The First Stone

When two young women students claimed they had been indecently assaulted at a party by the Master of Ormond at Melbourne University in 1990, the shock not only split the college and university communities but focused sharply the larger social debate about sexuality and power.

What the media presented as a head-on clash between outraged innocence and exploiting power becomes, in Helen Garner's book, a much more complex patchwork of versions. In writing The First Stone, Garner interviewed over 100 people involved either directly or indirectly with the case.

The story of this clash and its resulting devastation forces Garner to re-examine her own feminism while taking a critical but compassionate look at what feminism is becoming in the hands of a younger and more puritanical generation.

Garner examines what it means to be accused of sexual harassment, how the justice system deals with this and how an alleged incident grows from hearsay to hellish in the hotbed of a politically correct university that is wrestling with patriarchy and feminism.