The First Stone

by Helen Garner

  ‘The Catholic church,’ said a Jewish woman I know, ‘took centuries to achieve what these puritan feminists have managed to do in only a couple of years – take an idea whose purpose was to free people, and turn it into something that strangles truth.’

  Is it wimpy, is it soft on men, to believe in at least trying conciliation? Sonya O—, the lawyer who was Victoria’s Equal Opportunity Commissioner until the Liberal government abolished her job, certainly doesn’t think so. She’s in her forties, almost our scrap-heap generation, but though she is quick to laugh and has a keen sense of the absurd, her eyebrows are fierce and I can imagine her gaze, in a crisis, having the force of an oncoming truck.

  ‘Commonsense tells you,’ she said, ‘“For Christ’s sake deal with this immediately!” But it’s hard to achieve conciliation if you formalise it at an early stage. Most people when they’re accused want to defend themselves as hard as possible. As soon as a bloke is given notice of a complaint, he gets upset and angry. He doesn’t see his behaviour as untoward. He thinks there’s been a “misrepresentation”. This is why we don’t usually send the respondent a written, fully detailed account of the complaints – because it throws him into a state of anger and denial – a great rallying of forces to respond to the charge. They dig in. Usually they will deny it. They will all deny it. One bloke went on making credible denials, backed up by his employer, right up to the moment when we produced the semen-stained letter – then he collapsed.

  ‘But ninety-six per cent of cases are settled and you hear nothing about them in the media. A face-saving settlement is possible, as long as there’s speed, confidentiality and trust. Great efforts are made for everyone to hear each other. We fight to keep confidentiality. In a closed community it’s always best if the person’s peers can deal with it. There was a surgeon, for example – we got in touch with a senior colleague and said, “Fix it.” Never heard another word about it. We took a hell of a risk. And it wouldn’t work again, because people would say due process hadn’t been observed.

  ‘It’s the eternal question: why, when you set up informal, fast processes for personal ignition points, do the processes always tend to become lumbering, vast, politically laden machines with caterpillar treads, that don’t deal with the problem? If only we could zoom in, troubleshoot and zoom out – maybe with follow-up. Essentially, sexual harassment is bullying. The hardest thing for women is to stop it themselves. They need someone to hold their hand while they do it. You need an individual who can say “Oy!”’

  I remarked that her attitudes looked benevolent compared with the new feminists’ push on campus to sidestep conciliation and go ‘straight to retribution’. Sonya O— pulled a face and looked out the window at the commercial towers of Collins Street.

  ‘If you don’t take certain positions these days,’ she said, ‘you’re “not a feminist”. Dear God, if I know anything, I know that there are ten thousand ways of being a feminist.’

  People who think that degrees of assault should suffice are impatient with what one woman lawyer described as the fuzziness, the murky waters of conciliation. They call it soft law and they scorn it. But conciliation, when you think about it, is psychologically a feminine – almost a motherly – way of settling a dispute. It rests on the idea, commonsense to any mother of warring children, that more than one interpretation of ‘the facts’ can legitimately exist; on the possibility that there has been a genuine misunderstanding – or at least a gross mismatch of expectations. It has concern for the wounded feelings, the pride, of both parties. It takes into account that a story told over and over loses its tight fit with ‘the truth’ and becomes a story about a story. It allows people to escape from corners they may have painted themselves into, in their first wild burst of defensiveness. It admits the complexities of context which the rules of evidence in courts exclude. A certain patience is required, however, and a basic optimism about the ability of people to learn and change. The Ormond complainants and their supporters ran out of this patience; or perhaps they never had it. Perhaps they never believed, in their rage and frustration, that anything other than brute force would blast a hole through the battlements of men’s privilege. So they charged past conciliation into the traditional masculine style of problem-solving: call in the cops, split off the relevant nuances of character and context, and hire a cowboy to slug it out for you in the main street at noon, with all the citizenry watching.

  In a café I gossiped with Angela Z—, a woman friend of my age, about our recent experiences with younger feminists. My friend had written a piece for the Age about the impossibility of buying attractive, comfortable shoes in large sizes; when her article was run, she received more than thirty letters from readers, some of them very funny and to the point. The male editor wouldn’t agree to her writing a follow-up, and suggested she try the Accent pages. She got on to the editor of these pages and made her proposal.

  ‘Yes, I read your piece,’ said the Accent editor, a woman. ‘Accent publishes feminist things. What line would you be running?’

  My friend explained her idea, but the Accent editor declined, on the grounds that it was not feminist enough.

  ‘If you don’t think it’s a feminist issue,’ my friend said crossly, ‘that women outside the so-called normal size range can’t buy decent clothes, then I think you’re wrong.’

  ‘Why don’t you offer it to the Tempo section?’ said the Accent editor. ‘They run frivolous things.’

