The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power

by Helen Garner

In the autumn of 1992, two young women students at Melbourne University went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college.

The controversial book that Helen Garner wrote about the resulting Ormond College sexual harassment case caused a social media storm. Prominent feminists were outraged at Garner's perceived support for the man involved, but many saw her approach a necessary and much welcome nuance towards the power dynamic between men and women. Either way, The First Stone sparked a raging debate about sexual harassment in Australia, making it easy to see why even now, twenty-five years on, the book is no less sharp. no less relevant, and no less divisive.

This new edition coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of release, contains 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'.

'This was never going to be an easy book to write, its pages are bathed in anguish and self-doubt, but suffused also with a white-hot anger.' Good Weekend

'Garner has ensured one thing: the debate about sexual harassment . . . will now have a very public airing. And it will have it in the language of experience to which all women and men have access.' The Age

'This is writing of great boldness. . . an intense, eloquent and enthralling work.' The Australian

'Travelling with Garner along the complex paths of this sad story is, strangely enough, enjoyable. The First Stone [is] a book worth reading for its writing...' Sydney Morning Herald

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Australia, True Crime, Memoir, Politics, Crime

267 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 1995

About the author

Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She has published many works of fiction including Monkey Grip, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Children's Bach. Her fiction has won numerous awards. She is also one of Australia's most respected non-fiction writers, and received a Walkley Award for journalism in 1993.

Her most recent books are The First Stone, True Stories, My Hard Heart, The Feel of Stone and Joe Cinque's Consolation. In 2006 she won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. She lives in Melbourne.

Praise for Helen Garner's work

'Helen Garner is an extraordinarily good writer. There is not a paragraph, let alone a page, where she does not compel your attention.'
Bulletin

'She is outstanding in the accuracy of her observations, the intensity of passion...her radar-sure humour.'
Washington Post

'Garner has always had a mimic's ear for dialogue and an eye for unconscious symbolism, the clothes and gestures with which we give ourselves away.'
Peter Craven, Australian

'Helen Garner writes the best sentences in Australia.'
Ed Campion, Bulletin

Reviews

[Suz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before now, I had not considered myself particularly feminist. This book and this author have now piqued my interest. I picked this book up at the academic library at which I work. The unit of study of which it is included is entitled From Vindication to Liberation: A Comparative History of Feminism. I want this review to be taken for exactly what it is, my thoughts on a book I read, and enjoyed; and the thoughts provoked. It is not a statement on the topic of feminism in Australia. I like the book, I like the author and I would like to write about my reading experience.

I am quite taken by Helen Garner, having come across her many times at work in the library, and in fact, referred a grateful student to This house of grief to assist with her essay relating to the dreadful topic of Filicide. She gained a distinction for the essay, and I received a lovely card and gift. This is why I love my job; not for the gift, but for the reward of helping others! Helen also contributes to The Conversation http://theconversation.com/a-new-lite....

This author is sharp in everything I have seen, her note taking and journalistic prowess and her ability to ask tough questions make her a literary force to be reckoned with. I came across this summation of Helen in an article, penned by Gay Alcorn, of The Guardian (Australia): “But we also need our Garners, our worriers, unafraid to be accused of treachery to the cause.”

I also have booked tickets to an event coming up soon where she will be discussing her unpublished diaries. This will be amazing I am sure. https://www.cityrecitalhall.com/whats...

An event transpiring over two decades ago piqued the author’s interest, a college master at a tertiary institution steeped in male leadership and ‘old boy’ school style was accused by two young women students of inappropriateness after the consumption of alcohol. The incident involved a relatively minor incident of groping.

Helen at the time was 50 and had daughters around the same age of as the accusers. The crux of the matter was why did these young women choose to go to the police? It appears internally within the university it was quite a debacle. Conciliation did not go ahead and going to the Police was the path chosen to take. The university handled the situation badly and ‘the old boys’ were running their own show.

The two women did not agree to talk to the author. From what I could gather the attempts by the author were done in the appropriate manner, Helen is a fabulous writer and we see a glimpse of her journalistic skill in the way in which she approached the women. She tried hard to provide a balanced approach, but in the end was only able to talk to legal representatives of the women and other students, and of course the college master and many employees and ‘old boy’ type figures of the university. This makes sense, the women weren’t obliged in any way to speak to an author, even though Helen writes many times how desirous she is to write a “balanced account.”

This controversial book may very well be considered as an outdated view on the topic of feminism. Helen is a lifelong feminist but her question really was why did the women resort to “ghastly” punitive means. Why did they go to the Police? The author even penned a quick response letter to the defendant. The author was not inclined to agree with the rage and fear of the women, she was hated for this by their supporters and probably still is today. Lots of women didn’t agree with the author but the questions raised, and the book’s subtitle “some questions about sex and power” are obviously good questions then, and now. Helen received a letter back from one of the women’s supporters after her request to discuss the events of the night in question. She was unsuccessful. “Once again I felt the roll of frustrated ego – but oh, how pathetic her refusals seemed, with their tight tone, their scurrying to law.”

