The First Stone: 25th Anniversary Edition

The First Stone: 25th Anniversary Edition is a non-fiction book by award-winning Australian journalist and author, Helen Garner. It includes a foreword by Leigh Sales and an afterword by Garner’s biographer, Bernadette Brennan. It also reprints David Leser’s original 1995 Good Weekend interview with Helen Garner, and her own 1995 address ‘The Fate of The First Stone’. These extras are by nature quite analytical and quote the original work so there is some repetition.

Initially published well before the #metoo era, it was Garner’s reaction to a case of indecent assault that was brought in 1992 against the Master of Ormond College, a co-ed residential college, by two young women, and it sparked a raging debate about sexual harassment in Australia.

In her foreward, Leigh Sales related her own #metoo incident: “I made the split-second decision that even confident adult women make all the time in response to this never- ending bullshit: to smile and play along rather than make a fuss and be seen as priggish or rude.” This, and many other incidents related in the book will strike a chord with most women: we have all been subject to such things to a greater or lesser degree.

Garner’s initial reaction, like that of many of her colleagues of her own vintage was one of disbelief that it had gone to the police and “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.”

What follow, in the form of transcripts of court proceedings, interviews, a series of vignettes, portraits, and meditations, are Garner’s attempts to make sense of the whole affair, which she believes could have been maturely and quickly resolved but for certain confidentiality requirements.

Garner, despite numerous approaches, was never able to interview the women, and acknowledges it “leaves a ragged hole which I am unable to fill” but some of those she spoke to stated, with respect to the accused “The Master’s a victim, but a powerful victim” and “Oh, I don’t believe he deserved what’s happened to him. He may be “innocent”–but he’s paying for many, many other men who have not been caught. It’s the irony of things, that sometimes the innocent or nearly-innocent pay for what the guilty have done.”

Garner explores the grey areas: flirting, the power dynamic between men and women, degrees of assault and taking responsibility for one’s effect on the opposite sex, to name just a few of the many issues.

She freely acknowledges what might be her own bias: “I thought too that, at 50, 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.” Twenty-five years on, still a very powerful read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Pan Macmillan Australia.

5★
“. . . it’s not the kind of book that’s easy to review briskly. Because it’s a series of shifting speculations, with an open structure, it’s hard to pull out single quotes without distorting it. What the book invites from a reader is openness – an answering spark.”

Helen Garner said that in a lecture she gave after this book was published, 25 years ago. She stirred up enormous controversy in the community over her reportage (her word) about what was called the most important sexual harassment case since the 1950s.

I had heard the gossip and what people said she said, and there have been numerous articles sparked (“an answering spark”?) by her attempts at investigation. So I was glad to read the original book. Briefly (briskly?), two young women in their early twenties, law students at Melbourne University, went to the police claiming the head of Ormond College, their residential college, had indecently assaulted them at a party.

Garner is a letter writer. She is a habitual collector of clippings and items of interest and writes notes and letters the way we might send text messages today. Occasionally, she writes just to let off steam and files the letters away, unsent.

When she heard about this accusation, she fired off a letter to the man in question, apologising for the treatment he was getting. She felt that feminism, the cause so close to her heart, was changing, “the ideals of so many years distorted into this ghastly punitiveness”.

As she says later, “Feminism is meant to free us, not to take the joy out of everything.”

Her letter was before she knew she would get so caught up in the issue that she would write a book. Of course, her fellow feminists were outraged, saying she’d sided with the enemy, which was not her intent. The book is full of incidents and anecdotes and interviews and notes from those involved, those who knew them, families, onlookers, people at the party, psychologists, old friends of hers – everyone except the two women, who would never talk to her.

She just wanted the facts, but it became a he-said/she-said, oath vs oath situation, such that the judge could not find him guilty (and ordered the police to pay his costs), but the man resigned his job anyway.

Garner realises that “I was still skating along on ice that had frozen in the early seventies.” This is the woman who wrote Monkey Grip, based largely on her own free-wheeling, free-love youth living in share houses in Melbourne.

People flirted and slept around and changed partners. She was also sacked in 1972 from her teaching job for giving her Fitzroy High students explicit sex education because it was obvious they needed it.

It’s fascinating reading. I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw once where the doctor is saying to the patient “If you’d like to have a second opinion – I have a couple of other ideas what might be wrong with you.”

Garner is full of questions, as I have always been. Who can flirt and when? Who can make a physical advance and when? Where is the sliding scale between inappropriate behaviour and unwelcome touching and indecent assault and sexual assault? Here are some of her questions and thoughts.

“Again and again, in trying to understand the Ormond story, I came up against a disproportionate ferocity, a stubborn desire on the part of certain feminist ideologues to paint themselves and their sisters as outraged innocents. To them there is no light end of the spectrum. They use the word violence in places where to me it simply does not belong.”
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“‘I think it should be criminal for a man to sexually harass a woman,’ one young activist had said to me. ‘Women should have the right to bring the police in, right from the start. There should no longer be two branches of response to violence against women.’

There it was again, in three short sentences – the slide from harassment to violence. ‘What worries me,’ I said, ‘is that this rules out gradations of offence.’

‘There’s already a gradation,’ said the girl, looking me right in the eye, but with a smiling, courteous charm. ‘There’s indecent assault, and there’s sexual assault. That’s a gradation.’”
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“On 28 April 1993 the papers reported that a fourteen-year-old girl on her way to school had been raped in a public toilet by a man armed with a knife. This is the kind of news item that makes women call each other on the phone. I thought, contemplating it, that our helpless rage and grief at this eternally unpreventable violence against women and girls – our inability to protect our children from the sickness of the world – must get bottled up and then let loose on poor blunderers who get drunk at parties and make clumsy passes; who skate blithely into situations that they are too ignorant or preoccupied to recognise as minefields of gender politics. But the ability to discriminate must he maintained. Otherwise all we are doing is increasing the injustice of the world.”
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“The erotic will always dance between people who teach and learn, and our attempts to manage its shocking charge are often flat-footed, literal, destructive, rigid with fear and the need to control. For good or ill, Eros is always two steps ahead of us, exploding the constraints of dogma, turning back on us our carefully worked out positions and lines, showing us that the world is richer and scarier and more fluid and many-fold than we dare to think.”
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This edition includes a foreword from Leigh Sales (with her own #metoo moment), and more material at the end. The following is about this book by David Leser, as published in The Good Weekend, March 1995. Leser is the author of Women, Men, and the Whole Damn Thing: Feminism, Misogyny, and Where We Go From Here (2019).

“And to Garner, assuming for the argument that the allegations were true, a nerdish pass by a slightly inebriated man at a party is a long way from an act of violence, or even sexual harassment. It might be clumsy, inappropriate, befuddled or even lecherous behaviour, but to call in the police, take the matter to court, ruin a man’s career and his family life, is nothing short of overkill. And where, in this seeming thirst for retribution, she argues, is a concession to the complex, often shilly-shallying nature of male-female relationships: to just plain old heterosexual miscommunication?”

There is also a lengthy section at the end which is an excerpt from A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work by Bernadette Brennan (2017), about this book.

You can see why this has stirred up controversy for the last 25 years and why it will probably continue to divide people. She covers everything I can think of, even why women can be so surprisingly passive – including herself, which she finds hard to explain! – and they don’t slap the perpetrator’s face.

“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’.”

If you need a book to spur conversation, this is it. I very much enjoyed the additional material as well. Thanks to NetGalley and PanMacmillan for the preview copy.