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Issue Details: First known date: 1995... 1995 The First Stone : Some Questions About Sex and Power
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

When two female university students went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party by the head of their co-ed residential college, the shock of the accusations split the community. Helen Garner examines the issues of sex and power which surround this incident in a blend of reportage and personal experience. (Source: Trove)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Chippendale, Inner Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales,: Picador , 1995 .
      image of person or book cover 2492223570601158635.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 222p.
      Description: port.
      ISBN: 033035583X
    • New York (City), New York (State),
      c
      United States of America (USA),
      c
      Americas,
      :
      Free Press ,
      1997 .
      image of person or book cover 5578468728831871826.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 1v.p.
      ISBN: 9780684835068, 0684835061
    • London,
      c
      England,
      c
      c
      United Kingdom (UK),
      c
      Western Europe, Europe,
      :
      Bloomsbury ,
      1997 .
      image of person or book cover 7852847009153893583.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 1v.p.
      ISBN: 9780747532521, 0747532524
    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Picador , 2020 .
      image of person or book cover 7379806267720779951.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: xiii, 286 pp.
      Note/s:
      • Published: 28th January 2020
      ISBN: 9781760784881
Alternative title: セクシュアル・ハラスメント : 性と権力の迷宮
Transliterated title: Sekushuaru harasumento : sei to kenryoku no rabirinsu
Language: Japanese
    • Tokyo, Honshu,
      c
      Japan,
      c
      East Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
      :
      Akashishoten ,
      2008 .
      image of person or book cover 180139287911658663.jpg
      This image has been sourced from online.
      Extent: 312p.
      ISBN: 4750326992 9784750326993

Other Formats

  • Also sound recording.

Works about this Work

Helen Garner, Robert Hughes and the Mystery of Nonfiction Peter Craven , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: Meanjin , December vol. 81 no. 4 2022; (p. 196-208)

'It's 45 years since Helen Garner published Monkey Grip and perhaps a while later that people realised how fine a writer she was. In 1997 there was that shock of recognition that someone had succeeded in re-creating inner-urban Melbourne, the 'aqua profunda' part of the Fitzroy pool, the tumult and tumbling from bed to bed of shared housing, the heartache of loving a junkie. The initial response to Monkey Grip was a response to a literary brave new world that was also the translation of something real. Indeed, there were critics such as the late Peter Pierce who said that Helen Garner had just talked dirty and called it realism. Yes, and along with this, there was the persistent accusation that she had simply published her diaries and served them up as fiction. This last point had come to seem like the most vulgar misprision by the time I wrote a full-dress defence of Garner in Judith Brett's Meanjin in the mid 1980s.' (Publication abstract)

y separately published work icon One Day I'll Remember This : Diaries 1987-1995 Helen Garner , Melbourne : Text Publishing , 2020 19599730 2020 single work diary

'Helen Garner’s second volume of diaries charts a tumultuous stage in her life. Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming, and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the bombshell that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work.

'With devastating honesty, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another—how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both thrilling and uncompromising. And through it all we see the elevating, and grounding, power of work.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

The Law, Vulnerability and Disputed Victimisation in Helen Garner’s The First Stone and Laura Kipnis’ Unwanted Advances Diana Shahinyan , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , November no. 63 2018; (p. 190-196)

'It is a rite of passage in the early days of law school to ponder eighteenth-century jurist William Blackstone’s famous ratio, in which it is deemed ‘better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer’ (Blackstone 352), and the kind of society—or more importantly, normative vision of society—it meaningfully instantiates. The ratio, after all, as a precursor to the now commonplace presumption of innocence, suggests that the criminal division of law (and, more broadly, the rule of law and the tenets of procedural fairness it requires) has been designed so as to protect the accused from the sheer brutality of accusation, over and above its othersecondary function, which is to protect society from its criminal element, and protect victims of crime. It, then, heralds a specific political commitment: by stressing the importance of tempering the structural violence of sovereignty and the state apparatus in the organisation of a well-formed society, it correctly deemphasises or downplays the ways in which individual cases of injustice (that is, the ten guilty persons who escape) are able to shape the contours of social life.'  (Introduction)

