by Helen Garner
‘Colin’s ridiculously domesticated. He’s the sort of person who’d be cooking a curry for dinner, and rushing out to finish mowing the lawn, and ringing up an old lady who’s ill to see if she’s all right. He’s always thinking up ways to delight people.
‘The establishment won’t touch him. They’re too scared. Of the feminists. He’s not proud. You name it, he applies for it. I can’t bear to think of him not finding a job – we’ll all go crazy.’
I used the word fate.
‘I always felt you made your own fate,’ she said, with a fresh flood of tears. ‘But it’s terrible to feel so powerless. No matter what he did, it made no difference whatsoever. Every time the story rears its head in the press, I the again. Other people become frightened, when they think of us. We’ve got a friend, a teacher – he’s got a Chinese student, who came to see him about some problems with her work. She entered his office looking calm. They had a distressing talk about her academic progress, and she left dishevelled. He rang Colin and said, “She could have accused me of anything.”
‘Deep down, under this extraordinary pain I feel, there’s a sense of the triviality of this destruction.’
She wept and wept. I sat there helplessly. I said, ‘Maybe when these girls are fifty they’ll look back at this and think, “What was all that about?”’
‘I’d hope they’d have died of shame,’ she said fiercely. ‘Someone sent us anonymously that cutting – about one of them using the stress she’d suffered as a defence on a drink-driving charge. I thought, if she was drinking because she was traumatised, I should be drunk! Our whole family should be strung up on a rope!
‘The council botched it. They took fright. Their heads were in the sand. To do what they did to him was a cowardly act. I would have loved Colin to struggle on with Equal Opportunity. But it was never “equal opportunity”. Colin was never “equal”. They kept talking about “the victim” – who was the victim? I don’t believe there ever was justice. But why should we claim there should be justice? Just look at world events!
‘To deal with this is an insult to my nature. The basic assumption in the Magistrates’ Court, that any man given half a chance will molest a woman, is insulting to men – it’s insulting to my Colin. I cannot understand it. None of the theories explains it. No woman could be luckier than I’ve been. I know he’d die rather than betray me.’
During our conversation her eldest son, whom I’d seen with his parents at the County Court, came in with a tray of tea and a banana cake that Mrs Shepherd had made and iced. She cut me a slice, but didn’t take one for herself. She laughed, between sobs: ‘Normally I’m a large, greedy woman.’ Her son, upset to see her crying, crouched down beside her on the floor and awkwardly put his arm round her shoulder. She tried to pull herself together. ‘I’m all right!’ she said brightly, ‘really I am!’ But he left the room reluctantly, looking back at her over his shoulder.
When I left, she came to the front door with me and onto the verandah in the dark. I put out my hand and she took it in both of hers. I seem to recall that she kissed me goodbye; but even if she didn’t, that’s the kind of woman she is – spontaneous and sweet. I stepped off the verandah and suddenly, as I was about to walk away, she drew herself together with a visible effort and resumed a formal demeanour. She called after me a question about my book, as a piece of work in my life; she actually asked me how it was going. I stammered that I didn’t know how I was going to write it. She made a flustered, brushing movement with one hand, and sang out, ‘Don’t worry about me! Just write it for you – don’t be worried about me.’
For days afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about the fire in the Shepherds’ sitting room. The fireplace was handsome, but it was badly designed, with an updraft that caused a tremendous burning rate and consumed a huge quantity of fuel without throwing out a commensurate amount of heat: it was always demanding to be fed. It seemed to me an image of Mrs Shepherd’s generosity: her uneconomical, exhausting, undiscriminating, selfless goodwill. She told me that she had lost her faith over this; but it’s rare to meet somebody whose habit is to do what the prayer book recommends: ‘to give and not to count the cost’.
Now comes a gap in the story.
It was once filled by an interview with a man called Professor J—, whose name had been mentioned to me in casual conversation as someone with strong views on what had been happening in the college. When I arrived at his house for our appointment, he was so eager to talk that he had already launched himself before he remembered to check my credentials and my intentions: he seemed to be dying to tell me the story.
