We discuss the barriers we have put in the way of genuine intimacy with men, and she refers frequently to Jung’s concept of Eros, ‘the spark that ignites and connects’. She quotes Camille Paglia from time to time, as well. Tearing off a comer page of her notebook, she writes the name and phone number of a Jungian psychologist, a man I have heard often on ABC talkback radio, and gives it to me. This man, I shall call him Dr P, has views about the issue of sexual harassment, the issue that has drawn us both to this coffee shop. I have heard something of his point of view on the radio, something about dark and unresolved matters between fathers and daughters. I don’t like the sound of it.

She wants to know how she can write a book about the Colin Shepherd case. I have already made a venture into the minefield of academic sexual misconduct – perhaps I can advise her? I do not think this project is a good idea. I tell her that the issue is highly charged and very complex. Ormond is not an isolated case, it is more extreme only because it has got into the criminal court. There are equally serious cases in campuses across Australia. Sexual harassment procedures are going off the rails, I say, not that the charges are trumped up, but because everyone involved is being horribly damaged. This will not be the only case to end up in court. The problem for me is the focus on the sexual nature of the offence, rather than the breach of obligations.

I try to explain that we are dealing with an issue of the violation of fiduciary duty. No, it is not the same as in loco parentis, nor is it about infantilising students as if they were children. A master of a residential college is in a fiduciary relationship to his residents; he is not just the caretaker. A fiduciary duty carries with it stringent legal obligations of care and protection. Colin Shepherd, if he did what was alleged, has clearly been in serious breach of those obligations. That, I understand, is the nub of the complaint that Ormond College so patently failed to deal with, which drove the two young women to the Equal Opportunities Commission and, eventually, to the police.

I think that the famous novelist does not understand. I detect a desperate confusion between the world of everyday interaction – at a party or at the beach – where confused middle-aged men ogle, and perhaps sometimes grope, the firm flesh of robust, sexually inviting young women; and an institutionalised hierarchy of power where these confused middle-aged men exercise concrete power over such enticing young women, power invested in them by the state, and, in this case, by the church. There have been a couple of benchmark cases in Canada. I suggest she acquaint herself with the legal context, complex though it is. I suggest she read Catharine MacKinnon. She writes this down, or so I think.

The famous novelist is not really paying attention. She can see her story and I understand the pull of a compelling narrative. The problem she identifies is that the young women who laid the charges will not agree to talk to her. I know that. As it happens, I had earlier been approached by these young women to write about their reasons for taking the action they did, but found the media was as uninterested in hearing that particular narrative, as I was uneasy about writing it. Already a piece commissioned from me about Ormond had been pulled from The Australian (on legal advice, the editor said), and as far as I could tell the editors of newspapers and magazines had these girls in their gun sights. My best advice to them was to follow the example of Suzanne Kemp, complainant in the Orr case, and remain silent. I keep in touch with them, and am seeing them the next day, but as far as I am concerned the Ormond story is too close to the bone for too many people. Anyone who blunders into that territory is asking for trouble.

On this particular day, I am in Melbourne on a commission from the Good Weekend to look at the way women who complain of harassment are being positioned in the public discourse. I explain to the famous novelist my concerns about the revival of the vengeful woman stereotype: vagina dentata. A chill enters the exchange and her face closes down. Her mouth is pursed tight. I see we are poles apart. John Fairfax and Sons has paid for me to come to see a play by David Williamson, and have organised a special screening of a film based on the Orr case. She will come with me to the film screening the next day.

Only one young woman, I’ll call her Nicole Stewart, greets me in the tiny, fusty cafe in a city arcade, where we have agreed to meet for lunch. The location, quite unknown to me, was her choice. Even I am too young to be in this twee teashop, with its shabby–genteel atmosphere and 1960s menu. Nicole’s fellow complainant, she can be called Elizabeth Rosen, has not come.

A lovely girl, this Nicole, dazzlingly clever and fiercely set on her chosen course of action, but so very young. She cannot possibly know how a hostile world can knock the stuffing out of you. She has had intimations. The rumours about her, about them both, are vile. More than anything she wants to be a lawyer. Now it’s going to be awfully hard, however brilliantly she may have done in her last year in law school. She is not cowed. Her eyes glitter: Don’t you think that men have put their hands on me before? This man was the master of my residential college. He gave me my bursary, my lifeline to university. He violated his duty of care. I am prepared to stand up and say that is not on.

