The First Stone

by Helen Garner

  I sent letters as well to as many of the girls’ supporters in the university as I could identify, by guesswork, association or rumour. Deep silence ensued. As a group they maintained facelessness and voicelessness – in my direction, anyway. People I knew, both women and men, would stagger back from academic dinner parties, book launches, literary festivals, meetings, and report to me in amazed detail their encounters with feminist women who claimed to be among the girls’ supporters, or to have friends who were. All these women knew exactly what sort of book I was writing, and they wanted nothing to do with it, or with me. ‘But if you spoke to Helen,’ my friends would argue, ‘she wouldn’t be able to write that sort of book. By not speaking to her, you’re making it impossible for her to write anything else.’ All argument, my friends said, was vain. ‘There’s no possible way they’ll speak to you,’ they told me. ‘They say that what you’re doing is “part of the nineties onslaught against feminism”. They say old-guard feminists like you “don’t understand the issues in their current form”. They say you’re “incapable of being a journalist”. They say you’ve been “constantly harassing” them.’ Against this frustration I worked to maintain what used to be called ‘an open mind’. But I was in a state of bewilderment and scorn. What sort of feminists are these? What kind of thought-police, of saboteurs?

  Or don’t they believe in the strength of their own argument? Will they only speak to people who already agree with them? We used to truck out and present our views to the Werribee Young Farmers’ Association, for God’s sake. But since post-modernists tossed the idea of truth out the window, Milton’s great challenge has lost its poetic ring. ‘Let warrantable assertion and falsehood grapple’? I hardly think so.

  I went to lunch with Dr K—, the retired academic who had rebuked the post-graduate tutors for thinking of intellectuals as ‘brains on stilts’. In her eighties, she was a slim woman with beautiful bones and bright eyes, dressed in a chic black suit and a white blouse. She told me, as we walked across the campus, that she was Freudian-trained in London. ‘I’m interested,’ she said, ‘in what makes minds tick.’

  Her movements, at the table, were slow and careful. Her manner, though, was almost seductive: she was a practised charmer. At the table, while we talked and ate, she would look sharply straight into my eyes, but would sweeten her directness by tilting her head to one side and suddenly giving a wide, closed-mouth smile that turned her eyes to slits. Maybe this was the manner a clever women of her generation had had to devise, in order to live out her intellect without its frightening people and making men hostile; always I could sense her mind at work behind the smiling, time-marked face.

  She mentioned that at one point in her career she had been the only woman, and the only non-professor, on her University Academic Board. ‘I was a not unattractive woman at the time,’ she said with a sly smile, ‘and I capitalised on it. A lot of women, in the world of men, spoil their chances by over-talking.’ She, I noticed, had firm control over her natural old woman’s tendency to ramble: whenever her discourse strayed from the point she would draw it back briskly, saying, ‘But we weren’t talking about that.’ Occasionally she would trail off and sit thinking privately for a moment.

  ‘It’s the time we live in,’ she said, when I outlined the Ormond story to her, and mentioned the current climate in sexual harassment thinking. ‘We’ve got a cock-eyed view of human relations. We think of relationships in terms of people who fuck – not in terms of their emotional content.

  ‘There are other forms of power than the directly sexual. There can be mother-son relationships within a department, or father-son, or father-daughter. These aren’t contra-indicated. Some universities have a no-husband-and-wife rule, but none has a no-father-and-son rule.’

  She spoke with a sort of terse, worldly tolerance of ‘poor old mutts’ of men who find themselves charged with sexual harassment in colleges and universities. True to her Freudian training she dug under the literal in search of telling imagery. ‘Maybe what happens in some of these cases,’ she said, ‘is a symbol for the sexual act itself. Maybe the old dears aren’t after sex at all but acceptance. It’s naive to assume they’re only after erotic gratification – they mightn’t even know what erotic gratification means.

  ‘At my age, in retrospect, I’m not concerned at all about who grabbed who. I’m only concerned about what I understood about people, and what they understood about me. People are basically afraid of being moved. There’s not much generosity, much giving. It’s “Don’t touch me – you might make me come out of my shell”. People now are so defensive. What’s so precious about the sanctity of one’s “space”? My goodness – haven’t they ever slept with someone to comfort them?’