He sat hunched in a battered armchair, with his fists clenched and his knees clamped together, and spoke with bitter, trembling anger against Dr Shepherd. He had, he said, the greatest respect for the women’s supporters. He told me that they had given the young women wise advice, and hours of support; that they had behaved with the highest integrity, and for this they had been shouted at and vilified by the supporters of the Master and certain members of the council. This, he said, had caused them to suffer an immense amount of pain, anxiety and turmoil. His voice as he spoke of these matters lost its primness and became warm with passion. He was filled with shame and distress at the way the council and the college had treated the girls. It particularly grieved him that this could have happened in a Christian college.
After we had spoken for an hour or so, Professor J— had to go and teach a class. I had told him about my letter to Dr Shepherd and my failed attempts to get in touch with the complainants; on his way out the door he offered to speak to Nicole Stewart and Elizabeth Rosen on my behalf. He gave me the phone number and address of his daughter who, he said, was a friend of the two women. In his garden we shook hands.
I was very troubled by what he had told me. I had an urge to ring the women’s supporters who had shouted at me and written me angry letters – to say I was sorry (for what?) – to make another soft approach to them. I wanted to say, ‘Why wouldn’t you tell me all this? Why won’t you sit down and argue it with me – why won’t you persuade me?’ But I thought this was only a sentimental fantasy. I believed it would be fruitless. I dreaded the fury of their response. So I never made the call.
At the same time I was naive enough to be excited by the possibility that a path might open between me and the young women that didn’t pass through the supporters’ territory. I phoned Professor J—’s daughter where she worked. She was out. I left her a message. And, just to be absolutely sure, I wrote her a letter as well.
Dr Q—, a senior lecturer in a humanities department at Melbourne University, told me that one of his postgraduate tutors had been a student at Ormond and was ‘very close to the events, though not one of the complainants, and is very much against Colin Shepherd. She’s a terrific young woman, but she puts me in a rather awkward position – she’s always bounding up to me and throwing her arm round me, and teasing me.’ He laughed and looked out the window. ‘I’m constantly aware that if I did likewise I’d probably be up on a charge.’
I gave him my phone number and he promised to pass it on. But the very next day this small hope collapsed. Another ex-Ormond student phoned me to arrange an interview, and mentioned in passing that the post-graduate tutor was a close friend of Ruth V—, one of the women’s supporters, and used to babysit for her. I crossed the tutor off my list, and waited for the ricochet.
As the autumn rolled on and I imagined I was getting closer to the complainants, to the closed-off core of the matter, I began to be more scared before each interview. I developed a compulsion to arrive fanatically early, afraid that the person, irritated by a moment’s lateness, would slam the door in my face. Thus I often wound up with a good half-hour to cool my heels. During these waits I would sense an unpleasant pressure, coming from some anxiety-centre inside me, to arrive with an efficiently prepared list of questions, instead of simply opening up the topic and letting the talk roll. I recognised this panic. It was the old fear of profe
ssors and people with Ph.Ds, a leftover from my own undistinguished and almost totally silent university career, thirty years ago.
But I was also afraid that I was about to be handed a piece of information, a single fact or detail so far unrevealed, that would cause my whole trembling ethical position to crumble. I dreaded discovering that I had become cold-hearted; that a happy marriage, after all these years of fighting men, might have undermined my sympathy for my own sex, and weakened my moral imagination.
It was in this state that I picked my way, one May evening, through the maze of stud-walled, hideously papered corridors into which Melbourne University’s Law School has been divided. I was fifteen minutes early for my appointment with Dr M—, a law lecturer, and her door was closed. On it were taped several news items and cartoons with a feminist slant, including a Farrago cutting of a statement by the Vice-Chancellor about ‘extremists’ who, he thought, were creating resistance to the feminist cause. I experienced a sharp stab of solidarity, remembering men who, over the early years of the women’s movement, had given us the benefit of their advice on how best to conduct our ‘cause’.