The defendant was pushed out of his job in a seemingly out of proportion action toward the crime considering he was cleared, eventually, by the court. Helen was incensed by this. Also very noteworthy is the age old assumption that a woman’s appearance was worth mentioning in court, as if the strapless and “otherwise no covering” attire attributed to the happenings.

In explaining the disproportionate nature of things, “Unjust does not apply to a clumsy pass at a party by a man who’s had too much to drink.. But my young activist would not agree. She had a grid labelled criminal... Craziest of all, by criminalising hapless social blunders she actually believed she was ‘empowering’ women."

In a more general vein, the author writes of middle aged women’s (her, and I, actually) fear of their daughters. “They have stolen from us the crude nerve of youth, and in their unmodulated vision of the human things whose subtleties we have learnt to respect, they charge past us and rush out to fight, calling it politics. This is natural and right. But it is painful; and in the face of their scornful energy we become timid.”

Helen speaks of an awful experience when she was younger. A drunk man approached, chatted and asked for a kiss. It didn’t end well. This is what she had to say about women of the generation prior to mine. That of her generation, and my mother’s. “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 ambiguity.” This is interesting. I can see myself being wishy washy, bringing ambiguity and a lack of assuredness; then I can see my girls – a complete knowing of what is going on, what they want and what they will accept.

One of the author’s friends remarked to her: “Women are all harassed. It goes without saying, like being irritable or tired. The thing is that men trivialise sexual harassment and women inflate it. Men make light of it and women make it heavy.” These are some very interesting points I would not have pondered before reading this book. I like being challenged, and I am happy when I pick up new ideas.

I liked this book. It made me ponder all nature of things. It made me think on all issues related to gender, age, sex and power. I wonder what I would have done in my early twenties and what I would do now, as a mother in her forties. I also have to consider my position that my daughters hold. One is of drinking age, both are attractive and strongly opinionated. Do they have street smarts, though? Not quite yet. I have a lot to teach them, yet.

A ponderous quote in summation, which is very apt, “Feminism is meant to free us, not to take the joy out of everything.”

[PattyMacDotComma · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.”
==========

“‘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.’”
==========

“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.”
==========

“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.”
==========

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.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first reaction to this book was one of disgust. That was in 1995, but I picked it up again recently and decided to give the book another chance. I read the title, the epigraphs, the first chapter. I was still disgusted. I’ve now finished the book, and the disgust stays with me still.

As a work of feminism, this could have been spun from the ‘naive’ questions of the FAQ on Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog.

As a work of journalism, this is a legal and ethical disaster, an example of what not to do on almost every level.

As a work of non-fiction, this is replete with non-facts.

As a work of anti-intellectualism, anti-imagination, and anti-empathy, as a work that is ‘appallingly destructive, priggish, and pitiless’, this is a success.

Yet as I read, I became enamoured with Helen Garner’s writing. She can write. But what is it that she has written?

In her keynote speech to the inaugural Stella Prize, Garner talked about how she ‘can't stand the taxonomical thundering about whether one has the right to call one’s book a novel’. It seems to me that her critics and supporters (and the 1995 Miles Franklin judges) got the wrong end of the stick. This is assuredly a novel.

Yes, read for its ‘archetypal features’ and melodrama, this is a novel. Read for its textual games with names and documents, this is a novel. Read for its femme fatales and estranged society, this is a novel. Read through the lens of forty years of writing about unreliable narrators, this is most certainly a novel.

Like much good noir, we have a detective with a very limited literary character but a very great subjectivity to impose on events, and a sense of a calling to do so, no matter the cost to their material situation. She’s the one asking the questions here, and don’t you forget it and try to ask the same questions of her! She writes: ‘Later in March, someone sent the Truth cutting to Colin Shepherd in the mail, anonymously.’ I thought: gotcha. No doubt she would demur, but her story changes — skids, as ‘Helen’ would say — as it progresses, to suit her purpose.

With what sophistication should we treat this narrative? It is written four hundred years after Shakespeare, but only a few years before ‘farfetched’ Welcome to Country ceremonies became common. A time when the ‘heavy metal’ heard was probably Nirvana.

Perhaps you are not even prepared to argue that this might be fiction. I can understand that, unlike Garner’s narrator (or is it Garner herself?). In that case, it would be irresponsible of me not to mention the two books written in direct response to this one, Generation F by Virginia Trioli and Bodyjamming edited by Jenna Mead. Irresponsible of me not to condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the idea that women have an essential power to attract sexual ‘attention’ or repel sexual ‘harassment’, the idea that it is natural for men to gaze at women, the idea that the hurt and lack of empathy must continue forever.

[Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have talked at lengths with pretty much everyone I have seen over the past few days about how frustrating this book is. Garner's response to modern feminism seems to me to be paradoxical; she bemoans the complainants for not being assertive enough when they are groped by the master of their college, but she's also critical of when they do take action that they are too angry and radical. And there's a lot of 'why were you wearing that if you didn't want men to grope you?' and invocations of Eros, as a knowledge of Greek gods is the most typical cultural capital of the white upper middle class scholar.

