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 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, thirty years on, the book is no less sharp, no less relevant and no less divisive.
A W&N Essential
The controversial book that Helen Garner wrote about the resulting Ormond College sexual harassment case caused a 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, thirty years on, the book is no less sharp, no less relevant and no less divisive.
A W&N Essential
Reviews
This is writing of great boldness . . . an intense, eloquent and enthralling work
Had the impact of an avalanche
A brilliantly prescient book - in its complexity, in the tense torque of its self-argument, and in its very vulnerability and stunned intolerance . . . What consumes her are the difficult questions that seem to lie beyond the reach of formal narration: the deepest assumptions of class and gender and power; the problem of how well we ever understand someone else's motives
An invaluable guide into harrowing territory
Our greatest contemporary practitioner of observation, self-interrogation and compassion. Everything she writes, in her candid, graceful prose, rings true, enlightens, stays