At exactly 6.20 p.m., the appointed time, a small slim woman with short dark hair arrived at the door with a key. She looked in her thirties, with a clear, bright face and steady eyes. She held her chin high, and gave off a toughish vibe: someone clever and determined, who had an agenda, as they say. Her hand, when she shook mine, was very narrow and hard.
Her room was large, with a high ceiling. It overlooked trees and could have been beautiful, but it was amazingly disordered. I sat in a chair and waited while she got her messages off the answering machine. She explained that she was writing a paper for a conference, ‘about men who murder their wives out of jealousy or because they’re leaving them – this in itself is considered sufficient provocation, so that a bloke like that can get three years while someone who does an armed robbery gets fifteen.’
She took me to University House, the academics’ club on campus, and there I laid my cards on the table. She said she couldn’t answer any questions about the Ormond case because she was ‘too close to the complainants’. Thus, our conversation was general and, to my surprise, very enjoyable. Made wary by the anger of Christine G—, the Women’s Officer, and the abuse of Barbara W— on the phone, I had not expected this. We disagreed on almost everything, but her manner was so clean and open, so good-humoured, that our disagreements were not darkened by offence given or taken. I outlined to her the sense I had got from several people that Colin Shepherd was a good-hearted naïf who had been thrown to the lions by the establishment he had aspired to be part of
She considered this with apparent interest, and remarked, ‘You seem to be de-gendering the story; whereas Cassandra Pybus in her book was re-gendering the Sydney Sparkes Orr case.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to de-gender it completely. I just wonder if sex wasn’t only one strand in a much more complex story.’
‘I think,’ she said, ‘there should be an absolute rule that there are no sexual relations between staff and students at a university.’
I stared at her in amazement. ‘But how could this be enforced?’
‘It can only be enforced by the student. If the student doesn’t want to prosecute, there’s no evidence.’
‘How would it be found out, then?’
‘The staff member’s colleagues would know,’ she said.
‘But that would mean dobbing.’
‘There should be a dobbing mechanism,’ she said firmly.
‘We should have the moral responsibility to call our colleagues on this behaviour.’
‘But what if it’s love?’
With the patient severity of a mother or a headmistress, she smiled and raised her eyebrows. ‘If you fall in love – well, you just have to wait.’
‘Or else you can leave the institution, I suppose,’ I said, trying to follow the thought.
She shook her head sharply. ‘She can leave the university,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a gender analysis of this. Staff can’t leave. There are no jobs. The law is about changing people’s behaviour – and it is changing. We don’t have wild drunken parties any more, with all the nineteen-year-old students. Students should enter the institution and find it to be the state of affairs, that staff-student relations are forbidden. At some US universities they already have this kind of set-up.’
‘Isn’t this a bit bloody Islamic?’ I said. ‘Do you think you have a chance of introducing it? Who’d be against it?’
‘Men,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Civil libertarians.’
‘Would dates be allowed?’ I asked. ‘Could you go to the movies, or have a coffee? What about holding hands? Where would the lines be drawn? And by whom?’
By this time we were both laughing; but she meant it. ‘Holding hands would be . . .’ She put out her hand palm down and wiggled it, meaning a bit dodgy.
Speechless, I sat looking at her. She looked back at me firmly, smiling, not budging an inch from her position.
‘I’m interested,’ she said, ‘in working out what’s sexual about sexual harassment. There’s not enough recognition of the power academics have over students. At least we can empower students to realise that they are not in an equal power relationship.’
I didn’t want to argue against that; but she pressed on to suggest that ‘in heterosexual sex there’s an eroticisation of domination’. Her tone here was almost clinically detached. I argued, rather surprising myself as I went along, that there is no such thing as an equal relationship, sexually or in any other way. Dozens, scores of examples from my own life flooded into my mind to support this thesis. I said I thought all relationships were power struggles – or that at the very least the power balance in every relationship is constantly shifting. You and me, for example,’ I said. ‘We haven’t been together long enough to know, yet, which of us will be the stronger.’
