by Helen Garner
‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d explore the reasons for the delay in bringing the complaints to the Master himself. They were not conveyed to him. There was a possibility, you know, that Monash University would give him his job back. But there were anonymous phone calls, threatening that trouble would follow him there if he was taken back.’
‘What sort of troubles?’
‘Continuing demonstrations, I suppose. You can get up a demonstration about anything, in a university.’
‘Do you have any idea who the callers might have been?’
He looked at me sharply, with a sly smile. ‘I’d examine the dramatis personae,’ he said, ‘and see if there’s one that fits. There might be two. Possibly Colin Shepherd has suffered one of those almost tragic injustices that can wreck various aspects of a man’s life – a person’s life, these days. And those who brought it about – let’s say – don’t deserve much praise.’
Mr R— saw me to my car. On our way to the front door, he stopped in the sunny hallway and showed me a watercolour on the wall, a picture by Harold Herbert of a flat desert town in North Africa: rows of white houses, a strip of blue sea on the horizon, and in the upper corner a plane streaking away. ‘This is my prize possession, at the moment,’ he said. He thought it was a town he had been in during the war. He mentioned Rommel. ‘We got the Italians out of it,’ he said.
‘It’s a beautiful picture,’ I said.
‘It’s more than beautiful,’ said Mr R— severely. ‘It’s accurate. It’s almost all white, and yet the white contains different colours as well.’
I resisted an impulse to dawdle, to ask, ‘Do you often think of the war, now you’re old? Does it seem very close to you? Was it the best time of your life?’ It occurred to me later that his desire to mention the war to me was similar to my urge to tell Christine G—, the stern young Women’s Officer, that I had worked in the abortion law reform movement: ‘We helped to change the abortion laws.’ It was a way of saying, ‘I may look weak to you now, but once I was young and strong.’
Passing through the garden on the way down to the gate, I caught the plant-smell again and recognised it: a certain moss that grew round the roots of an oak tree in my grandparents’ garden. It’s a scent that always evokes in me the memory of being young and about to visit someone old with whom I shared a tender affection. All the way home I cursed this trick of nature, and my slowness at dragging it up to consciousness. I realised too that Mr R— had told me hardly anything. Like the old lawyer he was, he had skilfully blocked my amateurish questions – and not only that: some instinct had caused him to play the father to me, in exactly the way that would bring out in me the prodigal daughter: respectful, unchallenging, emptied of girlish rebellion. Disarmed by the smell of the moss, I had walked right into it. It took me days to think clearly about the interview.
As one who had keenly supported Shepherd for the position of Master, Mr R— might have had egg on his face had he not swerved robustly away from the question of sexual ethics and steered straight towards the conspiracy camp in whose tents (once comfortable, now rather draughty) he would presumably have encountered many a colleague of his generation. One powerful and widely respected university woman had spoken to me tartly about Mr R—’s domineering style on committees: ‘If he doesn’t want to,’ she said, ‘he just doesn’t see you.’ An even more highly placed man described him as ‘tough as hell. When he fixes you with those pale eyes, he’s a force to be reckoned with.’ It still alarms me that I rather liked him – that we got on. When I got home and mentioned the Harold Herbert painting to my husband, who knows a lot about art, he said, ‘Harold Herbert? Oh, he’s a very conservative painter. Very, very conservative.’
Not long after this, I spoke to one of the women who had been on the reduced list for the Ormond job when Colin Shepherd was appointed. ‘Although I got to interview stage,’ she said, ‘the majority of the council wouldn’t have appointed me. One of the older men in particular was antipathetic to me – he kept suggesting I wasn’t academically senior enough. This is a classic way of getting rid of a woman – specially one with children – you say she’s under-qualified for her age, even though the man she’s up against is less qualified than she is, and the status gap between her academic discipline and his is huge. There was one woman on the committee; I could feel she was carefully containing her enthusiasm. But I felt, I could never work here. It seemed a bastion of privilege, and the men were horrible – except for one, who had a more encouraging manner. I lost interest. This counts in your favour, in an interview. It means you don’t care, and so you say things more forcefully. I could hear in my own voice that I was disengaging from the whole idea of it. I was sitting there thinking, God – what a crew. Imagine monthly meetings and weekly meals with this lot.’
Writing a review for a newspaper of Hazel Rowley’s biography of Christina Stead, I went back to several of Stead’s novels and was swept away once again by her vitality – her embrace of life, her respect for and delight in the power of sex.
In a moment more the door opened and Leon appeared, fully dressed and very fresh. Behind him was a dazzling young woman, a Ukraine blonde, with a long plump face, a complexion of radishes in cream, hair in page curls. Her eyes, large as imperial amethysts, roved in an indolent stare of proud imbecility. For a full minute after the sudden splendour of her entrance, Aristide Raccamond found himself bathed in her glare . . . She advanced with studied insulting vanity. Her manners were perfect, that is, she flouted the Raccamonds outrageously, stirred the eels in their souls, while she went through the polite ritual minutely and coaxingly.
