The Best Australian Essays 2017

by Anna Goldsworthy

  Helen Garner’s Savage Self-Scrutiny

  James Wood

  In the early 1960s, when the Australian writer Helen Garner was a student at the University of Melbourne, she had a brief relationship with a twenty-four-year-old man who was her tutor. With characteristic briskness, she tells us that she learned two things from him: ‘Firstly, to start an essay without bullshit preamble, and secondly, that betrayal is part of life.’ She continues, ‘I value it as part of my store of experience – part of what I am and how I have learnt to understand the world.’ A writing lesson and a life lesson: Garner’s work as a journalist and a novelist constantly insists on the connection between writing about life and comprehending it; to try to do both responsibly and honestly – without bullshit preamble, or, for that matter, bullshit amble – is what it means to be alive.

  ‘Honesty’ is a word that, when thrown at journalism, unhelpfully describes both a baseline and a vaguer horizon, a legal minimum and an ethical summum. Too often, we precisely monitor the former and profligately praise the latter. In Helen Garner’s case, we should give due thanks for the former and precisely praise the latter. As a writer of nonfiction, Garner is scrupulous, painstaking and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life’s secular apocalypses – ‘a small grim figure with a notebook and a cold,’ as she memorably describes herself. She has written with lucid anger about murder cases, about incidents of sexual harassment, about the experience of caring for a friend dying of cancer.

  But Garner is, above all, a savage self-scrutineer: her honesty has less to do with what she sees in the world than with what she refuses to turn away from in herself. In The Spare Room (2008), her exacting autobiographical novel about looking after that dying friend, she describes not only the expected indignities of caring for a patient – the soaked bedsheets, the broken nights – but her own impatience, her own rage: ‘I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.’

  There seems to be almost no episode from her own life that she has not analysed. It is characteristic that her reference to her affair with her tutor appears in The First Stone (1995), her account of a 1991 sexual harassment case, in which two female students at the University of Melbourne accused the master of one of the university colleges of making inappropriate advances: that book is both a report and a deep self-reckoning. Garner’s readers are familiar with Mrs Dunkley, her fifth-grade teacher; the failure of Garner’s three marriages; her two abortions; her dismissal from a teaching job at a Melbourne school (for daring to talk to her thirteen-year-old pupils about sex); her struggles with depression; her feelings about turning fifty; and the complex stitch of fury and liberation at being, now, in her seventies.

  Her book Everywhere I Look (Text Publishing), selects essays and shorter journalistic pieces from the past fifteen years. The no-bullshit-preamble rule is sparklingly employed. ‘At the turn of the millennium I reached the end of my masochism, and came home from Sydney with my tail between my legs. Single again.’ So begins a gentle reflection on learning, once more, how to live alone. ‘My First Baby’ opens thus:

  This isn’t really a story. I’m just telling you what happened one summer when I was young. It was 1961, my first year away from home. I lived at Melbourne University, in a women’s college on a beautiful elm-lined boulevard. I was free and happy. Everyone was clever and so was I.

  There are tender, funny sketches of literary friends (the novelists Elizabeth Jolley and Tim Winton), portraits of her grandchildren, reminiscences of childhood, and, as ever in her work, lovely, loitering descriptions of Melbourne, the city she knows best.

  Garner is a natural storyteller: her unillusioned eye makes her clarity compulsive. In one of the longer pieces in this book, ‘Dreams of Her Real Self’, she recalls her late mother and illuminates with relentless candour her mother’s shadowy presence. Her father, she tells us, is easy to write about; he was vivid, domineering, scornful, and babyishly quick to anger. One of Garner’s husbands, having been subjected to a paternal inquisition, described him as a ‘peasant’. He was ‘an endurance test that united his children in opposition to him’. But she finds it difficult to write about her mother, in part because her father ‘blocked my view of her’, and in part, we learn, because she was willing to be blocked.

  So Garner’s reminiscence breaks into short, discontinuous sections, as she appraises, from different angles, the unassertive enigma that was her mother. She did not easily show affection, she was patient, timid, unconfident, law-abiding – and, probably, Garner decides, ‘she was afraid of me’.

