This is what the Aboriginal women of Hindmarsh were doing when they risked telling their stories outside their community on the condition that only within a larger community of women could they circulate. In a complex situation, under intense and competing pressures, women who were mothers hoped to protect the future for their daughters at a birthing place. As we know, their stories were stolen – thoughtlessly no doubt, quite probably without malice, but stolen nevertheless. And for what? A moment’s one-upmanship for a political party to whom the stories did not matter, for whom the theft threatened no serious community harm.

With these thoughts in mind, I ponder Helen Garner’s writing of The First Stone. What does the project mean to the community with which it is consistently associated, the community of women who are feminists in Australia? I am not offering a critique of the book, but some reflections on its getting of story.

In 1992 The Age newspaper broke for its Melbourne audience the story of what would become known as the Ormond College affair. Two female students had alleged assault by the Master of the College. Here was a quintessentially Melbourne story. At its centre was one of the oldest and most influential institutions in the city: the University of Melbourne. Here was Ormond College, whose most famous resident Master, Davis McCaughey, had gone on to be Governor of the state. Parents whose daughters and sons have been admitted to the University spend thousands of dollars each year so that they might live in a residential college where the passage from childhood to adulthood can be made in a culturally enriching environment. And yet it was at this university college that young women were pointing to a figure charged with protecting them during their rite of passage and saying – he has failed in his duty of care: he has sexualised our bodies for his pleasure.

The Age, while following the case in its protracted passage through convoluted institutional processes, broke a second story: Helen Garner, one of Melbourne’s best-known writers of fiction, had sent a letter to the Master of Ormond after she read the newspaper. She had expressed to him in forthright terms of sympathy, terms quoted in The Age article, her grief for his predicament.

Before long, Age readers learned that Helen Garner would be writing a book about the Ormond affair. They also learned that the young women did not want to tell Garner their stories for her first book of non-fiction. Part of the ensuing debate has focused on this resistance by the young women, their friends, and supporters. They did not want their story told by Helen Garner, writer of fiction making a guest appearance as a journalist. She has told their story anyway, has stolen the story they did not want her to have.

The book is dividing the community of Australian women who are feminists. Not since the story told by and about Lindy Chamberlain have I listened to such impassioned arguments. And never have I heard arguments about women’s stories set in such starkly generational terms. As a woman over fifty, as a feminist teaching in a university, as a mother of daughters, I worry about this division. I fear that we the mothers, whether our motherhood comes from biology or from the belonging to a community of women, are in danger of turning thieves, of saying we own the story of what it means to be young, and find our bodies the site of unwanted sexual intrusion. If you of the next generation claim for yourselves a different telling, we will deny the story’s authenticity, impugn your motives, and make certain that ours remains the master narrative, whatever harm comes to you when we take your story and re-tell it. The Aboriginal mothers at Hindmarsh were trying to protect their daughters. What are we doing to ours? In stealing stories, are we thieving lives?