The First Stone

by Helen Garner

  When the Vogue journalist returned from Bali, she phoned me. Her contact with the complainants, it turned out, had consisted of a telephone conversation with Nicole Stewart.

  ‘How did she strike you,’ I asked, ‘as a person?’

  ‘Very forceful,’ said the journalist. ‘She held an inflexible, politically correct line – as you do, when you’re in your twenties. At that age you don’t see greys. She must be feeling invincible. I asked her about you and your book – one of their supporters had faxed me your letter to Colin Shepherd. She said she wouldn’t speak to you – not even if you’d changed your mind.’

  I had a sudden sense of Nicole Stewart’s having whizzed by me, very close – a scorched sensation. Who was this very angry, very forceful comet? All my thoughts, all my interviews and papers, suddenly felt hollow and savourless.

  The winter of 1993 was over by the time I made my last visit to Ormond. I arrived early and hung about on a side doorstep of the huge main building, looking out over a lawn studded with native trees. A eucalypt stood against a pale blue sky in which, very high, a big black bird was cruising. It circled magisterially, with never a flap. Someone inside the building, way above my head, was softly playing a piano. Everything in the garden was ‘so cool, so calm, so bright’ that I began to be able to imagine how people – adults – might want to live there; how disgruntled women might be bothered making it into ‘a contested site’. I remembered a student from Melbourne University describing to me how, while she waited one evening for an Ormond friend to emerge from choir practice, she had leaned over the balustrade into the courtyard as dark fell: ‘Lights were coming on, I could hear voices talking quietly in the rooms that gave on to the quadrangle, and the choir was singing faintly, far away inside the building – and I thought to myself, my God, this is an incredible place!’ I was beginning, reluctantly, to think the same thing, that lunchtime in very early spring, when the peace was shattered by a blast of heavy metal from upstairs, followed by a girl’s playful shriek and the thunder of running feet. I stepped down into the garden just as the outside doors of the dining room opened and students poured out in twos and threes, on a tide of the unmistakable smell of institution food, the odour that no amount of scrubbing and swabbing can ever erase from a building, or from the memory of someone who has spent an unhappy year at a boarding school. What people will cling to, so as not to have to grow up, learn to cook, plan a household budget, manage their own lives! What people will bear, in exchange for having three meals a day put in front of them on a table!

  When Simon T—, the Acting Master, arrived and took me to his pleasant apartment in one of the college buildings, I asked him his opinion of co-education in colleges. He replied warmly that he was ‘strongly pro. Ormond always got the best men,’ he stated with jolting bluntness, ‘and now, since co-ed, it gets the best women. There are winners and losers in this world.’

  I digested this, remembering what a female head of one of the smaller Melbourne University colleges had said to me about co-ed: ‘It’s the God’s police thing again. The presence of girls is supposed to address the disciplinary problems of the boys.’ She had added an anecdote about an old churchman from another state who, at a conference, had expressed disappointment that, since his college had gone co-ed, the boys’ behaviour had not improved at all – and worse, there had been no reduction in the food bills: ‘I thought women would be cheaper,’ he said. ‘I thought they’d eat less.’ The female head had shouted with laughter at this memory.

  ‘Isn’t there a theory,’ I said to the Acting Master, ‘that co-ed is good for your son, but less good for your daughter?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we’ve got a hundred miles to go yet, before we get people to live together in a civilised way. But there’s a trade-off. Though the female students tend to adopt male traditions, the blokes become less aggressive.’ I asked him if he thought that the feminist group in Ormond which had organised against Colin Shepherd might have formed in opposition to this blokish element in the college. He cut across me in a flash. ‘We’ve always had feminists in Ormond. We’ve always tended to attract strong-minded, independent women.’ He spoke briefly about the fallout from the Shepherd affair, mentioning how expensive it had been for the college to settle the matter, and also its disturbing effects on general morale and on certain of the minor or background figures, of whom some had left the college, and others had not had their contracts renewed. ‘But the student turnover will soon get it behind us,’ he went on briskly. ‘Elizabeth Rosen’s younger sister was in college, but she moved out halfway through this year. All things considered, she preferred to live outside the college.’

  The Acting Master went on to tell me that some council members had recently proposed changing the title of the head of the college to Provost, from the latin praepositus, placed in charge. ‘They thought this would be a good time to change it, now that the name Master had been dragged through the mud.’ Every level of the college community, he said, had been ‘consulted in open forum – but it fell flat. No one was interested. They saw it as part of “that business”. They genuinely don’t care. They probably like the tradition, despite the gender.

  ‘The appointment of the new Master,’ he said, ushering me to the door, ‘will be a cleansing moment.’

  So soon! I thought, as I walked away across the magnificent gardens. The water will close over Colin Shepherd’s head – or over his disappearing feet, as in Auden’s poem: ‘. . . how everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster . . ./. . .And the expensive delicate ship/. . . Had somewhere to get to, and sailed calmly on.’

  The appointment of the new Master was announced in the press in November 1993. The professor of government and politics at Murdoch University in Western Australia would take up the post early in 1994.

  Much later I heard, from someone who was working at Ormond on the summer day in March 1994 when the students were moving into the college, that the new Master looked around the vast entrance hall with its human-dwarfing scale and echoing polished floors, and said, ‘It’s so bare in here. Couldn’t we bring a bit of those beautiful gardens inside? Even just a little jar of flowers on this wooden table?’