I also found it pretty distressing how she's so doggedly going after the young women. She tells them she wants to write a piece from all angles, which in the end, she doesn't, and the women have a very good reason for not believing. And while she portrays it as a middle-aged woman trying to be bullied into silence by an absence of information, it's not not really true, as she does talk to a few people connected to the victims. But also, she just keeps on trying to make contact with the victims when they have made clear about a billion times that they just don't want to. To paraphrase a sticker from the book, what part of No don't you understand, Garner?

And yet, I really fucking love the style of her writing. Which surprised me because I found Monkey Grip to be so blah, and this work of journalism to be so unobjective, judgy, gossipy, and in some cases just weirdly hyperbolic in this nonsensically bigoted sort of way. But there are some small anecdotes that are really beautifully written and emotionally provocative. It's why I give this book the extra star, even though, by Zeus*, it's just awful. Seriously don't read it unless you like to get mad at things, or you wish to reminisce about the days when you could bone your students, or get away with sticking your hand on a girl's breast simply because she has visible cleavage.

/rant

*an: see what I did there?

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1992, two female students at Ormond College, a residential college at the University of Melbourne, made complaints of sexual harassment against the college Master, Dr Colin Shepherd. One woman claimed that Shepherd had groped her breasts during a dance at a student party; the other that he had made unwelcome sexual comments to her during a conversation in a private room after he had locked the door. After the university’s internal disciplinary board sided with Shepherd, the women hired a barrister and brought criminal charges of indecent assault against him. The first magistrate’s trial found him guilty, but the verdict was reversed on appeal due to insufficient evidence. Shepherd later resigned from the college, his reputation in tatters. The complainants reached an out-of-court financial settlement with the university, the details of which were confidential.

Australian journalist and writer Helen Garner followed the story from its beginnings, attending the indecent assault hearing and interviewing Shepherd and some of the lead players. The experience shocked her. “I was finding out things that would cause an upheaval in my whole belief-structure, particularly where men and women were concerned”, she wrote. Her resulting non-fiction study, The First Stone, is her attempt to track and understand the complicated ethical questions the Shepherd case raised about sexuality, power and the nature of retribution and punishment.

The First Stone is a strange shaggy beast, inflammatory and contradictory. On one hand, it’s a rigorously reported account of the case, in which Garner interviews Shepherd, the complainant’s solicitor (though not the complainants themselves – more on that later), and dozens of interested onlookers. It’s also an unashamedly partisan piece in which Garner sides with Shepherd and condemns the “puritan feminists” at the university who she accuses of leading a Crucible-style war of attrition against the male powers that be.

Unsurprisingly, the book created a huge furore when it was published in 1995, at least as big as the case itself. Supporters praised Garner for not taking the obvious line of supporting the women without question. Critics condemned the book for its apparent lack of objectivity and accused Garner of being an apologist for the culture of sexual harassment. Garner acknowledged the controversy, but was still adamant about the importance of writing the book: "These are the stories that need to be told," she argued, "not swept away like so much debris, or hidden from sight".

The most fascinating aspect of The First Stone lies in Garner’s early participation on the case, which she freely admits compromised her later attempts to cover the story objectivity. Garner first read about Shepherd's trial in a newspaper. Thinking "Has the world come to this?", she immediately wrote a letter to Shepherd - a man she had never met - expressing her sympathy for his troubles and saying that the case should never have been handled in the criminal justice system. It was a move that proved divisive when she came to research the book later. Shepherd, assuming that Garner was his supporter, circulated the letter, which created an impassable barrier between her and “the other side”. Much of the book describes Garner’s unsuccessful attempts to interview the complainants, and being repeatedly being given the cold shoulder by “angry feminists” who had read the letter and viewed her as a traitor to the cause.

Undaunted, Garner struggled on, interviewing Shepherd, staff at the university, fellow students of Ormond and anyone else who would talk to her. The First Stone partially succeeds where it ought to fail, due to the intelligence and insight of Garner’s analysis, and the rigour with which she hones in on the difficult issues that the case raises. Her narrative, a mixture of journalistic reportage, anecdote and memoir, widens its scope from the case to become a commentary on the confused state of contemporary sexual mores.

Throughout the book, she struggles and largely fails to understand the point of view of the complainants, who retreat into silence and refuse to be interviewed. “What sort of feminists are these, what sort of intellectuals, who expected automatic allegiance from women to a cause they were not prepared even to argue?” she writes.

I found Garner’s rage towards these young feminists puzzling at first – if only because the world of Osmond College seemed so familiar to me. I was at university in the early 1990s, where sexual harassment was a hot topic in university culture. As a student representative, I fielded complaints from undergraduates about the unwanted attention of male lecturers. Rumours spread about Professor A- who now wasn’t allowed to close his office door if he was alone with a female student. Across campus, counsellors and women’s reps chanted the mantra that sexual harassment was an abuse of power, which seemed right and proper. Old white heterosexual men had ruled the world for too long, we agreed - it was time for the patriarchy to be toppled.

