by Helen Garner
On my way back to bed, I saw a student coming out of a room; I turned and dashed back to the toilets and shut myself into a cubicle. I heard the student come into the outer section of the bathroom and stand there non-plussed: he must have seen me. I waited in silence behind my door. His footsteps receded again into the hall. I tiptoed out of my cubicle and peeped down the corridor towards my boyfriend’s door. The student was tapping on it. Oh God – I was trapped. I ran back in and locked myself in again. My feet were bare and freezing on the concrete floor.
I heard distant male voices murmuring. After a while there was silence. I crept out and back down the empty hall to my boyfriend’s room. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he said as he let me in. He told me that a student had knocked on his door and said, ‘Mr X— – I think there’s a woman in the bathroom.’ The concept of the nerd did not exist at the time, but may be applied retrospectively.
Postscript: When my tutor got a famous scholarship and went to Oxford, he broke my heart, of course. I sobbed in cafés and hotel bars, bored my friends half to death, and thought myself tragically bereft. I cannot in all honesty claim to have been ‘liberated’ from anything in particular by my relationship with this man. I hated his subject and was bad at it, failed it twice and did not care. He made me laugh, that’s the main thing I remember. I often felt he was privately laughing at me, from the eminence of his twenty-four years. This made me watchful and defensive. But I learnt from him two things: firstly, to start an essay without bullshit preamble, and secondly, that betrayal is part of life. I would have learnt the betrayal lesson anyway – perhaps I knew it already; but it probably helped to have it made clear to me early on. Anyway, until I wrote this account of being trapped in the Trinity dunnies it had never occurred to me to call what happened between me and my tutor ‘sexual harassment’ or ‘abuse of power’. It was a relatively minor episode, seen in retrospect, and it ended wretchedly, but I value it as part of my store of experience – part of what I am and how I have learnt to understand the world.
When Colin Shepherd abandoned his struggle for reinstatement and did at last resign, the Age of 25 May 1993 handled it discreetly, giving the matter eight brief paragraphs on page two, headed Chief quits ‘untenable’ Ormond job. (This discretion may have been prompted by a complaint Dr Shepherd had lodged with the Australian Press Council; the APC later adjudicated in Shepherd’s favour, criticising the Age for ‘a serious omission in terms of balance’ and calling the concluding part of the article in question ‘unfair’. The fact that Dr Shepherd had received a substantial order for costs against the police should have been reported, according to the APC.) The Australian, however, ran the news on the front page with a big photo and the headline Sex-row Master quits. The photo showed Dr Shepherd peering out from behind a half-open screen door, its frame made dramatic by the spiky shadows of leaves. He was dressed in a collar and tie under a striped cotton football sweater. It was an image chosen by an editor with a ruthless news sense: it made Shepherd look furtive, wary, hunted – as if the photographer had shot him against his will, in the act of slamming the door. An old neighbour remarked to me, ‘What an evil face.’ Shocked by her reading of the photo, I scanned it again. To me he looked stricken, desperately unhappy, nervous – but evil?
Later that day I had a call from the journalist who had written the accompanying piece for the Australian. She told me that when she and the photographer had visited Dr Shepherd at his house he had welcomed them inside and spoken courteously to them. The photographer had taken plenty of good shots inside the house. He and the journalist had been upset by the paper’s distorting choice of graphic.
The journalist asked me some questions for a piece she now wanted to do about the fact that I was trying to write this book. I spoke very carefully, outlining my doubts and trying to express my sadness and frustration at being denied access to the students’ version of the affair. Next day this piece was run. Late in the day I spoke to the journalist on the phone. She told me that the complainants’ solicitor had rung her. The girls had read the article. They were ‘very shocked and upset’.
At that moment something inside me snapped. I wanted to find Elizabeth Rosen and Nicole Stewart and shake them till their teeth rattled. I saw my polite attempts to contact them and their supporters as unbearably naive, my hopes for a response from people like Professor J—’s daughter as pathetic. The daily papers were awash with endless outrages against women, as if victimhood were the sum of our experience. Feminists were redefining themselves in these terms, dragging themselves on bleeding stumps to the high moral ground of survival. To try to draw ethical distinctions, to point out gradations of offence, to suggest that women were in possession of untapped power, was now an act of treachery. I realised that I was wasting my time. I was just about ready to throw in the towel.
But the day after the press reported Colin Shepherd’s resignation, I received an unexpected phone call. It was Professor J—. I recognised at once his prim voice, a strangely audible way he had of breathing through his nose between sentences.
‘Helen Garner? Um – what is your address. I need to send you a letter.’
