by Helen Garner
‘Colin said to me three or four days after the event, “Did you enjoy yourself?” I said, “Yes, but I’m disgusted with myself. I spewed, first time in thirty-five years.” Colin said, “I got a bit full myself.” And he gave a little nervous laugh.
‘Now the cruel, cruel irony is that I didn’t believe him. I thought, oh, it’s just Colin trying to be one of the boys. I thought, come off it, Colin, you never drop your guard. Well, Colin hasn’t really got a guard, but – in twenty years of social occasions at the Monash faculty I’d never seen him drunk.’
I asked him if he had any sense that Colin Shepherd had been in over his head, in the Master’s job. He looked amazed, and answered warmly.
‘God, no! He was a marvellous Master. He might have been a bit too paternalistic, too avuncular – but in my judgement of Colin, this job was the pinnacle of everything he’d ever wanted. When Francis Ormond built that college, he had someone like Colin Shepherd in mind. Colin loves pomp, he loves circumstance, he loves connections with the church. Also, one thing he’s very good at is meetings. His interventions are astute, sensible, timely, and always well expressed. He thinks very well on his feet. He speaks well. And the kids were so bloody pleased that he was the first Australian Master.’
When I mentioned the High Court judge, whose role was cut short so sharply by his resignation from the college council, Patrick N— burst into scornful laughter. ‘He’s the metaphor for Colin’s tragedy. A knight, ex-Ormond, a man with all the right connections. Before his troubles, Colin would be saying to you, “Come and meet His Honour” – then at the first hiccup – see ya later. It’s the supreme tragedy of Colin Shepherd – that the establishment he devoted his bloody life to has turned round and kicked him to death.’
One curious detail kept surfacing, in the many accounts I heard of the Smoko in question: a woman who took off her top in the Junior Common Room and danced bare-breasted.
The first man who reported it to me described it bluntly as ‘clearly not a sexual act. It was “I am a woman and a woman’s been elected”. It was obviously a political act.’ As a veteran of the feminist social milieux of the seventies, I didn’t find this outrageous or even particularly strange. In fact it struck me as spirited and flamboyant, if somewhat rash. I simply made a note of it and passed on. But the little story kept popping up. I was not permitted to forget it. What was its status as testimony? Rumour, gossip, fact? I didn’t know how to evaluate it, or what it meant. But up it came of its own accord, like an urban myth, over and over, from almost every quarter, whether hostile to the complainants or friendly, whenever college people spoke to me about the Smoko. I never brought it up: it was always offered to me, laid down on the table in front of me like a mysterious tarot card. Those who claimed to have seen the bare-breasted dancer with their own eyes would present the story coolly, without making anything of it, as if merely adding atmosphere to their account of the evening. Others who had only heard it round the traps tended to raise it as if it proved something, although exactly what I could not determine.
I had a friend in Ormond, to whom I reported the rumour. At first he refused to believe it. Then, as I came back again and again with it, he stuck doggedly to his guns. ‘No no no. I do not believe it. It can’t be true. Perhaps someone was just dancing about triumphantly – perhaps she looked topless. Perhaps someone who was really drunk thought they saw someone topless in the distance, and told somebody else about it. It must be a collective hallucination. You’ve got to realise that colleges are extraordinary hotbeds of the most circumstantial gossip.’ After about the seventh reported sighting he was still obstinately maintaining denial. At the tenth resurgence he began to waver. He said, in the tone of somebody lost in realms of cloudy fantasy, ‘Well . . . I suppose that nearly everyone there that night was blind drunk . . . if it did happen, it suggests some sort of . . . Walpurgisnacht.’
But what fascinated and amused me most about this resilient little factoid was that the older the man who was discussing it with me, the more rapidly he would skid from plain statement into lurid embroidery. ‘Danced topless’ would become ‘danced topless on a table’, then ‘danced naked on a table’, then ‘danced newd on a table’. Each time I witnessed this slither into prurience, it was completely unconscious. When I drew the speaker’s attention to his slip, his face would go blank with surprise and embarrassment. So a gesture (however foolish, in this context) intended as symbolic of female glee, or celebration and triumph, is transformed by the older men who speak of it into something sleazy – an act of gross sexual provocation, with overtones of prostitution. They can’t help it. They don’t even know they’re doing it. There must be something useful we can learn from this.