Garner’s initial take on this culture was one of disbelief and contempt – a response that she freely admits is coloured by her strongly held beliefs about feminism that hail from an earlier and more idealistic time. Like Germaine Greer before her, Garner exemplifies the 1970s feminist: articulate, argumentative, unconcerned with causing a ruckus and able to defend herself in the face of stiff criticism. She seems constitutionally unable to understand younger generations of feminists, who she criticises for thinking of themselves as passive victims, “dragging themselves on bleeding stumps to the high moral ground of survival”, and wielding the law and other blunt instruments in their defence. “Why didn’t you slap ‘im?” Shepherd’s barrister asks one of the complainants in the indecent assault hearing. It’s a line Garner repeats several times, and appears to agree with, maintaining that both incidents could and should have been dealt with by the women themselves with a quiet word in Shepherd's ear.

Fearing that she might be too out of touch with the younger generation, Garner tries a different tack, and attempts to reconstruct the case from the complainants' point of view. Using interviews from fellow students, she draws a precise, pitiless picture of the boorish and chauvinist culture of Ormond College: a place of petty hierarchies and kowtowing to authority, in which the casual sexualisation of women is normalised and excused. Her insights prompt "sharp flashes of empathy" with the complainants, but it's never enough: “something in me, every time, slams on the breaks to prevent the final, unbearable smash” of identification with their cause. The First Stone stands as a striking and rather sad account of the failure of different generations of feminists to understand each other’s politics.

There’s a lot of anger in The First Stone: mostly Garner’s, but from others too. Garner is fantastic at writing about anger. Like Greer and Susan Faludi, she has an uncanny ability to keep jabbing away persistently at white-hot sore spots until she reveals the discomfort and rage churning around inside. That’s not to say she’s always accurate: some of her contempt gets flung about rather unfairly at first in the direction of “radical feminists”, who she blames for imposing a punitive and anti-sex world order. As she digs deeper, though, she makes a more nuanced case. One of her most compelling propositions is that Shepherd’s hounding was a misguided form of retribution caused by women’s “referred anger” and guilt about their own “passivity under pressure” in old cases of sexist abuse. She describes with horror the modern conflation of sexual harassment with violence, and argues persuasively for distinguishing between levels of severity of sexist behaviours. Shepherd was, she concludes, at worse a “helpless blunderer”, whose punishment was disproportionately severe given the nature of his reputed offences.

Garner’s conclusion is to plead for mercy and understanding, in recognition of the fact that no one is exempt from questions of sex, power and abuse. Tellingly, her title is drawn from Jesus’ words in the Gospel of St John: “Let the one among you who has done no wrong cast the first stone.” As an unabashed libertarian she argues strongly for women taking responsibility for their own sexuality, and cautions against the stifling of the erotic in academic life, which “will always dance between people who teach and learn”. (In an eleventh-hour curve ball, she drops a casual reference to her affair with a university tutor when she was a student, an encounter she describes as painful but never harassment or an abuse of power).

The First Stone is both a brave and a foolhardy enterprise. Garner is never less than intelligent and inquisitive, and her prose is lucid and emotionally taut. The honesty with which she identifies her own opinions makes it an engrossing read, even while the exposure of her prejudices threaten to compromise the authority of her argument.

Yet this perhaps is no bad thing. In Garner’s view, there are no absolutes about sex and power - only shades of grey and an appreciation of context. Eros is “for good or ill”, she says, “always two steps ahead of us, exploding the constraints of dogma, turning back on us our carefully worked out positions and lines”. With that in mind, it seems appropriate that she declares her beliefs and prejudices, and encourages others to do the same. In an afterword, Garner writes that the book "declines - or is unable - to present itself as one big clonking armour-clad monolithic certainty". We’re left with an intelligent middle-aged woman’s perceptive account of a very sad and difficult case, which is perhaps as much as any of us can hope for. The greatest achievement of this sad, funny and compelling book is to reiterate Wilde’s maxim: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

[Sam · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book made me hate Helen Garner. Written about a terrible act of abuse by a man of power, this book is written by someone who claims to be an old school feminist, but she takes the exact opposite position, instead siding with the abuser and constantly berating the female victims who chose to complain to police about sexual harassment rather than keep quite about it 'like she had to do back in her day'
Pathetic, should never have been published, do not read it. This is the first book I have ever thrown across a room in disgust.

[Luke McCarthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Confounding, messy text. Equal parts bold, infuriating and insightful. Garner is such a clear-minded, transparent thinker that a part of the pleasure of this book is in seeing the moral and ethical questions pondered here be turned about, sorted through and challenged by her intellect. I find myself agreeing with Garner about one thing: we cannot have an adequate language of consent until we develop an adequate language of eros. The legalistic, predator/victim framework of sexual harassment does not and cannot account for the nuances of want, desire and power that are woven into each and every charged interaction one finds themselves in throughout their life. But then one has to wonder, does that always matter? What is more important in life: preserving eros or protecting women? Is it possible to do both? If not, then how do we proceed?