  As we were leaving the restaurant, Dr K— fumbled at the counter, trying without her reading glasses to identify our bill among several lined up there. A man of my age was standing beside us. She looked up at him with her flirt’s smile and head-tilt, and said in a high, sweet, self-mocking voice, ‘I can’t find meeee!’ The man laughed, and quickly located the right bill for her. She was old enough to be his mother, but the rules of the playful encounter came spontaneously to both of them.

  I admired her performance, and her knowing spirit. Walking home, I thought of her symbolic angle on sexual harassment, her suggestion that what a man longed for might be not sex but acceptance; and I remembered the photo I had been shown on my last visit to Ormond: the solitary man in the football sweater, trudging along on the muddy grass, gazing towards the oblivious backs of the students watching the match. At a pedestrian crossing on Princes Street I waited for the lights next to a young woman on a mountain bike. She was a big-shouldered, powerfully built girl with short hair; under her helmet her face was pugnacious and grim. She had glued a sticker along the frame of her bike. It read, ‘Exactly which part of NO don’t you understand?’

  ‘This obsession with sexual harassment,’ said an old friend, a woman in her fifties, ‘is just a diversion. It’s not the main thrust of the women’s movement. A man in Shepherd’s position must not do the things he was accused of.’

  ‘It’s terrible to me,’ I said, disconcerted, ‘to see the effects of this on his life – on his family.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I don’t believe he deserved what’s happened to him. He may be “innocent” – but he’s paying for many, many other men who have not been caught. It’s the irony of things, that sometimes the innocent or nearly-innocent pay for what the guilty have done.’

  Yes, and you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs: what a cruel and ethically rotten argument. Another feminist I know went very quiet when I tried to tell her of my discomfort with the Ormond story. She related a painful experience of sexual interference from her childhood, and went on to say that ‘in any period of change, innocent or half-innocent people are going to get caught in the crunch.’ She said this as if it were to be accepted without protest or even regret. If I’d had my wits about me I might have quoted Janet Radcliffe Richards’ tough and useful book The Sceptical Feminist: ‘If justice does not matter in transitions, it does not matter at all.’

  Instead I got upset, and stammered an objection: ‘How can this be right? How can this be ethical, that punishment is skewed like this – so that the wrong person carries the can?’ She looked at me with a kind of accusing surprise. There was an awkwardness between us when we parted. Once again I looked hard-hearted, on the wrong team, a turncoat, lacking political passion and solidarity.

  But twenty years in what used to be called the counterculture have taught me to be wary of the word solidarity. I’ve seen hesitant people bludgeoned by an appeal to solidarity. Solidarity can be used to mock genuine doubt, to blur a fatal skid in reasoning. Run the flag up the pole and see who salutes. Whenever I feel in myself the warm emotional rush of righteousness, of belonging, that accompanies the word solidarity, I try to remember to stop and wait till the rush subsides, so I can have a harder look at what has provoked it.
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br />   That winter of 1993 I spent days in the Ormond library, reading the minutes of the college council, the General Committee of the Students’ Club, and the Equal Opportunity Committee that Colin Shepherd had set up to advise him on policy where male/female relations in the college were concerned.

  The EO body’s records were presented in a disconcertingly tiny typeface. A chill came off that tininess, that rigour and thoroughness. The committee’s final document, its recommendations to council, opened with an attention-getting stroke: a demand that the Aboriginal tribe on whose land Ormond College stands should be recognised, acknowledged and commemorated. While this might appear farfetched to some, it brought to me a sharp memory of the fact that when there was first a push, at Melbourne University, to establish a women’s college, certain men took out mining rights on the proposed site, to prevent this from happening.