What sort of a night was it, Wednesday 16 October 1991? That depends, of course, on who is remembering.
It was spring. Exams were coming. It was a splendid occasion, a triumphant event, a very successful junction. During a speech at dinner people were screaming through the vents. It was just another college evening. Nothing to distinguish it from any other Smoko. From memory it was a warmish night. A nice night to stay around after dinner and have a few drinks. But some people thought, no, and went home. A woman visiting from another college said to the Master Let’s go and see what the kids are doing. It was a strange night. There was definitely something in the air. A loss of authority. A lot of the tutors were drunk, dancing with each other, pinching people’s bums. Let’s go and see what the kids are doing. One of the senior tutors was blotto. She took an earring out of her ear – it was a pink, reasonably large ball – and gave it to a boy. There was a sense of abandon. One woman took her top off. There wasn’t a good feel about the night. People who hate Smokos were not in euphoria. People were very drunk so don’t count on subtleties but they heard stories. The room was dark; the only light came in from the quadrangle. It was a great party but not a wild party. See what the kids are doing. They asked him to dance. May be there was an element of teasing. Perhaps at first it was almost a kind of game. At least one person was dazed and confused. It was a warmish night. Something in the air. Let’s go and see what the kids are doing.
But the Bureau of Meteorology recorded that on Wednesday 16 October 1991 in Melbourne there were ‘showers and rain. The top temperature was 14.6°, winds were moderate from the south-west; it was fine in the evening.’ Of this at least we can be certain.
On 28 April 1993 the papers reported that a fourteen-year-old girl on her way to school had been raped in a public toilet by a man armed with a knife. This is the kind of news item that makes women call each other on the phone. I thought, contemplating it, that our helpless rage and grief at this eternally unpreventable violence against women and girls – our inability to protect our children from the sickness of the world – must get bottled up and then let loose on poor blunderers who get drunk at parties and make clumsy passes; who skate blithely into situations that they are too ignorant or preoccupied to recognise as minefields of gender politics. But the ability to discriminate must he maintained. Otherwise all we are doing is increasing the injustice of the world.
It was the end of April 1993, but the days were still warm and dry, and the hoses were going in the Ormond gardens, when I went there to interview Fergus C—, a tutor who didn’t look much older than his mid-thirties but displayed the articulate, unshakeable self-assurance that is the mark of the Ormond man. He welcomed me at the gate and took me on a little tour of the place, starting with the Master’s office which had so recently been Colin Shepherd’s. We stood at the door and peered in. In the middle of the floor stood a brightly painted child’s table and chairs; he told me these had been made by some Ormond students and entered in a competition: they hadn’t won, but the Acting Master, who had a small child, had made an offer for them. They struck an oddly homely note in the formal office with its towering ceiling and immense, high windows. Fergus C— took a few steps towards the great timber desk, looked at me with a naughty smile, spread his arms, and said, Well,
Helen – this is the scene of the crime!’
I stared around the room.
‘There’s the door,’ he said, pointing towards the one that led out into the passage, ‘and this is the key’ – he flourished it between thumb and forefinger – ‘that poor Colin Shepherd had to hold up in court.’
The key was heavy, curly, very old, like something out of a fairy tale. I glanced again at the door and saw its Victorian style, its low keyhole and handle. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I’d imagined a more modern one – that could be just flicked shut.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s quite hard to turn. That’s a point Colin tried to make in court.’