The major flaw of this book, which Garner readily admits, is her inability to talk to the accusers. Though she poses this as a kind of dangling thread – will she finally be able to interact with them? hear their side of the story? – I think she is smart enough to know how the narrative arc she’s created positions them. For all intents and purposes, the victims of the sexual harassment in question are the antagonists of this book. They are the enemies of Garner and her inquiring mind. I find this to be insulting at best, plainly unethical at worst. We are treated to scenes of the sobbing, kind-hearted wife of the man accused, and vitriolic diatribes against the ‘priggish’ feminists who accused him. As much as I do think Garner genuinely wanted to write a more holistic account of this event, the fact that she could not (given her access to all parties) should have given her pause. Why not spin this out into a wider story of sex and power? Why not mine her own experiences? Her friends? Why focus so intently on two women who have clearly been hurt by sexual harassment and the inane, confusing processes which one must navigate in order to have this harassment recognised?

This being said, the questions posed here, the power of Garner’s prose, her forthrightness – these make this a genuinely page-turning read. I found myself annoyed – sometimes furious – with her line of argument, and then nodding my head in agreement only a sentence or two later. An unsettling and honest book.

[Natalie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading this book made me so angry - despite HG's insistence that she wanted to cover both sides, it comes across as a self-entitled attack of the two women (probably due to the fact that they weren't jumping at the chance to be interviewed). Additionally I was appalled at the casual attitude taken on sexual harassment, the petty stereotyping of feminists and her naive support for the accused.

I don't think anyone will ever truly know what happened that night - what is clear is that the situation only went as far as it did because the complaint brought by the women was not dealt with properly by university authorities. But a book like this makes the problem even worse.

[Nicholas Cavenagh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Helen Garner has an out-of-control empathetic ego. She feels she has the right to tell the women's story without having interviewed them because "after all, I am a woman". Ultimately non-one around her is allowed any emotional experience outside of her own. She also naively expects all strangers to trust her and is self-righteously angry when they don't. Apart from this, her subjective approach is honest and refreshing. She raises good points about gradation of crime.

[Leanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been some twenty years since my first reading of Helen Garners' 'The First Stone' and still her excruciating honesty about the interactions that occur between men and women still cause me such mental discomfort.

This second reading, occurring as it does, against a backdrop of continuous and escalating levels of violence against woman at the hands of men, has made this book come to life again - as it did so many years ago in my youth - with its brutal analysis of power, and sex, and harassment.

I cannot recommend this book more highly and leave you with a quote from its final pages that force me.......

Still

.........to stare my own beliefs squarely in the face and quiver.

“….I know that between ‘being made to feel uncomfortable’ and ‘violence against women’ lies a vast range of male and female behaviours. If we deny this, we enfeeble language and drain it of its meaning. We insult the suffering of women who have met real violence, and we distort the subtleties of human interaction into caricatures that can serve only as propaganda for war. And it infuriates me that any woman who insists on drawing these crucial distinctions should be called a traitor to her sex.”

[Caitlin Deibe · Rating 1 out of 5]

gosh, where do I start. I was gifted this book by someone i assume (and pray) hasnt read it. This woman is completely pathetic and I cant believe she wrote this book… i quote “There cant be freedom without responsibility. It is a womans responsibility to protect herself against sexual assault. A free woman must accept that in the world there is risk - that risk is part of her freedom”. Girl… what? I get that its written in the 90’s but like….. insane

She also spends the entire book claiming shes writing a book to show “both sides”, but spends most of the book berating the complainants (calling them modern “puritan” feminists), mainly because they won’t give her an interview? Her audacity to be so outraged by their refusal to talk to her after they’ve both given evidence twice, been brutally xxn’ed and then pursued the claim through the uni and settled etc. is wild. I have no idea why she thinks shes entitled to hear from them, particularly since they’ve seen her discusting letter to their abuser.

She ends the book by reflecting, “if only the whole gang of them hadn’t been so afraid of life” re the complainants and their supporters (ie, as if being groped by your college professor is just a fun, chill part of life) Girl…. that is just not the slay u think it is.

All that to say, I shan’t be reading any of her other works x

[Sky Mykyta · Rating 1 out of 5]

Atrocious book. The one where Helen Garner irreparably shredded her feminist credentials.

[Camille · Rating 4 out of 5]

The First Stone sat unread on my bookshelf for over 20 years. I probably bought it on the recommendation of my Literature teacher in Year 11. That was in 1995 when it was first released, but for some reason it never appealed very much. It was tainted as feminist, and I would never have identified myself as one of them back then, unable as I was to understand the nuances of the feminism movement. It was also non-fiction and a reportage of sorts of an incident and a case that occurred when I was new to high school. Then, the university college setting in Melbourne was probably a little too close to the bone given I lived in a residential college for four years at the end of the century while studying in Melbourne. This case was still being talked about, mostly in hushed voices when passing by the University of Melbourne and their fancy colleges.