  She did not sense the right moment to speak. She did not know how to gain and hold attention. When she told a story, she felt a need to establish enormous quantities of irrelevant background information. She took so long to get to the point that her listeners would tune out and start talking about something else. Family shorthand for this, behind her back, was ‘and then I breathed’.

  What gives the memoir its power, as so often in Garner’s writing, is that she is unsparing, in equal measure, of her subject and of herself, and that she so relishes complicated feelings. She chastises herself for not being more responsive while her mother was alive; posthumous connection is, after all, too easy. She longs for her to return, but has difficulty regarding the woman’s life with anything but horror. She was about twelve, she recalls, when she realised that her mother’s existence was divided into compartments:

  None of them was any longer than the number of hours between one meal and the next. She was on a short leash. I don’t recall thinking that this would be my fate, or resolving to avoid it. All I remember is the picture of her life, and the speechless desolation that filled me.

  In some ways, it is a familiar portrait: an educated and liberated intellectual, the beneficiary of higher education and modern feminism, measures, with gratitude and shame, the distance between her mother’s opportunities and her own. But it is made singular by Garner’s almost reckless honesty, and brought alive by her mortal details: ‘She used to wear hats that pained me. Shy little round beige felt hats with narrow brims. Perhaps one was green. And she stood with her feet close together, in sensible shoes.’

  ‘Dreams of Her Real Self’ is ultimately an essay about gender and class, categories that have absorbed Garner for much of her work – precisely, it would seem, because gender and class are not categories so much as structures of feeling, variously argued over, enjoyed, endured and escaped. Her first book, Monkey Grip (1977), is an intelligent, tautly written novel that chronicles some of Garner’s own experiences from the 1970s, in particular her life in what she has called ‘the big hippie households’ of that era, ‘when group dynamics were shaky and we were always having to split and start anew’.

  But she established her reputation as a nonfiction writer, and established the characteristic Garner tone, with The First Stone. A twenty-one-year-old law student, whom Garner renames Elizabeth Rosen, levelled charges of sexual assault against the middle-aged master – ‘Dr Colin Shepherd’, in Garner’s telling – of Ormond College, the largest and most prestigious residential college of the University of Melbourne. She alleged that during a private, late-night talk in his office Dr Shepherd told her he fantasised about her, and that he put his hand on her breasts. Rosen and another student testified that, later in the evening, at a college dance, Dr Shepherd groped them while dancing with them. Shepherd forcefully denied all the allegations. He was convicted of a single charge of sexual assault, which was overturned on appeal; he resigned anyway, in May 1993.

  Garner first read about the case one morning in August 1992, in the Melbourne Age. Her early reactions were instinctive. She was puzzled by the young women’s recourse to the law. Why didn’t the students just sort it out locally, immediately, or get their mothers, or friends, to mediate? Garner’s own friends, she tells us, ‘feminists pushing fifty’, were in agreement. Seasoned victims of such
fumbled advances (or of far worse), they didn’t doubt the veracity of the allegations, but ‘if every bastard who’s ever laid a hand on us were dragged into court, the judicial system of the state would be clogged for years’. Garner wrote to Dr Shepherd, sympathising with his treatment at the hands of ‘this ghastly punitiveness’.

  The First Stone is subtitled Some Questions about Sex and Power, and, in ways both conscious and unconscious, it obsessively pursues the questions raised by Garner’s reflexive response to the case. She defends that initial reaction, but spends the entire book worrying away at it. The First Stone attacks and retreats like a baited animal. Garner persists in faulting the students for not acting pragmatically; these were not ‘earth-shattering’ offences, so why not deal with them swiftly, then and there? A repeated line of attack is that the students and their defenders use the word ‘violence’ where, she believes, ‘it simply does not belong’. To insist on abuses of institutional power, Garner suggests, nullifies the fact that all relationships contain asymmetries of power, and that there are ‘gradations of offence’. And power is always complex. She seems irritated by Rosen’s testimony that Dr Shepherd’s advances left her feeling ‘humiliated and powerless to control what was happening to her’. Why so powerless? When Dr Shepherd got down on his knees and grasped Rosen’s hand, as she alleged, ‘which of them does the word humiliated apply to, here?’