  Meanwhile, having abandoned hope of a response from either of the two complainants or any of their supporters, I packed up my notes and papers and went to New York. I had been working there for several months, in that climate of intellectual openness which is so astonishing to an Australian, when I received one morning, long after I had forgotten her name or even the fact of having written to her, a reply from one of the Ormond women’s supporters, a woman I had never met. It was scribbled in a looping hand, dead centre of a quarto sheet. ‘Dear Ms Garner,’ it said. ‘Regarding your request of August 12th. I am not willing to talk to you now or in the future.’ Over land and sea it had come fleeting in its neat striped envelope, and scudded on to my desk: one last forlorn brandishing of the feminist fist, enclosed in its tight circle of self-righteousness.

  Why did Elizabeth Rosen and Nicole Stewart report Colin Shepherd to the police?

  Three years ago I thought this was a simple question, a matter of he did/she did/they did, a brief detective story. I actually thought I would be able to ‘find out the answer’.

  In the face of the two women’s silence, though, which something in me still grudgingly respects, my question kept opening out into a fan of more complex bewilderments, about women’s potential power and why we find seizing it and wielding it so difficult – questions for which I have no answers.

  But I know that between ‘being made to feel uncomfortable’ and ‘violence against women’ lies a vast range of male and female behaviours. If we deny this, we enfeeble language and drain it of meaning. We insult the suffering of women who have met real violence, and we distort the subtleties of human interaction into caricatures that can serve only as propaganda for war. And it infuriates me that any woman who insists on drawing these crucial distinctions should be called a traitor to h
er sex.

  As for Colin Shepherd’s story – even with half the pieces hidden or withheld, it falls into a tragic configuration. The fact is that a certain nexus of forces existed in that place, at that time. The formula was chemical: a precise mix of prissiness, cowardice and brutality. A flick of a fingertip, and up it went. The pieces fell all over the countryside; perhaps they are still falling.

  At many points, as I tried to track Colin Shepherd’s slow demise, I longed to stop the tape and dream the story to a different, a less cruel and more useful ending. If only the Master had gone quietly back to the Lodge with his wife, instead of stepping into the Junior Common Room to see what the kids were doing. If only there had been no slow songs. If only Nicole Stewart and Elizabeth Rosen and their friends had developed a bold verbal style to match their sense of dress. If only the judge had had daughters, or a warmer tone of voice. If only the women’s supporters had been away on sabbatical leave. If the Vice-Master had run straight into the next-door office with his gown and papers flying. If the Master had been dashing, a biter of bullets. If the famous complaints hadn’t lain there stinking all summer long, gathering ‘agendas’ like blowflies.

  If only the whole gang of them hadn’t been so afraid of life.

  Helen Garner

  Joe Cinque’s Consolation

  ‘How soon the killing of Joe Cinque is swept away into the past! The courts have finished with him – but where does all the woundedness, all the hatred go? Must the load be shouldered only by the people who loved him? Is this what “tragedy” means?’

  In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests – most of them university students – had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of Rohypnol and heroin.

  Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as ‘evil’; and explores conscience, culpability, and the battered ideal of duty of care.

  Tim Winton

  The Turning

  In the 1980s, Tim Winton made his mark with tough, spare stories about youth and promise, of early parenthood and the challenge of loyalty. Now, almost twenty years since his last collection, he returns to the form with seventeen overlapping stories of second thoughts and mid-life regret set in the brooding small-town world of coastal Western Australia.

  Here are turnings of all kinds – changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours – where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they’ve made for themselves.

  Brilliantly crafted, and as tender as they are confronting, these elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.

  From the internationally acclaimed and bestselling author of Dirt Music comes an outstanding work of fiction that will resonate with readers everywhere.

  Colm Tóibín

  The Master

  In The Master, his brilliant and profoundly moving fifth novel, Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, an American-born genius of the modern novel who became a connoisseur of exile, living among artists and aristocrats in Paris, Rome, Venice and London.

  In January 1895 James anticipates the opening of his first play in London. He has never been so vulnerable, nor felt so deeply unsuited to the public gaze. When the production fails, he returns, chastened, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost.

  Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts made his career a triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing, and whose sexual identity remained unresolved. Henry James circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, he was lauded and admired, yet his attempts at intimacy failed him and those he tried to love.

  The Master is Colm Tóibín’s most accomplished and powerful novel to date. It is a portrait of a man who was elusive to both friends and family even as he remained astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art – a searching exploration of the hazards of putting life of the mind before affairs of the heart.

  Robert Dessaix

  Twilight of Love

  For forty years, until the day he died, Ivan Turgenev, one of the greatest novelists of Russia’s Golden Age, was passionately devoted to the diva Pauline Viardot. He followed her and her husband around Europe, even living with them amicably at times as part of their household. Yet as far as we know, the relationship with Pauline was chaste.

  What, then, did Turgenev mean by ‘love’, the word at the core of his life and work? After all, he had many other liaisons.

  Robert Dessaix has had his own forty-year relationship with Turgenev, first as a student of Russian in both Australia and Russia, then as a teacher, and now as what he calls a close friend.

  Works such as Turgenev’s A Hunter’s Notes and Fathers and Sons, still widely read around the world today, were pivotal in transforming the Russian social landscape.

  However, as Dessaix, in turn, follows Turgenev across Germany, France and Russia, he comes to see his life and work as above all an expression of a turning point in the history of love – the moment the Romantic became rational, and love unravelled into sentiment and eroticism.

  In a truly remarkable work of memoir, literary biography and travel writing, Robert Dessaix has found the pulse that still quickened Turgenev’s age but has failed in ours.