In the middle of the #MeToo tide of women opening up about sexual harassment, abuse and assault, I thought I should finally read what Helen Garner had to say about this pioneering sexual harassment case from the early 1990's.

As I read The First Stone, I was shocked to find that it was not the book I expected it to be. Garner was not the angry feminist I had been led to believe, that was instead her portrayal of the posse of women surrounding the complainants in the sexual harassment case against the Ormond College Master who then refused any contact with Garner as they had pegged her as being on the other side and accused her of not being a real feminist. I was surprised to find my thoughts on sexual harassment and feminism very similar to Garner's, and that this book and Garner's relentless looking inwards for answers has helped me to further articulate my own position.

Garner's insight about how women blank out when confronted with unwelcome sexual behaviour, allowing it to happen out of some warped sense of politeness or who play an appeasing role so as to diffuse possible escalation to real danger, is powerful. So many times women suffer through discomfort without saying anything or expect that subtle gestures such as looking away, lack of engagement in conversation or closed body language will be perceived and understood by harassers, when rarely it is.

I also understand Garner questioning the degrees of severity of harassment and while she does at times paint the complainants as having gone directly to the police, this isn't the case, despite not being made known to the defendant until that time. I can't say that the line I draw between sexual harassment and banter or flirtation is always the same. It does depend so much on context and who it's coming from and how we perhaps got to that point (why are there some people so charming as to get away with saying something outrageously racy that when coming from another it is repulsive?). But I think it's also important to understand the difference between sexual harassment and sexual assault because they are not the same thing - dare I suggest there's a difference similar to that between petty theft and armed robbery.

I'd like to think that things have changed since 1991 when the incident, around which The First Stone is written, occurred. But when it comes to differences in power and sexual harassment in situations where there is a significant and important power gap, I don't think anything has changed.

The First Stone is still so very relevant now, in 2018, and it is a thought-provoking read on sexual harassment, power, the consequences everyone faces and feminism.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggled to rate this book.

When the author said that maybe her happy marriage had weakened her feminism, limiting her capacity to empathise with the complainants in this sexual harassment case, I had to re-read the passage several times. In my mind echoed something a man said to me once, "feminists are just women who need a good shag". I put the book down.

In her pursuit of the complainants and unwillingness to believe that they could honestly refuse an interview I heard, "well she said no at first but I knew she didn't mean it".

In her defence of the accused, her disbelief that if true these allegations should be taken to to police, I heard, "stuck up bitch can't take a joke. She was asking for it anyway."

In her questioning of why these women are so angry, why so vengeful, I asked "why are you so angry, so angry to write a book about this?"

Are these parallels intentional? I don't think so. The discussion of why the public feels entitled to hear the blood and guts could have been interesting, as could the inclusion and deconstruction of anti-feminism in a more conscious way. The author uses the ubiquitous 'so', that is, 'she was dancing topless so...', 'she was sleeping at his house so...' and I wanted the ellipses removed. So what? Maybe the title is the answer, and if it is it makes me angry.

And what is frustrating is that I think the conversation is worth having, the differences in feminist strands, the importance of reconciliation versus revenge, of a meditation on sex and power. I spent an hour and a half in the car with the radio off just thinking about this book. But these moments just stopped me in my tracks as did the almost complete lack of participation of any of the key players in this book.

[Deb Waterhouse-watson · Rating 1 out of 5]

A regrettale apologist work. The premise underlining this book seems to be that (young) women have no right to complain about being sexually harassed, and that it would be perfectly reasonable for a male professor to dance closely with a female student, and possibly even touch her breasts, unless she had specifically asked him not to beforehand. Enough said.

[Bri Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very mixed feelings about this book. Good level of self-reflection because it's Garner, but it's too much a product of its time WRT attitudes and so I disagree with much of what she says. It did legitimately challenge me too though. It'd be interesting to know how she might write this book today. Glad I read it and would recommend.

[Alice Kimberley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled with this one. I love Garner, but found many of her thoughts here confronting. It’s good to be challenged and some passages had me re-evaluating my own ideology, but I couldn’t shake a visceral feeling of shock and betrayal that Garner could hold views so opposite to my own in parts.

[Terri · Rating 2 out of 5]

The First Stone is my first foray into Garner's work, and I have to say it was probably a mistake to start here. The author posits that her feminist views are perhaps outdated at the time of the book's central incident in the early nineties - and reading it over twenty years later, they seem outrageously, painfully so. It's a very uncomfortable read in this sense. It does give an interesting insight into the convergence of two generations of feminism, and the openness with which Garner examines her own thoughts and motives in response to this is appreciated.

The examination of college life in The First Stone is unnervingly familiar for someone who also lived at one of the residential colleges at the University of Melbourne (albeit almost fifteen years after the events in question). It kind of makes it all the more unthinkable to imagine Garner's response to events as they would have hypothetically corresponded to my own college experience.

Certainly wasn't what I was expecting. I'm interested to read some of Garner's later works as a comparison.

