The First Stone

by Helen Garner

  ‘I didn’t think much of him as Master,’ said the history graduate. ‘He was awkward – not a people person, like Colin Shepherd. The first time I met Parker, he heard my name and said there’d been a couple of boys with that name in Ormond who were good footballers – they were a fine-looking lot, and was I any good at football?’ She laughed. ‘I was taken aback.’

  ‘I was sitting at a table one day,’ said the lawyer, ‘and Parker came up and spoke to me. “Are you from Ballarat?” “Yes, Master.” (He wanted to be addressed as Master.) “College or Grammar?” “Ballarat High.”’ Here the lawyer hung his head to mime shame, but he was grinning.

  An arts graduate, lightly built and with a flop of brown curls, told me, from behind the cash register of the city bookshop where he worked, about a time when he and some of his friends were horsing around in the Ormond hallways with a trolley, which they crashed against the wall of a tutor’s flat: the impact almost knocked over a bookcase on the other side of the wall, near which the tutor’s baby had been sleeping. The tutor (by coincidence Barbara W—, the women’s supporter who had shouted at me over the phone, and whom this student greatly admired) ‘was terribly angry. She wanted us to be kicked out of college, but Parker said it was only boyish fun. She didn’t speak to us for two years. We deserved it. We were little Country Road dicks. It’s hard to dissociate yourself from the cretin that you were.’

  ‘At an ordinary Smoko, not the Valedictory one,’ said the engineering graduate, ‘you got a stamp on your wrist when you paid your five bucks to go in. It said FUGBAS. Fire up, get blind and score. I’m not the predatory type,’ he added, flashing a glance at my notebook. ‘The girls are definitely into it – it’s fun.’

  ‘Boys didn’t force themselves on you,’ said the science graduate with brisk scorn. ‘They waited till you were totally inebriated and then they slept with you. One country rugby-head went downstairs and got all his friends to come up to his room and have a look at a naked girl, who’d passed out in his bed.’

  When I asked the lawyer what he had gained from his time in college, he replied at once, ‘A complete contempt for property. We used to have fire extinguisher fights. We used to smash windows and break down doors. We trashed rooms. There was also a reasonable amount of nudity. I heard that once, after the rugby, blokes ran naked through the debating final. If we were walking to the pub, we’d just piss while we were walking along. We used to chuck bags of piss at people, at the car rallies. We had food fights. I remember one, when the food had been fish and chips. There was food everywhere, you couldn’t walk on the floor, it was so sticky. The Master said, “The Hall’s been raped – you promised me this wouldn’t happen.” It was a completely liberating sense of not caring, of being free from social control. You feel special, going to Ormond – you learn that things don’t matter.’

  In the middle of my distaste, which I was trying hard to conceal, a small memory wriggled to the surface: the water fights I used to have in my twenties with my first husband (an ‘Ormond man’, now I come to think of it, though not the nostalgic type) and the other residents of the old house we rented in Fitzroy. I remembered one fight which raged all through a winter afternoon, at the end of which, exhausted from running and throwing and laughing, I retreated to the outside dunny and sat on it, to hide and rest; but within minutes the door was wrenched open and my husband, with a demonic cackle, hurled a whole bucket of cold water all over me where I sat, panting and off my guard. I remembered being amazed by his tenacity – his refusal to stop.

  ‘There’s a sort of euphoria in those fights,’ the lawyer was saying. ‘All your muscles go weak, from the laughing.’

  ‘Davis McCaughey,’ a tutor remarked to me rhetorically, in a different context, ‘was a brilliant Master. He’d sort of let the kids burn the place down, but they still used to quail before him. He seemed to get the balance exactly right.’

  ‘I don’t know what happened to the place between McCaughey and Shepherd,’ said a woman lawyer who had been a fresher in the seventies, in the second year after the admission of women residents – a ‘very good time’ for her. ‘I was amazed to hear, in the late eighties, stories about raids on students’ rooms, and trashings – women being afraid to walk through the halls at night. If these stories were true, it had got much uglier than when I was a student.’