  At the word frivolous we began to utter shrieks of coarse laughter; and then, for some reason, we recalled the older women from the suburbs who used to turn up to women’s liberation meetings in the city, twenty years ago. They would sit quietly, listening to our rantings: Fima, Rose, old Jewish women with gentle smiles and bosoms, who never came to a meeting without bringing gifts of food. We gobbled it and never thought to ask them questions about their lives or why they had come; we were too selfish, too full of our own grievances and theories. I related to my friend my pathetic bravado in the presence of the fierce young Women’s Officer from the Student Union. ‘I practically pleaded for her respect,’ I said. ‘I talked about abortion law reform, demos and police and so on – I said, “We put our bodies on the line” – but she just looked at me coldly – she didn’t give a shit about our magnificent heroism.’

  We sat at the table howling with laughter. ‘It’s a dialogue between generations,’ said Angela Z—, wiping away the tears.

  ‘It’s not a dialogue,’ I said, blowing my nose. ‘It’s a fucking war.’

  On a clear morning in late April I drove out to Mont Albert to visit Mr Andrew McA—, the member of the council’s Group of Three who had written to me offering an interview. On the phone he had used the sarcastic expression ‘your feminist mates’; I was wary. As soon as he opened the door I had a strange and not entirely pleasant sense that I had seen him somewhere before. I racked my brains to place him, while his wife settled me at a table in a room with a big mirrored sideboard and floor-to-ceiling windows that gave on to a garden. A railway line ran nearby: occasional trains caused a faint shudder.

  Mr McA— took his place opposite me at the table. He looked in his seventies, dressed in neat wool pants and a viyella shirt open at the neck. He had moistened and combed his hair, but there was a rebellious little wave over his forehead which he had failed (all his life, perhaps) to subdue. He was thin, scrubbed, dry, like a Scot; he had battered hands with big, blunt thumbs. And suddenly I remembered where I had seen him. He was one of the two old Ormond men who had so forcefully asserted their claim to my seat behind the Shepherds at the County Court appeal. I was severely thrown by this memory. I bristled with hostility: at first I could hardly meet his eye. But he obviously had no memory of me. On his private turf, Mr McA— was a different man. He still held his chin high, but the tough posture was softened by a smile and a warm expression. I didn’t mention the incident, but I tried to keep the tone of his public self alive in my mind while we talked. This was made difficu
lt by his welcome, and more so by the cheerful friendliness of his wife, who asked if she could call me by my first name, and at eleven on the dot crashed open a servery hatch from the kitchen and passed us coffee and excellent home-made cheese biscuits. She told me she had left a bag of cooking apples from their tree beside the front door for me to take home. ‘Don’t bite them,’ she said. ‘They need stewing – they’re terribly sour.’ ‘But they fluff up very nicely,’ added Mr McA—.

  On the table between Mr McA— and me lay a low mountain range of files. More were spread out on the floor, and others burst out of a battered briefcase that leaned against the leg of his chair. He had letters, memos, minutes, photocopies of every conceivable relevant document. I longed for him to find pressing business elsewhere and leave me to graze on them undisturbed; but he was their captive. He would start his version of the events, then cut across himself, dive for a sheet of paper and read me a paragraph off it, then cast it aside and leap for another sheet. ‘I can’t place my hand on it,’ he would say as he shuffled through the mound. ‘It’s not that these are out of order – it’s just that I’m not exactly sure where it is.’ Like me he could not find an organising principle for this mass of detail. Such powers of discrimination as either of us had were swamped.

  He read to me excerpts from notes he had taken in court, stressing always the gaps in witnesses’ memories, the inconsistencies in their stories. His anxiety about proof and likelihood was infectious. I became confused and started to panic.

  After half an hour of this torture, Mr McA— suddenly pushed his chair back from the table and swung sideways towards the window. He folded his arms and began to speak more spontaneously, as if in a conversation where nothing had to be proved. He expressed frustration that the Group of Three had had such a narrow brief, with no power to call witnesses, no protection against defamation, no way of ‘compelling people to tell the truth’. He said he was one of those who believed strongly that Peter M—, the Vice-Master, ought to have spoken at once to Dr Shepherd and told him there were ‘real, active complaints around’. He spoke with dry anger against one of the college’s senior women tutors who, he said, had undermined Peter M—’s early handling of the complaints and had accused him (here he extracted a letter from a file) of being ‘obstructionist and sexist’. He showed me evidence that pointed persuasively to the identity of the council member who had leaked proceedings to the press. And he spoke with intense irritation about the High Court judge’s prompt resignation from the chairmanship of the council. Something in his tone as he said these things made me forget for a moment that Mr McA— was probably fifteen years older than the judge: I thought with surprise, so – even to old men, judges represent the father.

  We talked for a long time, trying to compare our senses of the thing, to find a common place to stand. The differences between us in age, sex and experience of life made this almost impossible, but the attempt was genuine, and the companionableness which developed between us was strangely sad.