[Ely · Rating 2 out of 5]

This pains me to have to rate this so low. I loved Garner's This House of GriefThis House of Grief and admired how she dealt with such a difficult case with empathy. I saw her speak at Broadside, a feminist lit festival, and was completely in awe of her. This book felt like her, but it also felt decidedly unfeminist. Garner comes off as privileged, especially in her refusal to leave the young women alone despite her admitting that she knows her writing will hurt them more. I was disappointed to see that she often sided with the men—I know the feminism has changed since Garner's day and even the 90s when this was all taking place, but it was sad to see the lack of support and understanding for other women that Garner and a number of her different friends and contacts had.

[Cherise Wolas · Rating 4 out of 5]

I find myself entranced by Helen Garner's nonfiction, not solely because of the true story she is telling, but rather because that true story is very complex and I enjoy reading how she makes her way through the myriad tangles, all the voices that either want or don't want to be heard, and how she analyzes - not in some easy way, but really wrestles with the meanings underlying that true story. The First Stone is about what happens when two college girls accuse the Master of their college with sexual harassment. Reading this book, about an Australian case in the early 1990s, in light of what has been happening in the US this year, is especially fascinating. She doesn't write like a journalist exposing "the truth," but rather as a writer trying to understand what those truths might be.

[Molly]

I don’t really think you can leave a rating for this book. But what I will say is that I cannot remember ever being so conflicted with a piece of writing. It makes you reevaluate your own experiences in the world as a young woman. I can’t say I agree with garner on a lot of what she said but everything I did agree with really made me stop and think. And I guess that was the whole point garner was trying to make.

[notgettingenough · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just don't know....The trouble with that early 'feminists' is that they often seem quite sexist later. Mind you. The trouble with the later ones is that they seem quite sexist sooner. I don't know...

But she does now how to tell a good story, even if it isn't necessarily the right one.

[Maz · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have always loved Helen Garner's writing style, and this book is not an exception, however there the praise must end.

This book comes across as a diatribe against contemporary women and the politics of sexual assault in today's world. Obviously this book was written almost 30 years ago, so it's taken with a grain of salt, but even 30 years ago this was an unacceptable stance on the matter of sexual assault, especially when perpetrated by men in power.

At the outset of the book Garner discusses with a friend that 'back in our day, we never would have reported such a minor offence' as being groped in public by a man in authority over you. The authority of the man in question is made to look small, which belittles the offence, and makes the women involved appear as though they simply have a vendetta against this poor, innocent man, the Master of the College in which they must live and work…

Men systemically and systematically hold power over women and minorities, even if this is not at an individual level involving two specific people. Why else would women cross the street away from a man when walking home at night.

When this man is protesting his innocence for the most part he simply states 'up until now, my record has been clean' which should be indictment enough, how often is the defence of a man accused of sexual assault simply 'but he's such a nice guy' 'but he's always been fine to me' roughly equating to 'but I've never been a victim of his, and he's always been pleasant to ME, so get over it, we don't believe you'. Certain voices within the story remain fixed on the fact that the assault wasn't reported immediately/there was no scene caused at the time of the assault as though this casts doubt on the legitimacy of the accusations. Garner later makes comment about how in the face of such events, women may often involuntarily resort to 'freeze' when their fight-or-flight instincts are triggered. The book does nothing to connect these two dots together.

Garner harks constantly back to her feminism of the 60s and 70s as a shield for her antiquated opinion on which sexual assaults should be taken seriously and which shouldn't. This thinly veiled excuse is not good enough, the world grows and changes, so too social movements. The suffragettes doubtless thought the same when working class women were fighting for their equality. Even if it were true of all second wave feminists that they wouldn't have cared so much about such a "minor infraction" one would hope their minds changed with the times. Further, surely a true feminist (or anyone who believes in equality and equity) would applaud the changing of the times, the bravery of such women to report such things, and the progress made from their own fight! There are multiple mentions of some sort of invisible sliding scale of offence, along which one may seemingly not call out or report wrongdoings until some subjective marker of severity says it's okay? You couldn't possibly be hungry, because there's children starving in Africa…. This alongside many emphatic statements that Garner herself IS a feminist, leading to the question, do you honestly believe that the 'worse' sexual assaults will stop while we allow the lesser offences to continue? SA doesn't happen in a vacuum, it happens in a world that consistently puts men (especially ruling class men) above the rest of us in terms of our rights. While men continue to get away with constant 'minor offences' there's no societal standard or expectation to stop them continuing to do whatever they want and going on to perpetrate so called 'worse sexual assaults'. The punishment should not fit the crime, the punishment should fit the damage done.

Here I put forward Bri E Lee's book Eggshell Skull, which discusses (specifically in the context of sexual assault and violence) that a perpetrator must take their victims as they find them. Extremely simplified: you may assault one person, and they will shrug it off, you may assault another and it could be the final straw for a life full of 'minor infractions' that build up against women throughout the world. In the case of the latter, this final straw may lead to many and often drastic repercussions for the victim, not the least the trauma of the violation resulting in something like PTSD. Sure on the surface, groping may seem like a lesser evil of the possible acts of sexual violence, but it may cause just as much damage to the victim. You MUST take them as you find them. If that 'small offence' leads to the same trauma and destruction as what you perceive to be a worse crime, the 'objective severity' of what you've done becomes completely irrelevant.