Cultures of Complaint : Protest and Redress in the Age of #Metoo Rosalind Smith , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , November no. 63 2018; (p. 172-179)

'We overhear a woman weeping by the side of a river, her tears mingling with its water and her voice echoing back to her to amplify her complaint. Caught up in grief and, occasionally, anger, she laments her unjust treatment by her male lover, even as she declares her unrequited love in the face of his abandonment (Kerrigan 14-23). In the late sixteenth century, when such complaints flourished, this abandonment could have devastating social and economic consequences for historical women’s lives, especially if the woman were pregnant. These chronicles of woe dramatised such consequences for both the unknown victims of assault and recognisable historical figures, in an early form of true crime writing. Yet this kind of female-voiced complaint was rarely a vehicle for women’s own protest or pursuit of redress. Early modern women’s complaints against love gone wrong were often written by men and framed by male narrators: they were the imagined responses of abused and abandoned women dramatised for the reader’s enjoyment and used to voice larger complaints against the times. Around these weeping figures formed sympathetic and generative communities, from the intimate publics who listened to the speaker’s lament within the text, to the broader communities of men and women who heard, read, copied, circulated or rewrote these complaints as their own.' (Introduction)

Being in the Archive : Affect and Scholarly Distance Bernadette Brennan , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Archives and Manuscripts , vol. 46 no. 1 2018; (p. 3-17)

'Working in the archives of living writers provides exciting possibilities for extended interpersonal research as well as ethical challenges. This article explores the author’s experience of working in Helen Garner’s restricted archives and negotiating the demands of scholarly objectivity with an increasingly felt empathic engagement. The author traces a chronological path through the archives relating to Garner’s three substantial works of non-fiction: The First Stone (1995), Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014). She draws attention to some of the ways in which distance and objectivity can be influenced not only by contact with a living writer but also by the space in which the archive is encountered. With a deliberate focus on the lived experience of researching, rather than a scholarly examination of archival theory, the author offers a case study of how the interaction of archives and living subject can shape research and publication.'  (Publication abstract)

El arte de resistir el acoso sexual Ben Haneman , 1995 single work review
— Appears in: Hontanar , June no. 45 1995; (p. 4-5)

— Review of The First Stone : Some Questions About Sex and Power Helen Garner , 1995 single work prose
Leeching the Meanings of Human Experience Kevin McDonald , 1995 single work review
— Appears in: Arena Magazine , June/July no. 17 1995; (p. 44-48)

— Review of The First Stone : Some Questions About Sex and Power Helen Garner , 1995 single work prose
Power and Principle Andrew Rutherford , 1995 single work review
— Appears in: The Sunday Age , 26 March 1995; (p. 9)

— Review of The First Stone : Some Questions About Sex and Power Helen Garner , 1995 single work prose
A Meagre Justice Morag Fraser , 1995 single work review
— Appears in: The Age , 25 March 1995; (p. 7)

— Review of The First Stone : Some Questions About Sex and Power Helen Garner , 1995 single work prose
Fighting the Furies Peter Craven , 1995 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 25-26 March 1995; (p. rev 7)

— Review of The First Stone : Some Questions About Sex and Power Helen Garner , 1995 single work prose
Common Sense and Feminism 1995 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 10 August 1995; (p. 14)
Hard-Line Feminists Under Fire from Aussie Author 1995 single work column
— Appears in: The Mercury , 10 August 1995; (p. 11)
Author Outs Moral Panic of University Sex Scandal Kimina Lyall , 1997 single work column
— Appears in: The Australian , 28 October 1997; (p. 7)
Second Stone McKenzie Wark , 1997 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Australian , 29 October 1997; (p. 40)
Questions, Not Arguments on Sex and Power Helen Garner , 1995 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Age , 9 August 1995; (p. 4)
Last amended 29 Jan 2020 12:17:50
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