Taken aback by his cheerful, dramatic frankness, I scanned the room. I saw the sideboard, the two low puffy chairs with their wooden arms, side by side; suddenly the scene came to life for me. The ghosts materialised. A middle-aged man fumbled in his elation with the whisky decanter and filled two glasses, slopping a few drops on to the glossy surface of the timber. A gorgeous young woman, flushed from dancing, a blur of beauty, sat and glowed in the chair. And then what happened? What was the truth? It was unknowable. I looked for the windows – could anyone have glanced in and seen them? No – the sills were shoulder-high. For some reason I felt a rush of terrible sadness. Young Fergus suggested we conduct the interview out in the garden, and I followed him out of the room with relief, to a bench that was shaded by trees but out of reach of the big leisurely hoses.
‘Colin, by style and temperament,’ he said, ‘will always collide with the politically correct gang who’ve had a foot in Ormond since Davis McCaughey brought a liberal cast of mind into a patriarchal set-up, twenty years ago almost to the day. Colin’s not of the establishment, but his whole life has been directed towards it, and he had links with it that would have been useful to the college. He had a track record with young people. And he was indefatigable. He seems not to sleep. I’ve seen the files from his time in the job – it’s amazing, the amount of stuff he pumped out. He was having a ball in the job.
‘It was the end of his first full year as Master. Alcohol was flowing. He had entertained the Governor. It was a case of hubris, of forgetting to be careful. He exposed his flank, and he was ruthlessly attacked.
‘He’s an innocent man. There’s a lot of good in him. A disproportionate reaction strikes me, in this. My accountant’s a woman. When she heard about the case, that it was an accusation of groping, she said to me, “What? You mean that’s it?” One of the senior women in college rightly asked, at a council meeting, “What level of conduct is required of the Master of Ormond College?” – but there’s always been bad blood between her and Colin Shepherd.
‘The Master is a representative figure. He’s the face of the patriarchy, of the institution. As with royalty, there’s no allowance for a lapse – no concept of a venial sin. And Colin was unaware of the sensitivity of his position. He doesn’t tune in.
‘I don’t mink he’s ever panicked. There’s a strength of purpose, a will in him that I’d never have suspected. You could look him in the eye and he wouldn’t bat an eyelid. He sailed right along. His wife has gone through the behavioural changes you’d have expected in him.
‘You or I might talk about something like “developments in contemporary feminism” – neither of them would know what you meant. They’re unworldly. I’d repeat the word innocent. A lack of perception. Something was going to happen. It wasn’t a surprise to me.
‘But why has the world seized on it?’ he went on, changing smoothly into rhetorical mode. ‘The women who support the complainants see the university as an island of purity in a corrupt sea. Ormond represents offensiveness butting in. Despite its multi-cultural pretences, our society is still very British. This story is a volatile mix of the establishment and sex. The media finds nothing more entertaining than that. If you live here, on the one hand you’re appalled by the publicity – but on the other you realise that perhaps it means that Ormond matters.’
He pulled out of his briefcase a folder of colour photos and spread them out between us on the wooden bench, rummaging through them for the one he wanted me to see. As he searched I picked one at random. It showed Colin Shepherd on green grass, strolling towards the camera with his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a football jumper in Ormond stripes, and a battered bush hat. His head was turned to his right, towards the backs of a line of young men who seemed to be engrossed in watching a football match. The placing of the figures in the photo, the directions in which they were facing, created a strong sense of melancholy and exclusion.
‘Here it is,’ said Fergus. He passed me another photo. ‘It’s the Master’s Dance. Normally the Master would turn up in black tie.’ It was a full-length shot of Dr and Mrs Shepherd standing arm in arm in a living room, looking straight into the lens. Dr Shepherd’s face was serious, his wife’s about to break into a diffident smile. He was wearing an eighteenth-century soldier’s uniform with breeches, plus a blond curly wig and a tricorne hat, and Mrs Shepherd a purple, flounced, big-sleeved Victorian gown.
‘See?’ said Fergus. ‘They just didn’t get it.’
The photos, with their touching human note, brought me up short; but Fergus C— was such a vivid, fluent talker, so intelligent and young and entertaining, so proud of his college, that I was hardly aware of the gradual chilling of my blood; and it wasn’t till I typed up my notes that I noticed the merciless closing-out of the Shepherds from possible college society that I had just witnessed.