Comparing the opening scene of House of All Nations, so funny, free and grand, with the mingy, whining, cringeing terror of sex as manifested in the Ormond story, I felt as if someone had flung open the window of a dark and stuffy room. Take away the imbecility, and the ‘Ukraine blonde’ of that passage could be a description of someone like Elizabeth Rosen – what eels have been stirred in whose souls by that brilliant and wild young creature? – and yet according to the Equal Opportunity statement, Elizabeth Rosen thinks of herself as a ‘worthless sex object’ when her beauty and her erotic self-presentation arouse desire in men. Something here has gone terribly wrong.
In the kitchen at a birthday party a woman I have known for years, who has a long history of involvement with the left, leaned towards me out of her chair, hot-faced and angry, to press her argument against men who harass women. Her large, flexible hands gestured as she spoke; when she disagreed most vehemently, the right one made a vertical wall between us, its palm towards me, six inches in front of my face. Above and behind this barrier, her handsome face shone with zeal. I tried to listen well and to be calm: I did not want to fight. I said, ‘Yes, violence against women is terrible – it’s wrong – but I don’t think violence is what we’re talking about, here.’
She said hotly, ‘What about waking up, the way I did once, and finding a man bending over me, naked, wanting me to suck his cock?’
‘Yes – but would you agree that something appalling like that is of a different degree of seriousness from a man dancing with a girl, say, and letting his hand touch her breast?’
‘Letting? You said letting.’
‘You’re right. That’s the wrong word. Let’s say, putting. Putting is what’s been alleged. Putting his hand on her breast?’
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘There are degrees. But there’s an underlying assumption, in both cases – in all these cases – which is the same.’
‘A man isn’t tried on his assumptions, though. A man is tried on what he does.’
We sat simmering. An old friend of both of us, a man who helped us to bring up our children in the big households of the seventies, was sitting with us. He listened calmly, making no comment. The bottom of my stomach started to weaken again. Have I lost something? Abandoned something? Have I joined the other side? Then she spoke again, but in a different tone of voice, vaguer, more thoughtful, shifting
her gaze to a distant point in the room, over our shoulders. ‘And I was in his house,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I was in my own bed at home and he broke in.’
The stories older women tell about unpleasant sexual experiences: first the blunt statement, the rage; then the pause; then the qualifying remark, the introduction of the ambiguity.
Dr V—, one of the women’s angry supporters, appeared to me in a dream. I came across her in a house, on a broad stair landing. She raised her head from a book she was examining, and greeted me. She looked slight, pretty, clear-eyed, open-faced and warmly friendly. I knelt down beside her and we examined the book together, with our heads side by side, like sisters. Cut to a car. She took the wheel. Suddenly the road dropped steeply in front of us and became deeply rutted and slippery with mud. She eased the car down the terrible road, her small, nicely shod foot on the brake. I was tense and apprehensive, but not scared; she seemed competent, but my intelligence and nerve were feeding into what she was doing.
Still I had no letter from the straight-shooting Professor J—. Could he hold out? Was he too losing sleep?
I phoned a prominent feminist writer in another state, with whom I was slightly acquainted, to ask her advice.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard you’re writing the pro-Shepherd version.’
‘Who told you that?’
She named Rose H—, one of the women’s supporters who had not answered my letter. I took a breath, and outlined my actual approach to the matter. Her manner warmed slightly.
‘Sexual harassment has gone off the rails,’ she said. ‘Not because the charges are trumped up, but because it’s damaging people.’
In a later conversation she told me about an appointments committee for an academic job. ‘The obviously best person was a woman. They wanted to appoint her, but she had a small child and needed flexible hours. “Oh no – we can’t do that.” So the job went to the next person, a man, who was less qualified. This is the terrible thing,’ she went on. ‘What we hoped and worked for was that a thing like that didn’t need to happen. We wanted flexibility – but all the energy that might have led to changes in this area has been turned around and focused on this narrow, punitive business of sexual harassment.’
In the course of researching this book I have heard many such stories from frustrated university women. ‘There was a chair,’ one of them told me, ‘and a short list of three people – an American woman, utterly brilliant and appropriate; a colourless man; and an awkward, unclubbable but original man. Guess which one they chose? The colourless man. You can see why women get so mad – then a bloke in a powerful job slips up, and even if it’s a minor matter that could have been resolved by other means, the women have got up such a head of steam that they think, oh, this is too much – we have to make an example of him or they’ll go on getting away with it for ever.’ Another woman academic, near retiring age and warmly respected by men and women alike, said to me, ‘Sometimes I think that nothing will change without people who are prepared to go way beyond what is considered reasonable. Maybe extreme behaviour is the only way to shift things.’
The interstate feminist writer told me that she had spoken to Nicole Stewart and Elizabeth Rosen months earlier. I asked her whether they had had to agree to maintain confidentiality as a condition of their settlement with the college.
‘No, they haven’t,’ she said. ‘I advised them not to speak, though. I told them that the best thing Suzanne Kemp could have done, when Cassandra Pybus was rewriting the Sydney Sparkes Orr case, was to remain silent. They’re prepared to talk to someone, now – but not you. In fact, they’re going to talk to Vogue.’
Vogue! I gnashed my teeth so hard I saw stars.