My stomach dropped. I gave him my address and spelt out the street name. Quickly and without further niceties he thanked me and said goodbye. I hung up. What on earth was this anxious feeling? It was exactly the physical sensation one gets when the principal says, ‘Report to my office in fifteen minutes’: the childish Ur-fear of getting into trouble, of being punished for some nameless, unknown misdemeanour. At fifty, one locates this dread in one’s psyche and tries to deal with it there; but it struck me that this story, for the students, must have been studded with such moments, as they drove themselves to confront professors, barristers, magistrates, judges – the whole apparatus of power in its panoply, under the banner embroidered with the small but resonant word Master. The women’s motives might baffle and infuriate, but there was something impressive in their determination.
I thought that after all I would not give up. Not quite yet.
And besides, I was eager to know what Professor J—’s letter would say. I began to rush home from work each afternoon, looking for the mail.
A friend gave a small dinner party for her birthday. Four women were present, two Australians, one German, one French, some of us previously strangers to each other; but we talked till long after midnight. We agreed that over the past few years, as we approached fifty, we had ceased to feel ‘at the mercy of men’. The Frenchwoman, the youngest of us at forty-seven, said, ‘But I still have red flashes of rage.’ She told us that in her mother’s provincial café, when she worked there in her very early teens, men used to put their hands up her dress, and her sister’s; she used to hate this, but did nothing about it until one day a man did it once too often. She spun round and hit him so hard that she broke his glasses. We all applauded, laughing. She went on, ‘But my mother was annoyed with me. She said he was a really good customer.’ We uttered cries of protest. She added, ‘Once a priest who was confessing me put his hand on my thigh. I never said anything to anyone about it – but I never went back to church, either. I consider that a much greater betrayal than the other.’
Then the other Australian said, ‘My girlfriend and I were both raped, as teenagers.’ She slid this into the conversation so casually that we were all taken aback. The German woman, who had known the speaker well for many years, leaned forward and cried out, ‘Raped? You never told me this!’ The Australian shrugged, looking completely matter-of-fact. She wasn’t trying to shock us, or even to up the conversational stakes. We stared at her, waiting for the story.
She said nothing.
I said, “Was it somebody you knew, or was it a stranger?’
‘It was a doctor.’
Appalled, we sat in silence. She didn’t go on, only said, ‘I was eighteen. I never told anyone about it – not till many years later, when a friend and I were talking once, and she told me she’d been raped, at fifteen, and had also
never spoken about it afterwards.’
Later, as I was driving her home, I asked her about it again. She said, ‘Actually, he was an abortionist. A well-known sleaze. I went to him to find out if I was pregnant.’
We looked at each other, and away. There was another long silence.
‘Do you understand,’ I said, ‘why women and girls go passive, when men attack them or approach them sexually?’
She shrugged. Perhaps it was too late in the evening for a couple of middle-aged feminists to open that particular can of worms: the complexities of what our lives as women had shown us about power, sex and assault.
I woke up the next morning sad and anxious, aware of the immense weight of men on women, the ubiquity of their attentions, the exhaustion of our resistance. In such a mood it seemed to me an illusion that women could learn to deal with this pressure briskly, forcefully, with humour and grace. I thought about the complainants, Elizabeth and Nicole, and I felt deeply sorry for them.
I’m sick of hearing the blokes’ side, the institution’s version. Why won’t you talk to me? I’m sitting here waiting to be convinced, but no one will come out of the bunker and argue it. I can write the book without your version – I can imagine it, for God’s sake! – aren’t I a woman? – but it’s so important. If you have a case, why won’t you put it to me?
Months later I found this plaintive pencil draft of a letter to the young women’s supporters shoved into my files at this point. I never copied it out or sent it.
It wasn’t till twenty-four hours after the conversation with the women at dinner and in the car on the way home that I recalled one crucial fact in the Australian’s story of the doctor who had raped her. ‘The worst part,’ she had told us at the table, ‘was that I paid him.’
It astonished me that I had forgotten this detail; but the fact of my having forgotten it underscored its importance. And I noticed that when I did remember it I was filled with a sense of immediate, deep and total empathy: an effortless understanding of an act which one would have considered, with one’s rational mind, to be grotesque. And it reminded me of a disagreeable (if much more trivial) experience of my own, which until this moment I had never written down or tried to analyse, though I had often thought about it with bewilderment.
In the early eighties I used to do aerobics at a gym on Johnston Street in Fitzroy. Every couple of weeks I would treat myself to a massage. The masseur, a man of about my age, had his table set up in a tall, narrow, windowless space between the gym’s reception area and the women’s change rooms. It had two doors and was dimly lit by a high fluorescent strip. One thing I liked about this masseur was that he didn’t feel the need to entertain you with a stream of chatter. He worked in silence. This meant that his massage produced a condition of extreme relaxation, almost a waking dream-state. He was very skilled, and I’d been to him at least half a dozen times.
One day I booked myself in. ‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ he said as I undressed and climbed on to the table. I explained that I’d been broke and busy, and he began to work. The only interruption was his request, half an hour later, for me to turn on to my back. He worked from my feet upwards. When he had finished with my right arm and was laying it down, he kissed the back of my hand.