No, she says in response to my request, no, she will not now, nor ever, speak to the famous novelist. This trauma is her life and her choice. She has a right to determine whom she does and does not speak to about it, and she has a right to have her decision respected, and not caricatured as the doubtful influence of a sinister feminist cabal. I can feel a core of vulnerability behind her erudite talk. Nicole Stewart is undoubtedly very brave, but I am anxious for the hurt which lurks further down track. She is strong enough to cop it, she says. I do not think that is the case.

After lunch I meet the famous novelist at the Hoyts private theatrette where we squirm through prurient scenes of masturbation fantasy and incestuous rape. This film, we both agree, is a complete dog. We shop to buy her a food processor and, affectionately, we part. I file my story before I fly to Sarawak. I next see her at the Adelaide Festival, eight months later. She is brittle and angry when I press a warning on her of the dangers persisting with this book. I know there are people very distressed by the prospect, and she will be hurt too, in the crossfire. She has had enough of their feminist bullying, she tells me, and they will find she can be a bully herself. She is tough enough to cope with whatever is dealt out. I don’t doubt it for a minute. That brief exchange will be our last conversation.

My piece for the Good Weekend was never run. The decision to cut was made by the newly appointed editor, Anne Summers. When I asked for an explanation, she said that it was an opinion piece and quite unsuitable for the Good Weekend. My opinion, I presume, was unsuitable. Luke Slattery at the Australian, when offered the piece by my agent, felt that the issue had already enough of a run.

The First Stone has been the basis of two major features written by Luke Slattery for the Australian. Anne Summers’s Good Weekend special feature on women had as its centrepiece an extract from the The First Stone and plenty of opinion, about young women who run to the cops and those who support them, from the famous novelist.

One of the complaints of my novelist friends is that every Tom, Dick, and Jane believes they can write a novel. It is just storytelling. These days another literary delusion is gaining credence: that non-fiction is no more than storytelling with some tangential connection to real events. But investigative non-fiction – be it history or serious journalism – has conventions, of both form and ethics. In a novel, the validity of the world created comes from its internal coherence, from the persuasiveness of the language, and the skill of the narrative structure. In non­fiction, the validity of the world created includes those elements, but in the final analysis its legitimacy comes from the author’s rigorous intellectual engagement with the material and personal sources which exist outside the construction of the text. A gripping or entertaining narrative is not raison d’être for a work of serious non-fiction, which is what The First Stone lays claim to be.

However much the conundrum Why did they go to the cops and why won’t they explain themselves to me? may drive the book’s well-paced narrative, that in itself is not sufficient. It is the author’s responsibility to seek answers to the questions she poses; to interrogate the social, political, moral, and legal issues which coalesce around the moment she seeks to understand. Helen Garner has not done so. The only context for this book, which, we are told on the blurb, ‘provides an insight into one of the most difficult and confounding issues of our time’, is the author’s confused feeling about a singular issue of sexual harassment which she wilfully insists on interpreting in a highly prejudicial way as ‘nerdish passes at a party’, or else, ‘he touched her breast and she went to the cops?’

She is nettled to be told, more than once, by more than one person (hints of collusion here), that ‘this thing is not being played out for your finer feelings’. But the uncooperative women were right to tell her that, and the Gregory family would have done well to have reiterated the point, rather than expose their naked grief and pain for Garner to lay out before a voracious mass audience, in order to explain how this makes her feel.

Like the Orr case, the Ormond affair is a modern tragedy and tragedy is, as any novelist knows, the most powerful narrative force of all, since it is in conflict and suffering, in human failure and un­happiness, we most perceive the frailty of the human condition. A story of tragic conflict, spiced with sex and conspiracy, is irresistible. And Gamer writes tragedy well. Consider this snapshot of Colin Shepherd’s wife:

The chimney drew hard; several times during my visit Mrs Shepherd had to replenish the fire with logs. She sat on the carpet in front of me in a girlish posture with her back very straight and her legs folded and began, almost immediately to cry. She hardly stopped for the two hours I spent with her. She held a bundle of tissues in one hand and repeatedly blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She apologised for this from the start, as if she feared that I wouldn’t be able to hear the depth of her distress. She told me she managed to hold herself together when she was with her husband and children. She didn’t want him to see her like this – it would upset him so much; he needed to keep his confidence up, in the search for another job … For days afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about the fire in the Shepherd’s sitting room. The fireplace was handsome, but it was badly designed with an updraught that caused a tremendous burning rate and consumed a huge quantity of fuel without throwing out a commensurate amount of heat: it was always demanding to be fed. It seemed to me an image of Mrs Shepherd’s generosity her uneconomical, exhausting, indiscriminating, selfless goodwill. She told me she had lost her faith over this; but it is rare to meet someone whose habit is to do what the prayer book recommends: ‘to give and not count the cost’.

