The First Stone

by Helen Garner

  Colin Shepherd himself looked stunned. The family’s outburst of distress seemed to swallow up his feelings. His face was expressionless. What satisfaction could he find in such a decision? Did he believe he would get his job back, after this?

  Outside on the cold street the students’ solicitor, a dark-haired, solid woman who looked scarcely older than her clients, was telling journalists that two complaints had been registered with the State Equal Opportunity Commission. And then everybody walked away.

  Now they were taking it to Equal Opportunity? But the EO approach to charges of sexual harassment is based on aims of confidentiality and conciliation: surely it was far too late for that. Shepherd might have been found not guilty by the court, but his name was being bandied about in the media, he had been stood down from his position at the college, and his professional reputation was the property of gossips. The story did not make sense. I felt the first stab of real, businesslike curiosity.

  I went home and wrote Colin Shepherd another letter, asking him for an interview. His accusers I would have to approach more obliquely.

  I had two female acquaintances at Ormond. One of them, Dr Ruth V—, who had invited me to her college apartment one afternoon years before and served me cake and tea on pretty crockery, I had briefly glimpsed in the company of several young Ormond women outside the court, on the day of the appeal. But before I had a chance to call her, I ran into her husband in the lobby of a theatre. He said to me, with a look somewhere between challenging and hostile, ‘This Ormond thing is much more complex than you probably realise.’ Taking this as an invitation to inquire further, I wrote Dr V— a letter. I told her I had shot my mouth off early on, when all I knew was what I had read in the papers; I asked her if she would speak to me about the background of the story, for a newspaper article I wanted to write. She didn’t answer the letter. I phoned her. She said she couldn’t speak to me because of the EO hearing which was pending. I didn’t know it then, but this was the last time Dr V— would ever speak to me.

  Next I went to Ormond to visit my second acquaintance there, Michelle B—, a young tutor I had met when I sat next to her in the court; we had exchanged a few remarks. When I explained my purpose, she gave me the names of several other university feminists who had supported the complainants, and promised to pass on to Nicole Stewart and Elizabeth Rosen my request for an interview.

  ‘Why are they so angry?’ I asked her. ‘Why did they go to the police?’

  ‘These men in their fifties,’ she said, ‘are the last generation who haven’t had to deal with feminists in their ordinary work. I’m thirty-six. In my student generation you wouldn’t have rocked the boat. But these days girls don’t put up with it.’

  With what? What else was there in this story, beyond accusations of nerdish passes at a party? Did something really monstrous lurk behind it? If so, why hadn’t it come out in court?

  After my initial conversation with Michelle B—, she never answered any further communication from me: I wrote to her and phoned her in vain. Like Dr V—, she slid back into the faceless group of women in the wider university who supported the two complainants; I never saw her or heard her voice again.

  That same month, in the spring of 1992, I took a job with Time Australia, reporting the trial of a man accused of having murdered his girlfriend’s two-year-old son. The horrors I heard in the Supreme Court each day threw the Ormond story into merciless perspective. The luxuriant gardens, as I pedalled across them those mornings on my way to the court, became less and less real to me. They seemed the site of an absurd, hysterical tantrum, a privileged kids’ paddy.

  But the story haunted me. I began to notice that I was anxious about it. I wondered if something in me had shifted, without my having noticed. I had thought of myself as a feminist, and had tried to act like one, for most of my adult life. It shocked me that now, though my experience of the world would usually have disposed me otherwise, I felt so much sympathy for the man in this story and so little for the women. I had a horrible feeling that my feminism and my ethics were speeding towards a head-on smash. I tried to turn on this gut reaction what they call ‘a searching and fearless moral inventory’.

  Twenty years earlier, in 1972, I had been sacked from my teaching job for having discussed sexual matters with my young students at Fitzroy High School. I tried to work out whether my initial rush of sympathy for Colin Shepherd had been merely an upsurge of the rage I’d had to swallow at the time, when I’d been sent sprawling and had had to pick myself up and find another way of making a living.

  I thought too that, at fifty, I might have forgotten what it was like to be a young woman out in the world, constantly the focus of men’s sexual attention. Or maybe I was cranky that my friends and sisters and I had got ourselves through decades of being wolf-whistled, propositioned, pestered, insulted, touched, attacked and worse, without the big guns of sexual harassment legislation to back us up. I thought that I might be mad at these girls for not having taken it like a woman – for being wimps who ran to the law to whinge about a minor unpleasantness, instead of standing up and fighting back with their own weapons of youth and quick wits. I tried to remember the mysterious passivity that can incapacitate a woman at a moment of unexpected, unwanted sexual pressure. Worst of all, I wondered whether I had become like one of those emotionally scarred men who boast to their sons, ‘I got the strap at school, and it didn’t do me any harm.’

  The innocence or guilt of Colin Shepherd was to me the least interesting aspect of this story. What I really wanted to know was why the girls went to the police. You’d think this would be a simple enough question; but it turned out to be very complicated indeed.

