The First Stone

by Helen Garner

  But feminism too is a conduit for Eros. Women’s struggle for fairness is a breathing force, always adapting and changing. It is not the exclusive property of a priggish, literal-minded vengeance squad that gets Eros in its sights, gives him both barrels, and marches away in its Blundstones, leaving the gods’ messenger sprawled in the mud with his wings all bloody and torn.

  What always impresses me about Monash, coming as I do from the older University of Melbourne with its elms and dank courtyards and buildings made of stone, is how Australian it looks. In winter the wind charges across its open spaces, fiercely jostling the eucalypts and making their leaves sparkle in the cold sun. From out there, Ormond might seem a century away – a distant, forbidding, old-world fantasy.

  ‘Monash made the decision not to have colleges,’ one of its senior administrators told me. We’ve got halls of residence. It’s much cheaper. You get a better mix of people, you get Asians – and it breaks down all that funny cultural stuff.’

  Twenty-one years full-time at Monash had not prepared Colin Shepherd for the ‘funny cultural stuff’ he encountered at Ormond. When he applied for the Mastership, after sixteen years as senior lecturer in Education, he must have had his head pressed hard against his personal academic ceiling. The Ormond job was a way forward for him – a big jump. ‘And after any big jump,’ the administrator said, ‘a whole new set of enemies emerges.’

  For someone with little experience of institutions, it is startling to be offered a glimpse behind the scenes – to see how a man who has come a public cropper may be hauled off-stage by a bunch of impatient colleagues in the wings, dusted off, and discreetly slid back into the performance – only in the back row of the chorus for a while, perhaps, but still working, still drawing a salary. This might have worked for Colin Shepherd. At the time of his resignation from Ormond he still had warm support from erstwhile colleagues in Education at Monash. ‘I had verbal assurances,’ Dr Shepherd told me, ‘from high up in Monash administration and from the Education faculty, that everything was fixed – but no letter ever came.’ University positions have to be advertised. To get round this there is the notion of the paid consultant. While subtle negotiations were afoot, however, a senior administrator at Monash received some surprising phone calls.

  ‘I believe,’ I said to him, ‘that you were strong-armed.’

  ‘Strong-armed!’ He dropped his head into his hands and turned his face away. For a moment I thought he had been offended by my choice of word; then he looked back at me with a crooked, ironic smile which I took to mean that ‘strong-armed’ was putting it lightly. ‘I got at least three phone calls,’ he said, ‘towards Christmas 1992. Three women, anonymous, with youngish voices, got through to me. I became the bloody issue! They said, “Don’t think this is going to stop here.” They were . . . abusive. I slammed down the phone on one of them. They were out to get this man, and anyone who sheltered him was equally guilty.’

  Meanwhile, there was a change of regime in the Education faculty. During this transition, support for Dr Shepherd lost impetus. Senior administrators of the university were reluctant to issue orders ‘from the mountain’. Matters were not helped by Dr Shepherd’s reluctance to be satisfied with whatever crumbs could be thrown to him. Another senior man at Monash told me that the position in Education had been ‘fixed – there was a room for him, he had all his pencils and his paperclips organised – and then hints were dropped about an associate professorship.’

  Strings were pulled by very powerful men, but something in Shepherd’s demeanour, I was told, caused them to lose patience. He was too fussy. He had scruples about the reactionary politics of at least one business group that offered him a quiet berth. He was not prepared to eat the required amount of crow. Soon these men were no longer returning the calls of Dr Shepherd’s champions. His behaviour, which seems so unreasonable and capricious, so lacking in the willingness to cut his losses and accept rehabilitation with bowed head, is explicable only if one keeps reminding oneself that Dr Shepherd has an unshakeable belief in his innocence.