This sharp sense of style was common to every member of the Ormond community who spoke to me, student or teacher, past or present. Some students struggled to extract moral meaning from it, others gloried in it, others again just wielded it, with varying degrees of irony and self-awareness.
‘I came from a state school,’ said one young man, now a lawyer, a tall, freckled blond in a grey suit and a raincoat. ‘I’d had jobs since I was twelve, and I thought Ormond would be full of “spoilt” private school kids. But when I got there I found they had skills I just didn’t have. They were socially very advanced, good at talking to people. They knew what clothes to wear, whereas at Smokos, for example, I tended to overdress. I saw after a while that there was a college uniform: Blundstone boots, denim jeans, a black T-shirt, and those check flannel shirts that the engineers wore. I realised it was anathema to draw attention to yourself. If you’re rich, the worst thing you can do is let people know. If you’re intelligent, you don’t draw attention to it. The look to have was one of self-effacement – of not making any attempt. You don’t care. What could be cooler than that?’
‘At first,’ said a young woman graduate who was still looking for a job, ‘it’s like a big holiday camp – so grownup, so sophisticated. People are spastic for the whole of Orientation Week, and by the end of it a hierarchy is established – the in people, and the dags. The first few weeks I was at the pub with the glamour girls, the “gorgeous pretty girlies”’ – her face positively rippled with disdain – ‘then I became known as a feminist, and halfway through the year I was dropped.’
As she spoke, very open-faced and smiling, she kept flipping her long silk hair back over one shoulder. ‘I was told that no man would come near me with a ten-foot pole, because I was so aggressive.’
‘Some people, like Nicky Stewart for example,’ said a science graduate who was working in another country and phoned me from there with her views, ‘thought O-Week was cruel – sexist and nasty. But at Ormond there are high school kids, and kids from Scotch and Geelong College and Morongo – they sit at the table asking each other “What did you get in HSC?” If you don’t treat them badly, give them some harmless violence and a bit of pain to talk about at breakfast, they’ll never mix.’
‘I only stayed in Ormond a year,’ said a history graduate, a self-possessed young woman from the country who had joined the college choir halfway through the year after she moved out. ‘The tradition didn’t work on me. I thought it was silly. I hated the hierarchical thing –
Gentlemen and SCUM, meaning Student Club Uninitiated Member – all that stuff. You were yelled at in O-Week, they threw water bombs, you were told to do tapskulls – drink beer straight from the tap, to see how much you could take. They took us all to a beach and we were supposed to do this stuff called Sexercises. Blokes lay on their backs in a line and rolled a woman along their raised hands. Push-up competitions. I didn’t think it was funny. I went to the beach, but I just walked off and sat down with the “gentlemen”, the female ones.’ She gave an ironic laugh. ‘I had feelings at the time which I didn’t really understand till after I’d done Women’s Studies. I didn’t like all that Ormond-importance stuff, the songs putting down other colleges’ – she clenched her fists and pounded the table in a sharp rhythm. ‘I’d already lived away from home, and I didn’t want to get pissed all the time. Basically I just lived in my room, in a rather isolated section of the college.’
‘There’s an aura to the place,’ said a graduate now working as an engineer, a dry-mannered, soft-faced young man, still dressed in what the lawyer had described as ‘the college uniform’. ‘The buildings reek of tradition. I like them. It’s sickening, once you leave – but when you’re into it you look at the day students and mink, I bet they wish they were like me. The problem is that it’s a discrete social unit. There’s no contact with the outside world. But it’s not a bad treadmill to be on. I wouldn’t be surprised if I married someone I’d met through college. You can’t hate a place where you made eighty per cent of your friends.’
‘David Parker was Master when I got there,’ said the lawyer. ‘He was a very intimidating figure.’
‘His office,’ said another young man, ‘was silent and calm, like a scene from a film. He’d say something to you about your parents.’