  Then, in October 1992, I received two letters from strangers. The first, written in an old-fashioned, forward-driving hand on sheets of lined foolscap, was from a Mr Andrew McA—, a member of the Ormond College Council. He told me he had been co-opted on to the Group of Three, the sub-committee set up in March 1992 to examine the students’ allegations against the Master. Having seen a copy of my letter to Dr Shepherd and heard that I wanted to write about the case, he was eager to correct the ‘factual inaccuracies’ which had appeared in the press, and offered to speak to me at my convenience. The second came from a woman called Janet F—, the director of Melbourne University’s counselling service. She said that a Monash friend had sent her a copy of the letter I had written to Dr Shepherd. ‘I have a large stake in (this),’ she wrote:

  I had been called in to attempt conciliation between the complainants and Dr Shepherd in February 1992, and subsequently I was subpoenaed to appear in his defence . . . The outcome for me has been devastating: the radical feminists have pilloried me in Farrago (Melbourne University’s student newspaper), and there have even been graffiti about me in the Baillieu (Library) loos. I have learnt about witch hunts. What happens to truth when rage and fear and ideological passions are on the rampage?

  One spring evening, a few weeks later, I went across the grounds of Melbourne University to Parkville, a pocket-sized inner suburb where many academics and professionals live, to visit Janet F—. In addition to her work as a counsellor, she was responsible at the time for handling sexual harassment complaints that arose on campus. She is a tall, slim woman in her forties, with the unshockable alertness of the practised psychologist. She struck me as someone who had been around, perhaps suffered in her private life; who knew something of the world and spoke from that knowledge rather than from theory or dogma. Like many people who have become embroiled in this story, she has a deep sense of unease about it. She laid out her map of it with care.

  She knew nothing about it, she told me, until six months after the Smoko, when the Vice-Chancellor offered her services as conciliator to the Ormond council, which was facing an awkward problem. She was unnerved by the anonymous leaflet that had been circulated throughout the college and the university, with its character assassination of Dr Shepherd and other Ormond men, and its wild predictions: ‘If Shepherd
is not promptly removed, he will commit offences of a similar nature or worse. If attacked by Shepherd, please – do not panic – call the police. There is no guarantee his next crime will not be rape or battery.’ It was clear at once to the counsellor that the case was already too polarised, and the allegations too old, for conciliation to be of much use; but she agreed to try.

  When the High Court judge, then chair of the Ormond council, phoned her with the name of the senior college woman through whom she was to contact the two girls, Ms Vivienne S—, she ‘sensed hostility between the judge and this woman. It was easy for me immediately to take her side, because I found him pompous. I felt he was uncomfortable about the whole business and wanted it to go away. I rang Vivienne S—. She was cautious, but we talked. She said she had tried to stand back from the students and let them speak for themselves.

  ‘But when I saw the two women, I thought they felt as though they’d never had a chance to really say what their complaints were – as though they hadn’t been heard. When they went to the Group of Three, they’d been formally warned that once they signed their complaints they were at risk of defamation. The group was doing what was proper, in warning them of this; but it would have seemed legalistic and intimidating. I think they felt that Shepherd, as a man, was part of the power clique, and that they were victims and vulnerable.

  ‘Shepherd, when I saw him, denied everything. He felt as much of a victim as they did. He felt deserted by Ormond. He’d not been told anything about the nature of the complaints – the judge had only told him not to drink at student functions, and not to dance with the students. Next thing he knew, this anonymous leaflet was circulated – and at that point his world started to fall apart.’

  Janet F— was impressed by the integrity of both Nicole Stewart and Dr Shepherd. ‘Shepherd was very concerned about the women – that they mustn’t be hurt. And I thought, you’re a fool – you don’t see how appalling this could become for you.’

  ‘I saw the students a second time – and then on the morning of their third appointment, a woman rang and cancelled. One of the receptionists took the call. I tried ringing them. I left messages. But they didn’t respond.

  ‘The Group of Three by this time was frantic: they had a council meeting coming up, that they had to report to. I thought it was probably going to be fruitless, but I typed up a report. It explained what sexual harassment is, and how complaints are usually handled. I talked about how hard it is to really establish what truth is, specially when people are under pressure and the events happened a long time ago. People feel there’s no way they can move from what they’ve said. Their memories get absolutely fixed, and you can’t shift them. The truth’s not knowable. I said I thought both parties deserved to be respected, but that I found it hard to understand why the women were so angry – much angrier than most people I’d dealt with in similar circumstances. I suggested they appoint someone to look into male-female relations within the college.

  ‘And the next thing I discovered was that the women were furious with me. In their eyes I had suddenly turned into the same kind of ogre as Shepherd.’

  A complex struggle ensued over Janet F—’s report to the college council, a benign document which breached no one’s confidentiality and attempted only to calm the situation, which had clearly gone way beyond the reach of sane negotiation. The students’ solicitor demanded the document under Freedom of Information and threatened to report Janet F— to the Psychologists’ Board. The campus newspaper, Farrago, was edited that year by puritan feminists. Despite – or because of – its tone, it exerted a certain influence on campus; and when it cast aspersions on Janet F—’s motives for giving evidence at Dr Shepherd’s trial, although she had obeyed the fundamental principle that ‘as a counsellor you don’t ever appear in court without a subpoena’, Janet F— was distressed – not only at being smeared herself, but because of the damage the smears might do to her counselling service and to the students’ faith in the university’s sexual harassment procedures.