  But at other moments, in retreat, she worries that she herself has changed. An ageing but committed feminist, a child of the 1960s and ’70s, she’s perturbed that she finds it so easy to side with the man and so hard to sympathise with the women. Perhaps she’s punishing the students ‘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.’ She enriches this rhetorical back-and-forth in other ways. She tells us about her short affair with her tutor, and about an incident in the early 1980s when a masseur, in the middle of a private session, bent down and kissed her on the mouth. Looking back, Garner is clearly astounded that she said nothing to the man. Above all, she was merely embarrassed. And, when the massage was over, she said goodbye, went to the reception desk – ‘and I paid’.

  She usefully explains that Ormond College was for decades a bulwark of male institutional power: women, admitted only in 1973, were not always made to feel welcome. She conducts revealing interviews with some of Ormond’s most entitled male graduates, who talk casually about their bad behaviour – food fights, public drunkenness, running around naked. After a particularly squalid battle in the dining hall, the master upbraided the young diners with these telling words: ‘The Hall’s been raped – you promised me this wouldn’t happen.’ Garner lets that verb hang, or hang itself.

  The First Stone quickly became controversial enough that the author felt compelled to write a formal reply to her critics. The two victims refused to speak to her, a decision hardened by the revelation of Garner’s letter to Shepherd. It is a refusal that Garner returns to with mounting frustration; her book takes on a curiously blocked, repetitive, almost victimised quality, as if she were herself responding to a violation. She attacks modern feminism (‘priggish, disingenuous, unforgiving’) as if it had put her on trial. Which, in a sense, it had: the victims’ allies and defenders soon made up their minds. Garner was on the wrong side; it was understood that she was writing ‘the pro-Shepherd version’. Some feminists boycotted the book when it came out. University professors reportedly told their constituencies to avoid it.

  The First Stone is, certainly, a very parental book: a woman old enough to be the mother of the two students looks on bemusedly, with the advantages of experience and hardened wisdom, and finds herself disappointed that the youngsters just aren’t a bit tougher. And, even as she writes about the complexities and hidden potencies of gender, Garner comes to the scene – again, like a certain kind of parent – with rather stubborn ideas about male and female roles. She upbraids the victims for avoiding conciliation, a ‘feminine – almost a motherly – way of settling a dispute’, and instead accuses them of charging past conciliation into ‘the traditional masculine style of problem-solving: call in the cops … hire a cowboy to slug it out for you in the main street at noon, with all the citizenry watching.’ Of course, the gun smoke of essentialism reactivates the very warfare that Garner seeks to heal. When she rhetorically asks that question about who is truly humiliated, the man on his knees in supplication or the woman somewhat distressed in the chair, couldn’t the reply be – both?

  Yet, more than twenty years after its publication, The First Stone also seems a brilliantly prescient book – in its complexity, in the tense torque of its self-argument, and in its very vulnerability and stunned intolerance. Feminism had indeed changed between the 1970s and the 1990s, and Garner’s narrative registers, with often uncomfortable honesty, a generational shift. Sexual harassment was coming to be seen as, invariably, a matter of institutional power. There was no narrative space left for Garner’s blithe admission of her youthful affair with an older tutor, and certainly not for her appreciation of its educative richness.

  In similar ways, Garner’s most recent full-length work of non-fiction, This House of Grief (2014), makes its complexity out of an honest vulnerability. It recounts the two murder trials of Robert Farquharson, who was charged with murdering his three small children in 2005. On the way to return the kids to his ex-wife after a Father’s Day visit, he swerved off the road into a deep pond. The children drowned but Farquharson escaped, abandoning the car in the icy water and hitching a ride to his ex-wife’s house. Farquharson was convicted of murder in 2007, won a retrial in 2009, and was convicted again in 2010. He was given a life sentence.