  The minutes of the General Committee of the Students’ Club, over the period of Colin Shepherd’s troubles, were by comparison cobbled together in haste. Members were identified by nicknames. There was no sense at all of the high-level drama that was unfolding in the college, only a concern for fun and more fun: parties, sport, grog, ‘bumblebees’ (Ormond striped sweaters), computers – and a demand, if you please, for a dispenser of free condoms. It was a ratbaggy, tedious, occasionally charming stream of jollity.

  The minutes of the council proper, each meeting of which was ‘constituted by prayer’, were formal and sparse, with little meat on their bones. I was inclined to skim. But after a while I began to develop a feel for significances, a sense that there was a sub-text to be read, even if I could perceive it only dimly: when certain persons left the room and returned to it; corrections to the previous meeting’s minutes, for example when one of the women’s supporters had objected to a mention of her having accepted ‘on behalf of the complainants’ Melbourne University’s offer of its conciliation services.

  I noticed how, once Colin Shepherd came on board, there was an injection of warmth and energy into the dry proceedings. His contributions, in reports and speeches attached to the minutes, were humming with enthusiasm – but they were also sprinkled with droppings of the word tradition. I wondered whether the use of the word might be considered pas comme il faut, a little gauche, by dyed-in-the-wool Ormond men. At these points Dr Shepherd seemed very much the newcomer, not yet versed in the institution’s codes, even teaching his grandmother, so to speak, to suck eggs.

  Soon came the proliferation of sub-committees whose reports, because of the press leaks, were too confidential to be included in the minutes; and then the painful realisation, as I read Dr Shepherd’s bouncing report of his first full year in the job, that as he delivered it he must have had not even an inkling of what was passing through the heads of some of the people who sat with him round the table, listening.

  On 25 November 1993, exactly six months after his resignation, a ‘minute of appreciation’ of Colin Shepherd was added to the council records, seven or eight hundred words detailing his career in Education, his honours (including the Order of Australia 1989), and his achievements during his brief Mastership. The tribute describes him as ‘a man of engaging enthusiasms’, and speaks of his Vigour of mind and person’. Its final paragraphs run thus:

  In March 1992, allegations of sexual harassment against the Master were made public and over the succeeding months and despite his being cleared of charges brought against him in the courts, his position grew to be untenable and in September he stood down as Master. In May 1993, the council accepted Dr Shepherd’s resignation with regret. The council places on record its appreciation of the service rendered to the college by Colin Shepherd as Master and its awareness of the deep pain suffered by him and his family in the circumstances of his leaving.

  Still I received no letter from Professor J—. I hoped against hope that he would keep his nerve. Everyone I asked about him spoke well of him: ‘Oh, he’s a straight-shooter. An honourable and decent man. A good Christian. Someone who tries to be as kind as he can.’ Yes, but his dilemma would try a philosopher or a saint. By innocently telling me the story from the complainants’ point of view he had got offside with their faction: he must be under pressure to recant.

  I went to buy some meat. My butcher, behind his counter in Carlton, hears everything and looks at the world with a sceptical eye. He asked me what I was working on, and I told him. While he wrapped up my chicken he told me what gossip he’d heard about it. He glanced up at me constantly, waiting for my opinion. After I had left three or four pauses unfilled, he raised his eyebrows. I said, ‘I’m working hard at not saying anything.’ ‘Oh!’ he said with a laugh, ‘I wasn’t trying to draw you out – just making conversation.’ I said, ‘There’s a big push on, these days, against sexual harassment.’ ‘Yes,’ said the butcher, straightening up and handing me my parcel, ‘but where does my world fit in? I’m a Catholic. I went to Catholic schools. A priest tried it on. I said no. Years later I was flattered! To have been liked!’

  Liked? Oh, we are all so lonely. Under these stories lie great chasms of self-doubt, uncertainty and fear.