  Janet F—, in short, had got sucked into the Ormond maelstrom. Two years later she was still extricating herself. A multi-national fashion magazine ran a piece on sexual harassment in universities which implied that she had lost her job over her handling of the Ormond complaints. Janet F— took out a defamation writ, and the magazine published a retraction and an apology.

  Back in spring 1992, however, when Janet F— talked to me in her quiet house, she was as sad and confused as anybody about the ethics of the story. She knew that for the college council to declare the women’s complaints had been made in good faith and at the same time to announce a vote of confidence in the Master was no solution. ‘To the women the outcome was hopeless. Justice had not been served. To them it was not fair that the council should give such a finding and that after it Shepherd should still be there. I can see that point of view. But I can’t accept that you then take him to court and charge him with sexual assault. To me that’s so far over the top that it’s appalling.’

  ‘Why, then?’ I said. ‘Why did they go to the police?’

  She gave a big sigh. ‘In some of the more radical areas of women’s help services, there’s a maintain your rage thing – a belief that the only way to overcome having been abused is to be angry, angry, angry. I think anger is a very important part of the healing process – but if you’re stuck with the anger for ever, that’s not healing. I keep wondering what was going on in Ormond that maintained their rage so much. Was it an ideological position, or were there other things the women were angry about, that made them want to pursue it?’

  ‘Do you think this is a generation thing?’ I asked. ‘Is this rage disproportionate, or are we on the scrapheap?’

  ‘Our generation was all about sexual liberation,’ she said. ‘But the women in their early thirties, who teach in universities now – they’re angry at the notion that someone would invade another person, sexually. To them the whole thing is located in the discourse of power, and the abuse of power. They find it impossible to believe that a man would ever touch a woman’s breast, for example, without knowing he was exerting power. And the new ideology is that sexual harassment is a crime. If you get the opportunity to punish someone, you really ought to.

  ‘To me, sexual communication is so complex and difficult – harassment is always going to happen without people intending it to. But for the radical feminists, even for me to hold that view is counter-productive to the advancement of women. I’m “unable to perceive the oppression”, or too simple-minded, or too sold out, or too old.

  ‘I’ve been noticing, too,’ she went on, ‘over the last few years, that women who come to me for therapy feel it’s a big deal to confess that they have fantasies involving dressing up in fishnet stockings or being into domination or bondage. They see these as non-feminist fantasies – they’re proscribed fantasies. They see themselves as sick, for having them. But I say, if you can’t play in your fantasies, where are you allowed to play? Isn’t that one of the pleasant things about there being gender differences – that there are games you can play?’

  We sat at the table and stared gloomily out into the dark garden.

  I drove home late that evening thinking of the good fortune of my generation – no Aids, freed by the pill: we had a large, safe area, for ‘play’. But feminists now, the ones who are making the most noise, seem to be consumed by rage and fear. Things are closing down, for them. The area where they can play has become so small that it’s only a dot – they can hardly see it, let alone stand on it.

  The morning after my conversation with Janet F—, the Age reported that Colin Shepherd had lost the support of the Ormond council.

  At a special meeting last week, a motion that the council continue to express its confidence in Dr Shepherd was lost. The motion was proposed by the chairman, who told the council that the vote, by secret ballot, was decisive. He is believed to have later told Dr Shepherd of the council’s change of heart . . . The council agreed that what
transpired at the meeting would remain confidential.

  Was someone on the council leaking to the press?

  Several days later I called the students’ solicitor and asked her whether Elizabeth Rosen and Nicole Stewart knew I would like to interview them. She said they did, but that it was not yet possible, in case the Ormond council made it a condition of the EO settlement that the girls not speak publicly about it.

  She told me how pleased the girls were ‘about the motion of no confidence – but maybe the council finally sat down and read the judge’s statements and took them on board. The girls’ aim was not to destroy Shepherd.’

  So Dr Shepherd was only caught in the crossfire between the girls and the college? I found this hard to swallow.

  I first visited Dr Shepherd on 24 November 1992, at the Ormond College Master’s Lodge, a low, wide, cream-brick house with big windows, surrounded by a screen of garden, and backing on to College Crescent. Compared with the neo-Gothic main building of Ormond, it has an almost suburban feel, though its scale – slightly larger than human – gestures towards importance. Its colours are pale, it is full of garden light, its big reception room is pleasant to be in.

  Dr Shepherd welcomed me at the front door, restraining a keen golden labrador. When I addressed him formally he said, ‘Call me Colin, please.’ His wife, he explained, was at work as deputy principal of a small private girls’ school in the eastern suburbs. Having been stood down from the Master’s position while the charges went to court, he was spending his days in the house, trying to finish a history he was writing of the Lord Somers Camp. By ‘in the house’ he seemed to mean more than just sitting at his desk writing. He looked at ease domestically, and gave no impression of being embarrassed or reduced by his indoor status.