing had yet forced to grasp how deeply things have shifted between men and women in the modern world – or how women’s notion of ‘what is due or right’ might be profoundly different from – and inimical to – men’s. I wondered whether he had daughters. I longed to hear the students’ version of their encounter with him – a version complete with tones of voice, body language, atmospheric shifts, all those details and quivers of meaning that men are notoriously so hopeless at delivering. It struck me too that the judge, like other men of status who have spoken to me about this story, had arrived rather quickly at the conclusion that one person lay behind all the trouble; and that this person was most likely to be a woman.

  Months later, Fiona P—, the emissary who had taken the first complaints to the judge, spoke to me (by phone – she would not go so far as to meet me) across the cordon sanitaire that the complainants and their supporters had thrown up between themselves and me. Fiona, who had wrestled with her conscience for a long time before deciding to speak to me, struck me as a young woman of almost heartrending earnestness and decency. She had a blunt, breathless way of talking, and tied herself in knots throughout our two conversations, so determined was she not to name names or betray even the shadow of a confidence.

  ‘The judge,’ she said, ‘dealt with me with total integrity. He spoke from good motives, though he was stern. I’m not saying he did a good job – but I didn’t feel threatened by him. We didn’t want him to act on the complaints – we went to him only to get advice – but he couldn’t understand why the girls didn’t want to sign them. They’d been advised that they shouldn’t – that once they were signed they would become legal statements.

  ‘I was a mediator. I volunteered. I’d never even had a conversation with the girls. I was a year younger than they were. I wasn’t emotionally attached to them. Our thought was, “Can we work this out within the framework of the college?” – because a court’s so final.

  ‘It was so traumatic. It was sad that there was no structure – no one to go to, to tell us what to do. The student Equal Opportunity board at Ormond was a good idea but it was only at its starting-point. The EO group for all the colleges round the Crescent was basically males – and I wanted to keep it within Ormond. I didn’t want to discuss it with Trinity.’

  I put to her my question, which with every asking seemed cruder and less applicable: why did they go to the police?

  ‘You make it sound,’ she said rather desperately, ‘as if it was all organised – as if we all knew what we were doing. But we didn’t. I wasn’t there any more – I’d gone overseas – when they decided to go to the courts. My involvement ended with the judge. What I really hated was the way everyone was boxed and labelled. Fellow-students were saying, She’s that sort of girl; Colin Shepherd’s that sort of man; he’s that sort of judge. I got upset with the rumours about the girls, and when the media kept showing the harrowed figure of the Master. What I saw was everyone doing things with the best possible intentions. My role was to keep it out of the courts. I put a lot of effort into it. And I failed. I don’t know if it was my fault – but I failed.’

  On 25 March 1993 I wrote letters to all the women’s supporters whose names I knew, and told them I had decided to write a book ‘about recent events at Ormond College’. I said that I had been ‘taken aback by the vehemence’ of what Barbara W— had said to me on the phone, but that I accepted with disappointment that she, at least, did not want to speak to me. The only purpose of my letter, I said, was to inform them of my intention.

  On 27 March I called Dr Shepherd and told him I was planning to write a book. After a brief pause, he pointed out that I was likely to have trouble with the defamation laws, but then added that he was quite happy with the idea, and hoped that the truth would come out; he said he had no fear of this. He said he had also, in mentioning the libel laws, not wanted to discourage me. He was now, he said, ‘too hot to handle’, and had no job and no prospect of getting one. I told him I had spoken to one of the women’s supporters.

  ‘Did you get an earful?’ he asked.

  ‘I did.’

  He made a sound like a laugh, and said without venom, ‘I believe they’re at the root of all my problems.’

  Whenever I’ve spoken to Colin Shepherd I’ve been struck by the absence of anger in his demeanour or tone. He shows rather a kind of stunned fatigue, and sadness; and sometimes bitterness.

  I know a woman whose husband, like more than one man of otherwise reliable taste, harbours a nostalgic connection to Ormond. She is always shifting to the back of a dark cupboard the keepsakes he indulges in – prints, etchings, sentimental memorabilia got up by the college and sold to faithful alumni. The Ormond men she has met through his profession she finds ‘opinionated, arrogant and ambitious. Only thirty years ago,’ she said, ‘when these blokes were students, they had maids. To clean up their rooms. Now they’ve got intelligent wives who mouth a few feminist platitudes but basically spend their lives looking after their husbands – lovely, soft, intelligent but basically biddable supporters.

  ‘Once I went to an Ormond dinner with my husband. On my way to the toilet I stopped outside the dining hall to look at a big framed display of photos of the college support staff – the kitchen people, cleaners, caretakers, office staff and so on. I was thinking how good it was that these photos were on display, as well as the academic staff and those born-to-rule sporting heroes. And then a couple of old boys – fifty, fifty-five – also stopped and looked at the pictures. They started making jokes about them and sending up “this egalitarian business – it’s absurd – getting quite out of hand”. So I said, “I think it’s good. It’s a recognition that Ormond wouldn’t be able to run without these people.” They didn’t even acknowledge that I’d spoken to them. They just turned and walked away.’