  On my way home from Monash that winter day, I drove past a certain house on a corner, and was overcome by a strange memory. In the early seventies I delivered to that house a silent and trembling woman from New Zealand who had flown across the Tasman for an abortion. I was just one member of a feminist organisation formed to help change the abortion laws and to work meanwhile at arranging safe terminations for women who were in trouble, who couldn’t wait for the slow, grinding process of legal change. This woman was Maori, too shy to speak, completely out of her depth in a foreign city. I delivered her to the surgery and picked her up again afterwards. I took her to the shared house I lived in. My friends and our children sat with her at the kitchen table while I made her a cup of tea. She drank it in silence. We didn’t even know how to talk to each other. She sat in our kitchen with her arms folded over her belly. Soon I drove her to the city, to the Queen Mary Club where accommodation had been arranged for her. Another member of the organisation must have taken over from me there; I have no further memory of her visit. Since then I must have driven past that abortionist’s house scores of times, without ever noticing it. But driving home from Monash last winter, speeding along that ugly, endless road, I saw the house, and the memory of the woman’s dark, frightened face rushed back to me for the first time in more than twenty years.

  The airwaves seemed to be humming with talk about sexual harassment. Whenever I turned on the radio, somebody was earnestly arguing it this way or that. One day I watched Donohue while I ate my sandwich. Sabino Gutierrez, a Hispanic with sculpted hair, told in a heavy accent and trembling voice of having been harassed for years by his female supervisor. Once she came ‘to his condominium’ and put it on him so heavy that they ‘had sex’. He was ‘terrified of losing his job if he said no’; he was ‘very proud of his job’. A hostile white man in the studio audience asked him what present he had brought his boss on his return from a holiday. Sabino replied, ‘A pair of pillow – pillow –’ (glancing for help at his female lawyer) ‘pillow covers’; the audience burst into scornful laughter. The rub was that a jury of twelve people – whose forewoman, a calm, articulate black woman in her thirties, was also, incredibly, on the show – had awarded Sabino damages of one million dollars for the loss of his job. People in the audience, smirking and grinning with hostility, asked him, ‘Why didn’t you leave the job?’ ‘Why did it take you so long to report her?’ A young black woman asked, ‘Why didn’t you leave the very day she touched you on the genitals? I wouldn’t have stayed.’ While he stammered out his reply, she kept on ironically smiling and shaking her head.

  His feminist lawyer, a tough motor-mouth in shoulder pads who got in a quick plug for having acted for the girl who claimed she was raped by the boxer Mike Tyson, made the point: ‘Why should the victim leave the workplace? It should be the wrong-doer who has to leave’ – and got a smattering – but only a smattering – of applause. Everyone’s ethics seemed to have been turned upside down by the fact that the harasser had been a woman.

  Next day I rushed to watch part two of the story. Sabino’s ex-boss now appeared, the man who had had to fork out the damages after the court found the supervisor guilty. This unsympathetic personage, an overweight white man with a grey, stiff-looking ponytail, who sat with his legs splayed and seemed often about to explode with rage, had dealt with Sabino’s complaints about the supervisor by sacking Sabino. By aggressive questioning, he got Sabino to admit on camera that he had only an elementary school education. ‘Fourth-grade,’ said Sabino, hanging his head; then, as his ex-boss trumpeted on about having replaced him with a graduate in electrical engineering, Sabino added faintly, almost in a whisper, ‘But I work hard.’

  At this I felt a stab of America-pain, class-pain, race-pain; and I saw once again the endless complexity of these stories, how the sex part is only one thread in a great matted carpet of struggle.

  I also thought that one reason for the popular
ity and addictive nature of talk shows, specially the rehashes of trials, is that people in their hearts no longer believe that courts provide justice. These televised bunfights are a grotesque parody of a fantasy I repeatedly had when I covered the child-murderer’s trial – a fantasy that there might exist some other forum, outside the harsh rules of evidence which excise context; some better, broader, freer, less rule-bound gathering of the tribe; a forum in which everything might be said, everybody listened to: where bursts of laughter and shouts of rage might not be outlawed: where if people agreed to take turns everyone might at last, at last be heard.