  I went away from this meeting (and a later one) with Mr McA— weighed down by a sense of his distress and confusion. It seemed to me that his response to the events in question was so complicated by the depth of his emotional attachment to the college that he could only flounder in the oceans of detail he had amassed. I could not get a fix on his attitude. At first I thought he seemed to believe either that Dr Shepherd had done the things alleged and thus deserved to be fired, or that the two girls had made up stories out of malice or neurosis, in which case the college should have gone in to bat for Shepherd with real vigour. But his position seemed to shift repeatedly as we talked, and when I read back over my notes I found that at the outset he had said, ‘Colin Shepherd has been penalised far too heavily – out of proportion.’ Was there ‘proportion’, or was it a case of either/or? I think he wasn’t sure. But he did stand firm on one thing: ‘I n my personal view,’ he said, ‘we should make sure that Colin Shepherd is treated fairly on being parted from. Some parties would believe in being as stingy as possible – fulfilling the minimum legal obligation – but it doesn’t pay to be parsimonious. You can’t have a man feeling really sore and foul about the college.’

  Privately I wondered yet again at the passion certain people – usually men – harbour for institutions. I will never understand this emotion; and my inability to sympathise with it handicaps me in trying to grasp the ‘truth’ of this story. It is completely mysterious to me, even somewhat distasteful, that someone might fall in love with an institution for life, and that his loyalty to it might unsettle his broader ethical judgments.

  The bag of cooking apples was on the car seat beside me as I drove away. While I waited for a traffic light to change, I thought I would try one, despite the McA—’s kind warning. I took one bite – they were right: my saliva dried up, and every hair on my head stood on end.

  A woman I vaguely know, and rather like, a big handsome laughing Catholic mother in her early fifties who has come late to feminism, related a discussion she’d had with her sister, ‘that could have become an argument but didn’t, about the way women in our family flirt. I realised it a few years back,’ she said, ‘and tried to stop doing it. We send out messages, to get a buzz back that’ll make you feel good for the rest of the day – but the poor bloke’s left wondering, “Now what did all that mean?”’

  She spoke about the differences between her mother’s generation and hers, about the distorting power of a Catholic upbringing about sex: ‘It’s education that makes the biggest change. Once you start to read, once you start to realise that you’ve been lied to about A, you start to question B, C, D and E – and then the whole house of cards collapses.’

  Yes, I thought, that’s a wonderful thing – but not if Eros, ‘the spark that ignites and connects’, gets extinguished in the wreckage. What’s wrong with flirting? Perhaps it made the men ‘feel good for the rest of the day’, too. Why be so literal-minded about it? Why does it have to be harmful or wrong? Who says it has to mean something beyond itself? It’s play. It’s the little god Eros, flickering and flashing through the plod of our ordinary working lives.

  Feminism is meant to free us, not to take the joy out of everything.

  Lance Peters, whose work Margaret L— had suggested might be ‘a n important source’ for my project, turned out to be the man who had written the screenplay of an Australian feature movie called Gross Misconduct which, in a stroke of breathtaking synchronicity, had been shot on location at Ormond College while aspects of the Colin Shepherd drama had been unfolding in real life. In Peters’ plot, the student who brought a charge of misconduct against her lecturer was a neurotic, damaged girl, engaged in an incestuous affair with her father. She had seduced the innocent academic, a handsome family man and inspiring neo-Platonist teacher who in his spare time played funky saxophone in clubs. The movie was released in the winter of 1993, and screened for a brief period without creating a stir.

  Patrick N—, a Labor man and jazz buff of fifty or so, came to live in Ormond as a tutor at Colin Shepherd’s suggestion. Like many people who have known Shepherd for a long time, he spoke of him with a kind of rough, impatient affection. Patrick N— gave me the first graphic eye-witness account I had heard of the fateful Smoko in October 1991.

  ‘The Valedictory Dinner ends the year with a bang,’ he said, launching into it with gusto, ‘and after that, through the exams, the rest of it’s a whimper. I’m a highly emotional slob, I love it – and it’s emotional for the kids, too, though they have a love-hate relationship with Ormond – more love than hate.

  ‘The dinner is quite an occasion. Darkness, candles, a piper pipes the procession in, the Governor of Victoria was there, the staff’s in academic dress, black tie is religiously observed.

  ‘Colin Shepherd made a brief speech, then the two senior kids – a woman and a man – gave the Valedictory addresses. They were brilliant speeches. The whole show was worth going to just for them. Then they sang “Land of Hope and Glory” – tha
t’s the Ormond song. The kids sing it Cossack-style. They stand on the chairs – they’re asked not to stand on the tables – let’s say some of them don’t.

  ‘The High Table processes out, then the kids go out.

  ‘Then the deal is you get into your old stuff and you go to the Smoko. Everyone’s well on the way by the time they get there, given the highly emotional night it is – and it was made more emotional on this occasion because the Master had announced the results of the election for the chair of the Student Club – and it was a woman. She was elected against two blokes – one of them was the captain of rugby.

  ‘People went berserk with happiness. I was one of them. She walked past me and I congratulated her – I gave her a kiss on the cheek and told her she could use my phone to ring her parents. So it was a Valedictory Dinner but with this extra tang – the election of a woman chair. Some of the blokes were saying to me later, “The place is going to the fuckin’ dogs – bloody women.”

  ‘The Smoko started at about eight-thirty. Everyone was in their olds, the grog was flowing. I’ve got a reputation for dancing with everybody on the bloody floor. I’m a physical person and my friends warn me – that’s the safety element of these things – you don’t dance with just one kid. It was a great party – but it wasn’t a wild party.