I found this book to be rife with contradictions and hypocrisy. From 'back in the 70s female liberation resulted in sex positivity and liberal nudity' to 'if women wear revealing clothing, they should expect the ramifications of the resulting male attention'. As well as 'people can feel helpless and trapped in the moment when they feel under threat' to 'why didn't the women fight back, why didn't she just punch him?'. 

Assault is assault. None of it is okay, regardless of any opinions on the 'severity' or some externally prescribed acceptable level of reaction. 

[Sophie Oli Meredith · Rating 4 out of 5]

That I disagree with half of what Garner has to say isn’t important: I am intellectually wealthier for having heard her say it. It is hard to passively read this book when she is so generous in sharing her own biases (and personal histories that she herself has not yet examined). I ended up feeling like I had to reply to much of what she said as I was reading and dig deep to understand why I thought it. Her writing encourages a flexibility of mind and opens up a dialogue with the reader...the sweat of struggle to question her own rigidity almost drips off the page and you can’t help but want to meet her half way in that struggle.

While I understand, of course, the offence caused by much of the content in this book, Garner does not wildly toss out thoughtless opinions (mostly); she is primarily asking for a debate, for a discussion on what is grey, for a collaborative social approach to solving some of our darkest and most difficult problems around power and sex (and age and race and wealth and individual responsibility and and and..)

One paragraph in particular remains with me after greedily munching through her words: “Solidarity can be used to mock genuine doubt, to blur a fatal skid in reasoning. Run the flag up the pole and see who salutes. Whenever I feel myself in the warm emotional rush of righteousness, of belonging, that accompanied the word ‘solidarity’, I try to remember to stop and wait till the rush subsides, so I can have a harder look at what has provoked it.”

In a time where hateful rhetoric is strewn across ideological walls of left and right seemingly with little attention to genuine conciliation and problem-solving, Garner’s spikes of authenticity should be admired. I do not agree with her- all teachers must understand the privilege of their position and making any sexual advances to students is wholly unacceptable - but I value this book.


One uncertainty I do have, however, is about The First Stone’s concern with the silent battle in egos between Garner herself and the women who refused to discuss their experience with her. Is she making herself seem more vulnerable and flawed than she actually is?! She might have left their voices as a subtle canvass for the reader to mostly draw themselves but then perhaps the book would never have sold. I love her writing and voice nonetheless.

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion Helen looked down on the girls and came across as anti feminist because a strong empowered woman does not behave like a tart and then complain about the consequences which appear to be minor in this circumstance. This kind of behaviour gives women a bad name. I am many things but i am not a feminist, give me an apron and a family to care for, I find that more fulfilling than a thankless career and no legacy. There is a photo circulating the web with proud, well dressed women in the 1940s. Then to the right scanty covered young women behaving like tramps. I don't recall the caption but basically the women on the left had no rights but look intelligent and empowered, the women on the right have all rights and look stupid, naive and truly useless. Modern day feminists think it's their right to dress like prostitutes and carry on like a pork chop if a man looks at them sideways. I imagine that is only if an unattractive man looks at them. This is not intelligent behaviour and is quite offensive to many women. I guess my point is there are different extremes to feminism and I think a grown, intelligent woman can assert herself and rectify a situation such as this without trying to destroy a man's career and potentially his life.

[Anne · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hugely disappointing.
Garner's attitude throughout is naive and narrow-minded. The wider consequences of the case are entirely ignored; Garner gently but constantly suggests that the complainants went too far and expresses disdain for them and "what feminism has morphed into" ... "puritan feminists" with their "belief that men's sexuality is a monstrous, uncontrollable force, while women are trembling creatures innocent of desire..." - these puritans being, as far as I can tell, women who wear lipstick if they want to and won't let matters of sexual harassment be swept under the rug.

In her last paragraph she says "If only there had been no slow songs... If only the women's supporters had been away on sabbatical leave..." reflecting the simplistic tone of the whole book. Not recommended for anybody.

[Beth The Vampire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't like reading about real life, because it makes me think of how crappy the world can be sometimes. Take me to a land of dragons, magic, and fairies any day!

My class this semester for my Masters in Creative Writing is Creative Non Fiction. This was a great example of this genre, and helped me inform my final piece, but it's not what I want to write myself.

[amelia · Rating 1 out of 5]

the word for this is 'bizarre'. the most annoying woman in the world collects & processes an incredible amount of information that rebuts her argument totally and exposes the impulse behind writing this book as essentially psychopathic without ever reaching the mirror stage. i don't really understand how this book is psychologically possible.

[Lauren Riots · Rating 1 out of 5]

this got recommended to me and I thoroughly hated it because I felt like she took the side of the perpetrator. I haven't been able to read any of her other books since.