  ‘There was a huge fanfare,’ the male lawyer who’d gone to school in Ballarat continued, ‘when Colin Shepherd took on the job. He was the first Australian. They rang the bell seven times to show he was the seventh Master. At his first big dinner he was piped and spooned into Hall. It was a big night. Three hundred people, black-and-white, candles. I had to carve a turkey. We all got pissed, smashed glasses. People got up on the tables and sang “Land of Hope and Glory”. There was a toast to the Queen. The difference between D. H. Parker and Colin Shepherd,’ he went on, ‘was stark. One day I was in the vestibule and I met Shepherd’s eye – and he nodded. I was impressed. With Parker, you wouldn’t have expected him to have loose eyes. I thought, Shepherd’s an open guy – he’s accessible.’

  ‘I thought he should be more removed,’ said the unemployed woman graduate; ‘a figure of respect. He tried to get down to the students’ level. I felt that this job was too much for him – that he would bumble his way through – at any minute he might muck it up. I had a sense of impending doom. If he’d been dashing – but I felt he was out of his depth.’

  ‘When he invited guests to Hall,’ the lawyer said, ‘he would always introduce them to the students as noble, esteemed persons, a professor from India and so on. The rugby blokes in particular thought it showed bad taste – that it was demeaning of himself and of the college.’

  Another ex-Ormond student, who was grateful to the college for having taken him in ‘at a great, dangerous corner’ of his life, and whose sympathy for Dr Shepherd had brought him social ostracism (one Ormond girl described him to me contemptuously as ‘a friendless geek’) devised a more complex analysis of the embarrassment Shepherd’s public persona provoked among the style police of the student body. ‘He’s bloody naive,’ he said. ‘A teddy bear. He had no idea how nasty people could be towards him. People were just waiting’ for him to fuck up. He’s a deeply establishment person, a middle-of-the-road Liberal voter. He’s much more personable than Parker was – but he irritated people, because he confronted us with the establishment class culture we’d inherited and were benefiting from. Where campus politics is concerned, being in Ormond, or in college at all, is pretty incorrect. Ormond students are aware that they’re on the wrong side politically, so they look for other ways to marginalise themselves. For some, this is radical feminism, for others it’s being gay, or Asian. They define their whole lives not by the benefits of the college, but by what oppresses them. And Colin Shepherd confronted them with the truth of the matter. At High Table he’d say, “Tonight we’ve got Sir and Lady So-and-So.” We’d cringe. But in thirty years these same students will be the Sir and Lady So-and-So’s. The women who brought the complaints are law students. They characterised themselves as helpless. Wait a few years. They’ll be screwing companies in court.’

  ‘I’ve been out in the workforce for a while,’ said the engineer. ‘There’s constant innuendo to the secretaries – blatant sexism – much worse than what used to happen in college and at uni. The college was so much more liberal a place than the whole CBD for a start – than the real world. The university is the place where society draws its progressive ideas from – but it’s not where the worst problems are.’

  ‘I’ve been told,’ said the lawyer from Ballarat, ‘that the two girls will have a lot of career problems because of what they did.’

  ‘I met Elizabeth Rosen in a nightclub,’ said the bookseller, ‘the night before the trial. I got a strong sense of her sincerity. It changed my whole opinion of the thing. It’s not framed in terms of injury. The issue is what happens when you complain – how you’re treated. The forces are so unseen – the cultura
l machinery they had to fight through, the opposition they came up against – why should they? I’d support anything the girls did. You think Ormond’s a benign, safe world, until something like this happens. The Master’s a victim, but a powerful victim.’

  ‘I liked Nicky Stewart a lot,’ said the lawyer. ‘I thought she was attractive and gutsy. She doesn’t know my name. Elizabeth Rosen is a really smart girl. But I don’t feel comfortable, talking about her.’ He gave a grimace of a smile, dropped his eyes and twisted his shoulders. Sensing personal emotion, I backed off; but I wondered, as I had many times before, whether Elizabeth Rosen had any real awareness of the profound effect she has on men.