I was thunderstruck. I couldn’t believe it had happened. I thought I must have dreamt it. I lay there as if everything were normal, but I was tense and alert, though I still hadn’t opened my eyes. He continued to massage me: left arm, abdomen, chest, shoulders, in the ordinary asexual way. Then he moved to the top of the table, stood behind me, and took my head in both hands, as he always did, to massage my neck; but I felt his face come down over mine, and he kissed me gently on the mouth.
I didn’t move. I lay there, flat on my back and stark naked except for the towel he had spread over me as he worked. I kept my eyes tightly shut. I was unable to compute what he had done. I was more than anything else embarrassed. He finished the massage without further incident. At the end of it I opened my eyes and got off the table. I could hardly meet his eye. My face felt stiff with awkwardness. Something needed to be said, but my mind was blank. While I was pulling on my track suit he said, with a calm smile, ‘Don’t let it be so long, next time, between visits.’ I recall thinking in amazement, surely you don’t imagine you’ll ever see me again? But still I said nothing and made no sign.
I said goodbye – I think I even smiled – and scuttled out of the room. I got my bag out of the locker, fronted up to the reception desk, and I paid.
What else might I have done?
I might have said to the woman manager, ‘I’m not paying for this massage. The guy came on to me without provocation.’ Would she have believed me? Had other clients complained? Would she even have thought it mattered? No – what she thought about it was not the point. This was between me and the masseur.
I might have opened my eyes and said to him, ‘Don’t do that. I don’t like it. Just do the massage.’ But he had broken the professional contract between masseur and client, the unspoken agreement that makes it possible for a woman to take off all her clothes in a closed room in front of a stranger without its having a sexual meaning: it would hardly have been possible for the massage to continue, once his act had been acknowledged.
So I behaved like a child. I kept my eyes shut. That is, I declined to take any responsibility in the situation. When I left the room I was still maintaining the pretence that nothing untoward had happened. And I never went back.
And this is where my masseur’s kiss loops back and touches Nicole Stewart and Colin Shepherd on the dance floor, in her version of the story which the judge ‘did not disbelieve’ but which could not be proved. What woman would not feel a shot of rage at the QC’s question to Nicole Stewart: ‘Why didn’t you slap ’im?’
We all know why.
Because as Nicole’s friend said angrily in court, all we want to do when a man makes a sleazy, cloddish pass is ‘to be polite and get away’.
What did these students – clever, beautiful young women in their twenties who drive, vote, drink, dance, wear sophisticated clothes and have free sex lives – what did they do when one of their friends ran out of a party upset and told them that the Master had groped her? Their spontaneous collective action was to make it look to him as if nothing untoward had happened – to cover up the unpleasantness, to smooth things over. Instead of making clear to him their true feelings about what their friend had reported, they offered themselves to him (even if ‘for less than a minute’) as dancing partners, as decoys. They believed they were protecting Nicole from him; but in fact everything they did was directed at protecting him from knowing that he had offended her.
Is it retrospective shame of our passivity under pressure that brings on the desire for revenge? Is revenge the right word, or should it be retribution, the term used by Christine G—, the fierce Women’s Officer, with its atavistic clang of righteousness? Again and again come these sharp flashes of empathy with the girls; but something in me, every time, slams on the brakes to prevent the final, unbearable smash. I invent and discard a dozen fantasies of less destructive responses to such an incident. I remember a tutor from another college who told me about having to drag one of his colleagues out of a party where he had been ‘monstering’ the women students: ‘We took him outside and shook him and said, “Listen, mate – they don’t want to fuck you!”’ I see myself marching into some man’s office and saying, ‘I know what you tried on my daughter. This time I’m prepared to let it pass. But I’m warning you – if anything like this ever happens again, you can expect big trouble.’
One of the sweetest men I ever knew, my first father-in-law, used to say, ‘Even a dog gets two bites, before they put him down.’
‘A bloke came up to me in a pub,’ said a 24-year-old student, ‘and said, “Can I buy you a drink? You’ve got a beautiful bod.” I opened my mouth to say, “Why don’t you fuck off?” – and then I suddenly thought, he’s just a poor bastard. So I s
aid, “That wasn’t a very good thing to say”. He took it fine. He turned out to be a boring nerd, of course, but his friend was quite nice. I think I’ll try that sort of response from now on. What’s the point of making them feel humiliated? They never learn anything, that way.’
Once more I tried to get in touch with Nicole Stewart and Elizabeth Rosen. I wrote to each of them, and sent the letters in care of their solicitor.
I’m aware of a rumour currently being circulated, to the effect that what I am putting together is a ‘pro-Shepherd version’ of the events; I’d like you to know that this is untrue. My aim is to write a truthful, calm and balanced account of what happened, to set it in a wide social context, and to try to understand what it means. If you remain unwilling to speak to me, I will go ahead with the project anyway, but it seems a pity that the first book on this important subject should not include your two voices. I know you have both suffered a great deal and I respect this. If you would consent to speak to me, I would be very glad.