Mrs Gregory (why beat around the bush with pseudonyms, since this book was sprung upon us, we’ve seen photos and footage of her and her devastated husband over and over and over again) told Helen Garner: ‘Don’t worry about me, just write it for you – don’t be worried about me.’ Could she really have expected to be taken so completely at her word? For the casual reader, the watcher of television, the listener to talkback radio, shifting his or her attention in search of endless titillation, the evocative portrait of the accused’s wife remains frozen in past time. No one is especially concerned with the moral issue of what Mrs Gregory must feel like since this book has appeared, and the extent to which she may be counting the cost of her generosity. It is little commented upon that the Gregory family tried hard to have the book stopped. Can you blame them? To have to relive that nightmare again and again, just so Helen Gamer can tell the world how confused she is about what it all means.

The doyenne of investigative journalism, Janet Malcolm, whom Garner clearly admires, is a felt presence behind The First Stone. Malcolm understands that she is a carrion feeder and a hunter of prey. Her relentless and unself-serving interrogation of her own project in books is one of the things that raises her work well above the ruck. She does not cloak the ‘familiar stirrings of reportorial desire’ in borrowed clothes of moral integrity, and she makes no bones that she is in the business of feeding an insatiable public appetite for damaged lives. Consider her initial snapshot of Olwyn, sister of the poet Ted Hughes:

Her frantic activity makes one think of a mother quail courageously flying in the face of a predator to divert him from the chicks scurrying to safety. The journalist whose talons are closing around her cannot but be stirred by the woman’s fierce loyalty and love – and cannot help wondering about the emotions of the man for whom she is sacrificing herself …

(The Silent Woman; Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Picador, 1994, p. 31.)

This writer does not seek absolution from her victims, and she is clear-eyed about the indifference of her market to the matter of individual vulnerability. I doubt that literary commentators in the United States speak in awed tones about the courage of Janet Malcolm in writing her books, and she is a writer who has suffered the slings of several massive defamation suits.

Janet Malcolm knows the punters like their stories served up in archetype – the heartless betrayer, the evil sister – but her own work strives to undermine such reassuring simplicity. By contrast, Garner explains her failure to even attempt a serious engagement with the historical moment her book addresses, saying she has raised her narrative to a level where ‘its archetypal features have become visible’. Having not even seen the young woman she calls Elizabeth Rosen, and with no access to her friends or to her testimony, she does what she can with a photo:

The first impression it creates is one of shining. Then one notices the amount of flesh that is permitted to shine. The gaze, whether one is male or female drops like a stone from top to bottom of this photo, then travels slowly up. She is wearing a dark strapless evening dress, out of which the double mass of her splendid bosom – the only possible word for it – is bursting … She is a woman in the full glory of her youth, as joyful as a goddess, elated by her own careless authority and power.

A photo, yes? Just a photo of a girl dressed for a ball. Garner then tells us that the sight of this photo administers a jolt to men and women alike, although the men make lewd remarks ‘to conceal from themselves their deeper response, which is something like awe’. And later: ‘Has a girl like Elizabeth Rosen even the faintest idea what a powerful anima figure she is to the men she encounters in her life?’ And again: ‘… that passage could be a description of someone like Elizabeth Rosen – what eels have been stirred in whose souls by that brilliant and wild creature’. A girl like Elizabeth Rosen. Do you recognise what this is? Not the representation of a vulnerable, and very young, woman who, rightly or wrongly, has been catapulted into an ethical and legal trauma which will blight her life. No, what we have here, is vagina dentata in her full glory.

There is no point in reviewing The First Stone, we are all saturated with talk about it, but I am compelled to say this: talking to your friends, listening to hearsay and reading Jung may be useful in grappling with ‘one of the most difficult and confounding issues of our time’, but it is no substitute for rigorous engagement with the multifaceted context of the issue, especially when you are feeding off the devastation and distress of your fellow citizens.