  ‘Nicole Stewart,’ said the unemployed graduate, ‘was two years older than me. I had a lot of respect for her. She dressed differently. At one ball I remember she was wearing a hat. She was a great, gutsy woman. She would stand up in Students’ Club meetings and say, “You stupid men.” Elizabeth Rosen I had no respect for. I used to live opposite her in first year. She never went to uni. She played loud music very late. She never went to meals, never seemed to eat a thing. She had a big bust but she was thin around the hips. She wasn’t anorexic – she just saw no value in eating.’

  ‘Nicky Stewart never fitted in,’ said the science graduate who called collect from America. ‘She wasn’t a private school kid. She didn’t care for the yuppie life and way of doing things – the social life. With her it was “I’m an intellectual”. Elizabeth was more “Ha-de-ha, I’ve got more money than I know what to do with”. So it was two college misfits who went ahead with complaints.’

  ‘You know the dresses the girls wear to these formal do’s?’ said an older Ormond resident. ‘They’re all’– he made sinuous narrowing, then overflowing gestures with both hands – ‘got up, like chocolates about to be opened. That’s the male point of view on it, anyway.’

  ‘Once I went to the Ormond ball,’ said the history graduate. ‘It was held that year at the Metro nightclub – awful place, I hated it. I wore a short black skirt and high heels – and I was amazed at the way blokes I’d seen round Ormond all year suddenly started behaving towards me in a different way. Afterwards I threw out the clothes. It’s not that I don’t want to be seen as attractive or sexy. It’s more that I don’t want that response from people I don’t want to appeal to. Some women – I don’t understand it but they seem not to feel worthy unless they’re being treated that way. I found I could always deal with the sexism at Ormond. I dress so as to be treated the way I want to be treated.’

  ‘I looked forward to seeing Shepherd get up in court,’ said the woman graduate who was looking for work. ‘I hoped and prayed they would find him guilty. I’ve heard the argument, from a boy whose opinion I respect, that what Shepherd was accused of doing is what every boy in college does. No one says it’s wrong when they do it – some girls even like it.’

  One of the senior college tutors told me that recently, at a dinner to celebrate the grand centenary of the Dining Hall and to raise bursary money, ‘a tutor asked a student to sit on his lap – at the table. If I’d been that girl, I’d have seen that as sexual harassment, but she didn’t seem to mind. And afterwards, when I asked people who’d been at the table what they’d thought of it, they all said, “What?” They hadn’t even noticed it.’

  ‘But boys are stupid when they’re young,’ the unemployed graduate went on. With the position of Master, its privileges, you have to accept the responsibility – and with that comes the acceptance that people will judge you more severely than others. But maybe a crime should be a crime, regardless of age?’ Here she paused and frowned, trying to get a grip on the slippery morals of the thing. ‘The law isn’t fair. More is expected of him.’ Now she felt herself back on firmer ground. ‘Yes. He’s supposed to be a pillar of the community. If he gets away with it, what hope have we got? And I was disgusted by the age difference.’

  A little jet from the unconscious showed in her use of the word disgusted. Why should ‘the age difference’ be disgusting? The violation of the incest taboo is the public obsession of our age. An anxiety has been triggered here: something dark about fathers and daughters. But she galloped on, censorious and unawares.

  ‘There’s a lot of young people in my position,’ said the engineer, ‘with a lack of passion about wrongness. I feel’ – he laid his flat hand on his stomach – ‘that his punishment doesn’t fit the crime. His career’s destroyed. I can see how it’s bad but I feel sorry for him. It all went horribly wrong. The media picture of college is melodramatic. I feel like saying on the front page of the paper, “Trust me, public – it’s not that impressive”.’

  ‘It seems so tragic,’ said the bookseller. ‘Everyone can push their trolley through it but it was an accident.’

  ‘I used to have a moral code,’ said the lawyer. ‘But I realised it was useless. We’re all pathetic weak human beings. I’m just a kid of twenty-two. I can’t set up a code to judge a thing like this.’