  Garner’s book is superbly alive to the narrative dynamics of the case; she tells a grim story of unhappy marriage, limited social opportunity, bitter divorce and spousal grievance. Again, as in The First Stone, what consumes her are the difficult questions that seem to lie beyond the reach of formal narration: the deepest assumptions of class and gender and power; the problem of how well we ever understand someone else’s motives. In her reply to the critics of The First Stone, she describes ‘eros’ as ‘the quick spirit that moves between people – quick as in the distinction between “the quick and the dead”. It’s the moving force that won’t be subdued by habit or law.’

  That quick spirit is the free devil, the human surplus that she tries to capture in all her best work. The law’s fine calibrations are coarsely related to this kind of narrative work: the evidence that helps us make sense of a catastrophic or a complicated incident is often not the same evidence that helps the law make its sense. Paradoxically, the legal process tempts writers (notably Janet Malcolm, Garner’s admired model) because trial machinery appears to operate like the machinery of narrative, pumping out its near-simulacra for the benefit of reporters, TV journalists, voyeurs and jurors. Garner quotes Malcolm: ‘Jurors sit there presumably weighing evidence but in actuality they are studying character.’

  At the heart of the Robert Farquharson case is a large narrative question that frequently abuts but finally diverges from the smaller legal question before the jury: Why? Attracted and repelled, Garner circles around the unspeakable, abysmal horror. Can any story ‘explain’ why a man might murder his children? She doesn’t pretend to possess the explosive answer, and frequently confesses appalled stupefaction, but her book walks us along an engrossing and plausible narrative fuse. Robert Farquharson emerges from Garner’s account as limited in intelligence, expression and will. He lived in the modest town of Winchelsea (not far from Geelong, where Garner was born). He worked as a window cleaner, and had three children with the much more forceful Cindy Gambino, who told the court that Farquharson was ‘pretty much a softie. He always gave in to what I wanted.’ Though he was a ‘good provider’, she found it hard to stay in love with her husband. Cindy eventually left him, and soon began a new relationship with a con
tractor, Stephen Moules, a man more vigorous and successful than Farquharson. She kept the children, and Farquharson had to move out. He was jealous of Moules’s access to the children, fearful of being displaced, and angry that the new lover got the better of the Farquharsons’ two cars. An old friend testified that he threatened to kill his children and rob Cindy of her dearest gifts; Garner wonders if Farquharson was really trying to commit suicide.

  Her narrative is lit by lightning. Hideous, jagged details leap out at us: the old, child-filled car swerving off the road and plunging into dark water; the trapped children (the youngest was strapped into a car seat); Farquharson’s casual – or shocked – impotence at the crime scene (his first words to Moules, when he arrived, were ‘Where’s your smokes?’); the slack, defeated, anguished defendant, weeping throughout the trial; the wedding video of the happy couple, Gambino gliding ‘like a princess in full fig, head high’, and Farquharson, mullet-haired, ‘round-shouldered, unsmiling, a little tame bear’; the first guilty verdict, Farquharson’s vanquished defence lawyer standing ‘like a beaten warrior … hands clasped in front of his genitals’.

  Garner is a powerful and vivid presence in her nonfiction narratives: she intervenes; she weeps and laughs with the evidence; she is scornful, funny, impassioned, and gives honest expression to biases and prejudices. (She also avails herself of the full, meaty buffet of Anglo-Australian demotic: ‘bloke’, ‘sook’, ‘sent to Coventry’, ‘dobbing in’, ‘spat the dummy’, ‘bolshie’.) She powerfully sympathises with Farquharson’s thwarted opportunities and flattened will, but she cannot hide her distaste for his weakness, which she expresses in tellingly gendered jabs. In court, she compares Stephen Moules physically with Farquharson (‘I was not the only woman’ to do so), and admits that Moules ‘gave off that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie’. She wonders if there was something in Farquharson, by contrast, that brought out ‘the maternal in women, our tendency to cosset, to infantilise’. In a striking image near the end of the book, she sees the accused as a big baby, ‘with his low brow and puffy eyes, his slumped spine and man-boobs, his silent-movie grimaces and spasms of tears, his big clean ironed handkerchief’. It is hard to resist the conclusion that Garner, in full maternal mode, is arraigning him for not being more of a man. Is it unfair to wonder if this tough-minded writer was not also unconsciously demanding of the two University of Melbourne women that they, too, act more like men?