  She went on to speak with a fascinated distaste about the building itself. ‘It’s got those sort of gatehouses with – what are they called? – turrets. And the fascistic scale of it! It’s weird. I went to a wedding there once – they go back there, you know, to get married – and standing in that deep courtyard, the quadrangle or whatever they call it, I felt we were all completely cut off from the real world. It gave me the creeps. I thought, a place like this must act on people. Imagine the blokes it was built for, back in the 1880s – striding along the halls in their gowns and mortarboards – passing the port – desperately trying to convince themselves they weren’t cast away – lost at the very bottom of the world.’

  I mentioned to a businesswoman friend that I was finding out things I couldn’t
write without further damaging people who had already been hurt, on both sides of the fence.

  ‘Everyone in this story must have been damaged,’ she said. ‘It’s an overlay of one ideology on another. The very word harassed is maddening, to me. Women are all harassed. It goes without saying, like being irritable or tired. The thing is that men trivialise sexual harassment and women inflate it. Men make light of it and women make heavy.’

  Early in April 1993 I received one reply to the letters I had written to the women’s supporters. It was from a Ms Margaret L—, on the letterhead of the university where she taught. She identified herself at the top by means of her qualifications and position, addressed me by my full name, and went on to sort me out in firm and very formal language.

  She told me she regarded my letter, in which I had told her I was going to write a book, as an attempt to intimidate her, and an instance of futile harassment. Her intention, she said, was to protect the women students from any further distress or harassment. She rejected with particular firmness any implication that she should reveal to me the confidences with which she had been entrusted. She wanted me to be very aware that she had known, for some time, of my efforts to collect information about this matter. As a parting shot she proposed to me as source material for my project the work of someone called Lance Peters.

  I read this intemperate letter many times. I noticed that she used the word harassed about my having addressed her at all. So the world, to Margaret L—, was divided into harassers and harassed. If one were not completely with her, one was the enemy. It was not possible that someone who disagreed with her might have legitimate motives – or even be ready to be argued round. There was to be no discussion, no putting of a case. Also, she and her group owned the story. Who would tell it? Certainly not me – or not if they could help it.

  One of my sisters suggested in her peaceable way that the letter’s tone ‘softened somewhat, towards the end – she gives you a useful research tip’. I had no idea who Lance Peters was – some sort of theoretician, perhaps? – but I was sure that the linking of his name with mine was not intended as a compliment. I rang a friend at Melbourne University and asked her who he was. She said she had never heard of him. When I explained the context we both became feeble with laughter. She said she would go to the Baillieu Library and look him up in the catalogue.

  It took me over a week to answer the letter. I put my reply through draft after draft. It mortified me that I was so exercised by the thing. ‘It’s not worth addressing yourself to her,’ said a French friend, after an hour of close textual criticism under an oak tree in the Botanic Gardens. ‘Address yourself to something beyond her. To the women who are experienced enough to have gone beyond fanaticism and hatred.’

  On 11 April I posted my answer.

  Thank you for your letter. I was surprised and sad that you saw intimidation, provocation and harassment in my three brief and (I thought) courteous approaches to you. It was as part of an attempt to put together a quiet, thoughtful account of the story and its wider meanings that I asked you for your version of the course of events at Ormond College over the past eighteen months. I know that it has been a difficult and painful time for everyone concerned, and I most particularly want to assure you that, contrary to your apparent impression, I never intended to urge you to divulge matters which have been entrusted to you in confidence. I respect the depth of your commitment to the complainants, and consider it unthinkable to expect you to betray their trust. Since this misunderstanding of my motive seems to have been fundamental to your refusal, I think that, having made myself clear to you on this point, I should now ask you again to agree to an interview, at a time convenient to you. I am asking this not only because your contribution to any account of the events would be invaluable, but also because I believe that we are both bound by our professions to encourage open discourse. It is crucial for both of us to maintain attitudes which permit the freest possible discussion of important things which happen in our community. This is why I sincerely hope that you will reconsider your decision. With best wishes . . .

  A bit pompous, but I was getting bored. To be frank, scrub as I might, I could not quite scour out of myself a thrill of refined aggression, and a twinge of guilt for continuing to ‘pester’ her. Why should she, or any of these women, speak to me? But then I recalled that throughout the events somebody – at least one person – had been talking freely and in detail to the Age journalist, leaking the Ormond council proceedings to him, as part of a campaign. Yes, a cat may look at a king. So I sealed up the envelope more cheerfully.