  What does it mean, then, in a place like Ormond, to manifest the wrong style? You encourage students to use your first name, instead of addressing you as Master: you lose authority. In the vestibule of the dining hall you nod to a student: you have loose eyes. You wear Hush Puppies: the wrong kind of shoes for the Master of Ormond College. At the end of term you help departing students by carrying their rubbish bags: you demean yourself. Colin Shepherd’s obliviousness to the Ormond view of appropriate conduct is a measure of his vulnerability. Perhaps, if he’d been dashing, the word one female student used, he might have weathered it: the judge might not have shown a clean pair of heels; the council might have gone to the wire for him. Maybe when the girls made their complaints they were unwittingly putting a weapon in a hand not yet flexed to seize it. Maybe it was through the chink of his less-than-patrician style that the blade, whoever was holding the handle, slid in. And yet one of these students, who had been speaking about Dr Shepherd in severe terms, then struggling to make sense of his mixed feelings, suddenly turned to me and said in a rush of sympathy, ‘Oh, poor Master! Are you going to be good to him?’

  On 5 May 1993 I received a curt, three-line reply from Margaret L—, one of the women’s supporters, to my scrubbed letter of the month before. She made pointed mention of her lawyer and, hammering in a fresh set of quotation marks, declined my invitation to discuss what I had called her ‘version of events at Ormond College’. Once again I felt the roll of frustrated ego – but oh, how pathetic her refusals seemed, with their tight tone, their scurrying to law.

  By the time I visited Mrs Shepherd it was late in the winter of 1993; the family had moved out of the Lodge months before, and back to their own house in East Malvern. I drove out there one evening, when as it happened Dr Shepherd was not at home; a friend had taken him to Barwon Heads to play golf.

  Mrs Shepherd opened the front door. She was tall, with smooth cheeks, clear, dark blue eyes, and dark hair that was starting to go grey, loosely pinned up and falling in strands to her shoulders. She looked slimmer, less youthful than in the photo I had been shown by Fergus C—. Her expression, as she greeted me, was tense to the point of anguish, but she tried hard to be welcoming, and ushered me into the living room, where her two younger children, the ones I had met the year before at the Lodge, were doing their homework on the carpet next to a vigorously burning fire. Mrs Shepherd spoke gently to them and they sprang up at once and left the room.

  It was a pleasant room, with three plump sofas arranged in a U facing the fire, an old blackish upright piano in one corner, and on the wall behind the couch I sat on, half a dozen undistinguished watercolours of Corpus Christi College, mementos of the Shepherd family’s happy year at Cambridge before they moved to Ormond. The chimney drew hard; several times during my visit Mrs Shepherd had to replenish the fire with logs. She sat on the carpet in front of me, in a girlish posture with her back very straight and her legs folded, and began almost immediately to cry. She hardly stopped for the whole two hours I spent w
ith her. She held a bundle of tissues in one hand and repeatedly blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She apologised for this from the start, as if she feared that I wouldn’t be able to bear the depth of her distress. She told me that she managed to hold herself together when she was with her husband and children. She didn’t want him to see her like this – it would upset him so much; he needed to keep his confidence up, in the search for another job.

  ‘I’m in grief,’ she said. ‘It’s been totally – surreal. If you know you’ve done something, you can bear it – but when he heard that there were accusations against him, he kept saying to me, “What have I done?” If you’d asked me to list two thousand things that could happen to Colin, I wouldn’t have guessed this. It’s the constancy of the negative response to him – something about him seems to have inspired terrible hatred. It must be an urge to kill someone in authority – but I’ve never seen the Master of a residential college as a very important job. It’s a nice position, with lots of fun, but otherwise –

  ‘Our ears have been burning for fifteen months. If I saw one of the women’s supporters when I was out walking with the children, she would turn away – you know, the snub. Sometimes we laugh – but you need a few drinks to see it as funny – two silly little people. But I do begrudge that he won’t have a pleasant end to his life.

  ‘When he took on the Ormond job he saw élitism, and drinking. He felt that people who came to Ormond had a responsibility to give something back, instead of just take, take, take. He invited interesting people and introduced them to the kids – to broaden them.