When I got home from work I found that the Vogue journalist had been trying to contact me. I rang her number and got an answering machine which told me she had gone to Bali. I left the politest-sounding message I was capable of.
The Age reported the case of a young woman whose stepfather had sexually molested her for years, when she was between the ages of ten and sixteen. When this was discovered, she was made a ward of the state, and kept in Winlaton girls’ home for eighteen months. Much later he was charged, given a very light sentence, and released after serving only seven and a half months of it. Soon after his release the girl, now a young woman, was driving her car when she saw him on the road. She aimed the car at him and ran him down. He was quite seriously injured, and she was now up on a charge. She named herself in the press, and her photo was published on the front page. I read all this with hatred and rage, and with a sense of exhilaration at what she had done. Some acts of revenge are cleansing strokes. Fate offered his body to her and she seized the chance. Most of all I respected her bravery in having identified herself publicly.
One bitterly cold morning in June 1993 I rode my bike downtown and arrived with streaming eyes and nose, and fingers barely capable of holding a pen, for an eight-thirty appointment with Mr Donald E—, one of the Ormond council members who had been authorised to force the affair to a conclusion, in that they had negotiated financial settlements between the girls and the college, and between the college and Dr Shepherd.
‘Some council members,’ he told me, ‘have had a very emotional reaction to the thing, which has made them a bit of a menace. They thought we should have done much more to keep the Master there – that we should have fought the girls to the death. Some of these people wanted a full council inquiry – they really wanted to get amongst it.
‘To us, it was more important to get Ormond back on an even keel. The truth was at the bottom of a well. Though it stuck in everyone’s gizzard to settle the thing, we had to settle it. Because of the leaks we couldn’t conduct such sensitive negotiations with the knowledge of the full council. So a small group was voted in; and laboriously, in order to avoid an EO hearing, five of us negotiated a settlement.’
The terms of this settlement, he said, were confidential, and he would not give the details. Later, other inquiries I made suggested that money was paid to the girls, a substantial amount. Part of the settlement, too, was that the students were to take their records away.
‘There are four or five people who stayed in touch with Colin Shepherd,’ said the council member, ‘and encouraged him to believe that someone on a white horse was going to come along and save him. We’re not very popular. We’ve received letters from even the Archbishop of Canterbury protesting his innocence.’
I stared at him. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury?’
He grinned, and made an airy gesture with one hand. ‘Oh, that’s just an ambit claim.’ He got up and showed me an extract from a letter that had been lying on his desk: a sad, angry letter, awkwardly typed, its errors corrected in trembly biro. It contended that Colin Shepherd had been denied natural justice; that if the courts had cleared him he ought not to have lost his job.
‘People have been rounded up,’ Mr E— continued, ‘to write to us and say, “Hey – you’re murdering this fellow.” But there was nothing anyone could do. He was too badly winged.’
There was a brief silence in the sparsely furnished, glass-walled office. There might have been a sigh; but if there was, it probably came from me.
‘What behaviour,’ I said, ‘do you think is required of a Master?’
‘The Master has to be like Caesar’s wife.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Above reproach.’
It took me a moment to absorb the strange conjunction of such a feminine image with the word Master. So Caesar, in this analogy, must be the college, or its council.
‘Colin Shepherd’s main weakness as Master,’ Mr E— was saying, ‘was that he was too close to the troops. He wanted to pull on a football jumper and run around on the riverbank. Perhaps he’d spent too much time at Somers Camp.’
‘What is Somers Camp, exactly?’
He looked surprised. ‘It was originated by Lord Somers, the one-time Governor of Victoria, so that boys from privi
leged and under-privileged backgrounds could be together during the summer. And well-meaning adults joined in all the fun.
‘The Master’s got to manage the college. You need – though I don’t much like using the word – charisma. You give Ormond its tone. And you have to make sure it’s a happy place for people to work and study in. Since we advertised the position, we’ve had a hundred and ten letters from people wanting further particulars. We’ll probably get fifty more.’
‘I guess Colin Shepherd must be pretty crooked on you all,’ I said.
‘He doesn’t seem to be, actually. We wrote to him and thanked him for having been gentlemanly in his conduct throughout. We tried to help him with other jobs. When you think of all the wickedness in the world, what he’s alleged to have done doesn’t rank all that high. Nicky Stewart seemed to me a very sophisticated young lady. Why didn’t she just knee him in the balls?’
I came away from this interview, as I did from many with the men who run the college and exert power in the wider community, feeling obscurely unsettled. I had to acknowledge that I was putty in the hands of these old stagers, with their racy turns of phrase, their imagery drawn from sports and war, their confident bandying of biblical and Shakespearean references. On a day when you don’t feel personally at its mercy, the discourse of power is seductive. It is worldly. It enlists and flatters you. It can afford to relax and be genial, to charm and entertain and take risks and crack jokes. The clincher is its humour: Eros, ‘the spark that ignites and connects’, flashes into the room on the charge of laughter, disarms with a sudden vision of the absurdity of the whole ghastly mess, and leaves women looking grim and dull and wowserish and self-righteous, struggling against men in the name of boring old justice.