  A young woman graduate of Melbourne University now working for an international publishing company told me she thought the ‘extremity’ of the Ormond complainants’ response must have been an expression of their powerlessness – a rage at not being listened to. ‘Even to make people listen to them they had to work themselves up and say, “But it was really, really upsetting!”

  ‘It’s to do with the age at which you come into your power,’ she said. ‘And it’s something to do with being Australian. We don’t even seem to like being looked at. We take it badly. But women in other cultures like it. I used to argue for hours with a Frenchman, once, when I was just out of university and still very ideological, about the outrage of being looked at – the male gaze, and so on. But now I’m aware that I can say no. Or yes! – which is exciting – rather than going “Oh God! He’s looking at me!”’

  There are looks and looks. I remembered a lonely ‘New Australian’, as we called them in the fifties before they transformed our society, who sat on the edge of the timber promenade at the Eastern Beach swimming pool in Geelong, one summer afternoon, and watched me with a burning concentration while I played alone on a float that was bobbing in the calm water. His attention broke into my happy play (I must have been about fourteen) and made me self-conscious and ashamed. (There it is again – the word ashamed. What is it doing here?) He did not speak to me, or make gestures, or try to draw my attention to him. He just watched me. I was not prepared for this. But is anyone ever prepared for it? Was it his fault, my parents’ fault, my teachers’ fault, society’s fault? Is ‘fault’ a helpful way of thinking about his gaze and my discomfort?

  Or is language, rather than looks, where the problem lies? A friend described to me a scene she once witnessed in a café down at Bondi. Near her sat a gorgeous young woman dressed in light, revealing clothes, having a coffee with a girlfriend. She had a fine body and beautiful breasts and she sat there in her beauty, proud of it, ready to be looked at by the world. At a nearby table sat a bunch of bikies. They stared at the young woman, couldn’t take their eyes off her. The atmosphere in the café, at first, was light, zingy, appreciative: a mood of wordless, flirtatious play. But then one of the men called out something to the beautiful girl. My friend didn’t hear what he said, but she felt the atmosphere turn sour. The girl swung round and shouted back to him, ‘No – they’re not silicone.’ The mood was broken. The room was full of aggression and offence – but, my friend stressed, only after words had been used. ‘It’s as if,’ she said, ‘there were no language for appreciation.’

  I placed a flurry of phone calls.

  The Vice-Master of Ormond was down at the riverbank at the women’s inter-collegiate rowing, ‘a very important event’, as the female secretary lightly remarked.

  Mr Andrew McA—, the member of the Group of Three who had volunteered to speak to me, remarked irritably, when I rang him, ‘The council seems set on a course of action which is completely unjust.’ His impression was that practically everyone at the party had been drinking on the night in question, and ‘wouldn’t have known whether they were Arthur or Martha’. He had seen the report in Truth about the drink-driving conviction of one of the complainants, and expressed outrage that her name should be protected while Shepherd’s was made public again.

  The Women’s Officer of the Melbourne University Student Union, Christine G—, agreed to speak to me about the Ormo
nd story. I described to her the kind of ‘quiet, thoughtful’ book I wanted to write. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘this does seem to have burst out into areas that were . . . unwarranted.’ She was apprehensive, though, about saying things that the complainants wouldn’t be happy about, and said she would try to contact them before she spoke to me. ‘Would you like me to do that?’ she suggested warmly.

  My heart sank. Like all requests, this one would no doubt have to be processed at the faceless supporters’ Checkpoint Charlie. ‘That wasn’t my aim in approaching you,’ I said hastily, ‘but if you think it’s a good idea . . .’

  One of my sisters said to me, ‘Now that the lava has spread out across the countryside and begun to cool, some of the people involved in the explosion must be looking back and thinking, “My God. How could I have acted the way I did? How could I have got swept up in all that madness?’”

  While I was sorting through the mass of papers I had so far collected, I came across a photocopy of Elizabeth Rosen’s statement to the EO Commission. She might not yet speak to me, but here was her voice, though mediated by some representative of something or other:

  ‘As a result of Dr Shepherd’s actions, Ms Rosen. felt like “a worthless sexual object” and was “humiliated and powerless to control what was happening to her”.’

  I sat and looked at this for a while. A worthless sexual object. The phrase sexual object I was, of course, after twenty years of involvement with feminist rhetoric, familiar with to the point of being blind to its peculiar psychology. But worthless sexual object? The phrase gave me the little shiver one gets when confronted with the disingenuous.

  Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her? She might not like it. She might want very much for it to stop. But why does it make her feel ‘worthless’? Would she feel ‘worthless’ if the man were younger, better-looking, more cool? Or is worthless sexual object just a rhetorical flourish, a bit of feminist sabre-rattling on behalf of a young woman who has not taken the responsibility of learning to handle the effects, on men, of her beauty and her erotic style of self-presentation?