  One morning towards the end of writing this book, I had to call Mr Donald E— to check two factual matters. The first required a simple yes/no answer, which he gave. The second was more complex, concerning motive. Perhaps I spoke too fast, or failed to make myself clear; anyway, Mr E— misunderstood my question and launched on an explanation of the wrong thing. ‘I’ve already told you this,’ he added, between sentences. Although his tone was only faintly irritated, I became flustered. I tried to interrupt, to redirect his attention to what I needed to know, but because I was nervous I began to gabble. He paused for a second; then he rolled right over me. I subsided into silence. Incredibly, though I was invisible to him on the end of a phone line, I even went on taking pointless notes. I felt intensely foolish, like a child who has been squashed by a teacher. I felt ashamed. Stupidest of all, I didn’t even have the aplomb, once he had finished his laborious and unnecessary reiteration, to correct his misunderstanding. I actually thanked him and said goodbye. Then I sat here at my desk like an idiot, flushed with astonished fury. I am fifty-one years old, and still at the slightest obstacle I regress into this ridiculous passivity. Why didn’t I persevere? Was it because I would have had to make him look wrong-footed? Was I, like the girls at the Smoko, doing everything I could to spare his ego?

  In New York last year I heard a well-known woman journalist give a talk about a recent trip to Eastern Europe. The applause had hardly died away before her host at the event, a male academic whose special field was European politics, aggressively challenged her on a factual point. She produced from memory a more recent statistic than the one he had used to contest her argument, and courteously laid it down – but as she did this, she blushed. She said, ‘Sorry.’ ‘Male power’, ‘patriarchal insensitivity’ – yes, all this, with impatience and bad manners thrown in – but also our hesitancy, our feebleness of will, our lack of simple nerve. What is this fear women have of our own power – of just calmly taking hold of it, calmly putting it to use? Is there something in it for us, that a man’s ego should have to be spared a minor dent? A woman remarked to me about a man who had pestered her with his attentions at work: ‘He was a delicate plant. Older than me and with much higher status. I wasn’t scared of him. I felt I could cope better with being a victim than he could have with being rejected.’ An older woman told me about a fine and respected teacher she had had at university in the sixties, a man who at parties, after a few drinks, would hug his women students, rub himself against them, try to touch and kiss them. ‘We would never have complained about him,’ she said. ‘We liked him – we were fond of him. And we felt sorry for him.’ Whose is the power, in situations like these? There is a path here that might be followed, a line of fruitful questioning: but puritan feminists prefer to ignore it. They are offended by the suggestion that a woman might learn to handle a trivial sexual approach by herself, without needing to run to Big Daddy and even wreck a man’s life, because it unsettles their unstated but crucial belief: that men’s sexuality is a monstrous, uncontrollable force, while women are trembling creatures innocent of desire, under siege even in a room full of companions, forever about to be made to feel uncomfortable. I don’t understand my own sporadic collapses into passivity. Perhaps I never will. But this analysis of power is of no use to me at all. In fact, in its disingenuousness it weakens me, and makes me ashamed to call myself a feminist.

  I tried, on and off over a period of months, to contact several other young women students from Ormond whose names had been mentioned to me as companions of the two complainants on the night of the Smoko. I got nowhere. Doors were slammed by people unwilling to act as intermediaries. I was about to give up when I discovered, by chance, that the mother of one of them had been a friend of mine at school. I tracked her by a wandering route, back through my family and across old bridges to hers, and found her at last, by phone, at the place where she worked.

  As soon as I heard her voice I remembered something I had always admired and envied about her: a way she had, while staying comfortably near the top of every class, of driving our women teachers out of their minds. Under pressure she was imperturbable; she just went on smiling a strangely enraging smile. ‘It’s easy,’ she told me once, at sixteen. ‘When they start to tick me off I sit here and imagine what they’d look like with no clothes on.’ The smile was still in her voice, but also, now, when I stated my name and business, a certain steely quality. Her daughter, she thought, wouldn’t like to talk to me about it. It had been a disturbing experience to young people without positions. She, like the other girls, was disturbed that a book was being written. They felt it would crystallise them in some way. They had been uncertain, and they were still uncertain. Her daughter had resisted being called to give evidence.