She seemed a bit taken aback. Maybe as a lawyer she was suspicious of psychology; or maybe she was just shocked by how old-fashioned my feminism was – the sort she would presumably label ‘libertarian’ like Bettina Arndt’s, whose name she had mentioned earlier in dismissive terms: ‘She still has that Forum mentality, that more sex is good automatically. It’s a very sexual-liberation model. Feminists have made inroads into our understanding of that.’
She spoke about the rape laws in Victoria, how in 1992 ‘fear of harm’ was included as one of the admissible reasons for not consenting: ‘Consent means free agreement. This requires men and women to talk about it. It makes things marginally less spontaneous, of course. Teenagers will be more stilted – bad luck. We need to move the discourse so sex is seen as a mutual engagement.’
I raised the question of women’s passivity in disagreeable minor encounters with men, the paralysis of will, the sense of the terrible fragility of men’s egos.
‘Well, that brings us back,’ she said, ‘to what I was saying in my office, about men who murder their wives to stop them leaving, or because they’ve been having an affair.’
Again this point of helplessness: the instant raising of the stakes, so that further inquiry about the woman’s role in a minor incident looks like treachery.
Outside it was dark. We walked back across the university grounds in silence. I asked her if she would concede that an affair with an older man could ever be ‘a good thing – a liberating thing’. She pulled a sceptical face. I said, ‘Back in the fifties, with Orr for example, the person in the street automatically assumed the girl was the baddy, the liar. Even women made that assumption. Now it’s the opposite. The world’s imagination is that the bloke must have been at fault.’
She shot a look at me. ‘No! I don’t agree at all!’
I said that this had been my impression, as I went about the town obsessively bringing up the topic with everyone I met.
‘People in the university,’ she said, ‘didn’t assume that the man was the bad egg.’
‘Yes, but people in
the university aren’t like people in the outside world.’
She laughed. We shook hands and parted. On my way home I thought with relief that I would never have to be a student in the university Dr M— was envisioning. But I also felt exhilarated by our discussion. Maybe I was just a naive old libertarian, while she was a well-trained lawyer, but I was impressed by the rare quality she had, the ability to separate her ideas from her ego, so she could radically disagree with you without having to hate you or deny you a voice.
Not for the first time a fantasy occurred to me: before people make pronouncements on what sexual behaviour society should tolerate, they ought to make the clearest possible statement of their own sexual experience, what they have learnt from it, and how it might colour their attitudes. ‘I have a horror of penetration.’ ‘I am involved with someone who satisfies me sexually.’ ‘I would rather have a backrub than make love.’ ‘I’m only sexually attracted to other women.’ ‘I feel free only when I masturbate.’ ‘I have never had an orgasm and don’t know what all the fuss is about.’ ‘I was molested as a child and still see men’s sexuality as furtive and monstrous.’ How would it change the way we talk about sex and power, if we had the self-awareness and the honesty to acknowledge psychological states as such, instead of passing them off as pure intellectual beliefs?
One night I dreamt that I was about to be shown over Ormond College. There were two women guides. One was a noisy, talkative, opinionated ideologue whom I disliked. The other was quiet, modest, retiring. I couldn’t get a sense of what sort of person she was. Her manner was subdued, almost muffled, as if she didn’t want to declare herself, or show her nature, yet.
I went to the Panorama in Brunswick Street to see a dreadful 1959 British movie called Expresso Bongo. One of its main characters is a pretty young blond called Maisie who works in a club as a stripper. Throughout the story she is constantly being approached by sleazy men, and has perfected a line in brush-offs which she delivers in tones varying from briskly casual to venomous. ‘Seek elsewhere,’ she snaps, without even looking up. Later, while she is having a drink with Cliff Richard (hardly any girl’s idea of a protector), a drunk staggers up to their table and slurs, ‘Whadya doing after the show, shweetie?’ She fixes him with a glittering eye and enunciates with vicious clarity, ‘Going to meet my boyfriend from the Vice Squad. Want to come?’