  How had Colin Shepherd got the job in the first place? One morning in early winter I drove out to Canterbury to put this and other questions to Mr Douglas R—, a retired member of the college council. The street he lived in was sloping and handsome, its wet pavements thickly strewn with red leaves, but his house was a plain 1960s cream-brick dwelling, set high on a neatly trimmed garden block. As I hurried past the wooden hutch for milk bottles (a rolled-up cheque stuck out of the neck of a sparklingly clean empty) and mounted the concrete path to the door, I picked up a whiff of a delicious plant-smell. It reminded me of something, but I had no time to pause and identify it. Mr R— greeted me at the door, without offering to shake hands. He was an old man of slight build, with white hair parted and combed down, and was dressed in neat, firm-fitting clothes, Henry Bucks style, with the old brown brogues buffed to a glossy sheen that are a badge of his class, his profession and his generation. He ushered me into his study. Seated, he looked more commanding. He examined me with the steady, appraising gaze that psychologists and lawyers use: I’m listening. Why are you here? I heard myself begin to chatter nervously, but suddenly remembering the remark of the old woman who had taken me to lunch, about women who ‘miss their chance’ through over-talking, I bit off my sentence, and he launched into his, exactly as if my babbling had not happened. I felt both squashed and relieved.

  ‘It ought to be obvious to everyone,’ he said briskly, ‘except some of the people behind this story, that the final result is utterly out of proportion to the case. In fact, when the first charge appeared in the papers my eldest daughter lined up her daughters and said to them, “If anything like this ever happens to you, and you don’t deal with it yourselves in a better way than this, I’ll disown you.”’

  Ouch! I was glad that in my fantasies of something unpleasant happening to my daughter I had at least gone in to bat for her.

  At the time when Colin Shepherd was appointed, he said, there had been about seventy applications. On the reduced list there had been three or four women, most of whom had got on the list ‘because of their backgrounds’.

  ‘What do you mean by backgrounds?’ I asked.

  He looked down at his hands, which were reddened and puffy, with fragile-looking skin. ‘I’m old,’ he said, after a long pause, ‘and it’s three years ago. They had quite reasonable academic backgrounds. The Master should be able to take a reasonable place in the university academic community. There were some fascinating applications,’ he continued, slipping with relief on to less fraught territory. ‘One chap had been in the New Guinea highlands for many years, imparting education. He wrote that “a more relaxed form of life” would suit him.’ He laughed. ‘He was discarded early on – but I would have liked to fly him down. He would have had some interesting stories to tell!

  ‘When you work doing these things, when you’re accustomed to reading CVs, you come to re
alise that some people have something they’re escaping from. But Colin Shepherd presented himself as someone who felt that the Master of Ormond was just that thing he’d love to be – and he did love being it, too. Not just because of the prestige, but because of the whole complexity of circumstances surrounding it – contacts with people, responsibilities, variations of the managerial skills the Master is called on to display – academic, administrative, personal.’

  Mr R— spoke at considerable length and with pointed emphasis about the way Dr Shepherd’s appointment had been received ‘by the community. He was favourably known by an enormous number of people. I had letters from people I’d never heard of, saying Ormond was to be congratulated on having got him. A man I regarded as a total stranger stopped me in William Street to say what a good thing it was. It was very gratifying. When you’re selecting people for these higher appointments, at the end you’re keeping your fingers crossed – so if someone comes at you making reassuring noises, you’re pleased.’

  I asked him whether he thought people had been out to get Shepherd.

  ‘Not before the allegations,’ he said, ‘but plenty were, after.’

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘Oh, no names no pack drill.’

  A cuckoo popped out of a clock and called the hour. ‘It’s eleven o’clock,’ said Mr R—, standing up. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’ He soon returned carrying a tray of plunger coffee and a jar of home-made biscuits. He took a biscuit for himself and put the jar on the small table beside me. I ate one. It was excellent, the absolutely perfect biscuit. I remarked on this, and took another, then perhaps another. Ten minutes later, without breaking off what he was saying, he got up from his chair, walked over to my table and replaced the lid on the biscuit jar. He was halfway back to his seat when he suddenly stopped, turned towards me, and said, ‘I didn’t do that to keep you out of there!’ We both laughed. But I thought, yes you did, sir – you were putting the lid back on what you know: I won’t get any more out of you. Unnerved by his gesture, I asked him, ‘How did this thing blow up so dreadfully and get so out of hand?’