  ‘This might be a nasty question,’ she said, ‘but if your daughter had been involved in something like this, how would you feel if someone was writing a book about it? Would you want her to . . .’

  There was a pause. I said, ‘I hope I’ve brought up my daughter to believe in open discourse.’

  Another pause. Then she said she would put it to her daughter, and get back to me. Several days later she called me. No, her daughter didn’t want to speak to me. ‘It’s water under the bridge, as far as she’s concerned.’ She had taken my point, that everyone should at least be able to have the choice of speaking if they wanted to: she would try to contact the two other girls. If I hadn’t heard from them by the end of the month, I should take it that they did not want to speak to me.

  This was a low point for me, when we hung up. I thought my courage was used up. They would never ring, I knew; and of course they never did. But that day I phoned my daughter and said to her, ‘I’ve been taking your name in vain.’ I repeated to her my schoolmate’s question and my answer. I asked her if she would have agreed to be interviewed, in such a situation. There was a short silence. I stood there holding the phone: my knees were trembling. Then she said, in her dry, thoughtful voice, ‘It would depend on who was writing the book, of course. I can tell you one thing, though. I might have reported it to someone – but I would never have gone to the cops.’

  And then, at last, Professor J—’s letter came.

  It was typed very high on the page, and signed in a cramped, nervous-looking hand. He pulled the plug on the interview. He asked me to destroy my notes.

  I asked a magazine editor I sometimes worked for whether I was obliged to do this.

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘They’re yours. Some journalists would say that once a person’s spoken to you, knowing it’s for publication, you’re legally in the clear to quote them, even if they ask you not to. It’s a moral decision for you, now.’

  So I continued to refine the art of not sending abusive letters. I wrote them – oh, I wrote them! I wrote furious insults on a bedraggled scrap; and then I tore it up and stamped it into the bin with my boot; and I took a fresh sheet of paper and rolled it into the typewriter and started again, more politely, more calmly, more falsely:

  Dear Professor J—,

  I was very sad to receive your letter asking me to destroy the notes from our interview and to refrain from mentioning your name or quoting anything you said; but I acknowledge that this is your wish, and will respect it.

  Early one Saturday morning not long after this, I went with a friend to the Victoria Market. As we were entering the meat section, a tall, stooped m
an hurried out past us. It was Professor J—. I don’t recall now whether our eyes met. At the time I thought they did. I stopped short and looked back, but he was walking very fast, and didn’t turn around. If I’d been alone I might have run after him – to say what? I don’t know. Just to stand in front of him and see what he said. The one that got away.

  In the August 1993 issue of Vogue Australia appeared a feature article on sexual harassment, by the journalist who had gone to Bali. I rushed to read it, hoping to hear at last the voices of Elizabeth Rosen and Nicole Stewart, their reflections in retrospect on the story, their characters; but once more I was disappointed. The journalist gave an account of the case which was warmly sympathetic to the complainants, set it in a sort of context, and spoke of the stress and health problems the women had experienced since the court hearings. But only one of the women had actually spoken to the journalist, and her remarks were strangely remote and formal. ‘I don’t regret making the complaint,’ she said, ‘because I think it was important for me, the college and the university. I had a lot of support from female staff, which was crucial, but the reaction of some male teachers was that they wouldn’t see me without having the door open. Academics, particularly those who are part of the college’s administration, are in a position of trust and responsibility, people to whom a student would go for advice about problems of an emotional, financial or professional nature . . .’ She stated that it was not only the attitudes at universities but within the legal system which needed to change. ‘We were asked questions in court,’ she said, ‘about what we were wearing at the time of the incident. I do not think that should have been relevant.’ She added that she would welcome guidelines on staff-student sexual relations, ‘but only if the university is prepared to implement them and act upon them.’