Hear her roar: Germaine Greer at Adelaide Writers’ Week

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“It’s so weird to see Germaine Greer walking around,” says one of Australia’s leading literary figures over a glass of champagne at an Adelaide Writer’s Week party. “I mean, it’s Germaine Greer!”

 

Minutes later, I’m standing on North Terrace, waiting for a cab. Germaine Greer is just metres away, deep in conversation by the kerbside. She’s off to the next event, as are we. There are no cabs in sight. A woman on a bicycle passes slowly along the footpath. Germaine looks at her.

 

“We could get a dink,” she murmurs. As the woman draws near, she calls out to her. “Hey! Can I have a dink?”

The woman stops short, planting her feet from the pedals to the ground. She stares at her. She says something I can’t hear and thrusts out her hand. Germaine smiles and shakes it and they stand talking for a while before the woman rides off again, her wheels teetering a little, her face glowing.

 

 “I think there’s been more muddled thinking by muddled people on Germaine Greer than on any other person in recent times,” said novelist Deborah Robertson, speaking on a Writer’s Week panel about The Female Eunuch, a panel made extraordinary by the fact that Germaine herself was on it.

 

Indeed, the pleasant grey-haired woman who stopped to chat with a stranger on a bike bore no resemblance to the savage harpy she is often depicted as. Nor did the passionate – and, yes, fiery – speaker who wiped tears from under her glasses as about 2000 people rose to give her a thunderous standing ovation at Writer’s Week.

 

I attended the session on my way to the airport – and only just managed to make it – and was very, very pleased that I did. Germaine’s speech rates as one of the three most inspiring talks I’ve heard (the others being the first time I heard Julian Burnside speak about asylum seekers and Robert Fisk at the last Adelaide Writers’ Week).

 

Here’s a taste of it:

 

“It is not true that I sneer at Australia,” she began. “If I groan at the mismanagement of this continent, it is not because I despise it and its people. It’s because both the land and its people deserve better.”

 

Greer said that she had been “spat upon in public places” because of the distortion of what she said about the notorious Guardian piece on Steve Irwin, which she hinted she will write about in the future. On the topic, she said that she is critical of Steve Irwin because “his approach to conservation is profoundly misguided, and that’s why I did it.”

 

“You’ll have to believe me that when I say things that are bitter about what is going on here, it is because my heart is breaking, it is not because I feel superior,” she went on. “I have just driven through the Coorong, which is becoming the Dead Sea, because it so excessively saline. I know that the Murray is already a salt lagoon and not a river at all. And our rulers are sitting around chewing the fat about a plan that they might one day arrive at. It’s A DISGRACE! And you should be ANGRY!”

 

“Four years ago on the Bert Newton program, I said to him that all the people in Melbourne should rise up as one to declaim against the channel deepening project that will destroy Port Philip Bay … Now, as usual, we’ve left it to kids on jet-skis to throw themselves in front of the Queen of the Netherlands, which would not be allowed to do in Rotterdam what it is doing in Port Philip Bay. Why? Because the Dutch GIVE a shit!”

 

“I wrote The Female Eunuch because I couldn’t really do anything else. I was, as usual, cross. I was cross because I was being told by cultural analysts that giving women the vote had been a total bust. They’d done nothing with it, they hadn’t instituted a new world order, they had not solved the problem of international warfare, blah blah blah. And I found myself saying, ‘you gave us the vote because you KNEW we could do nothing with it. You KNEW that we would be operating within sclerotic institutions that were incapable of change.’”

 

“And then it occurred to me that one of the arguments I was hearing, and particularly from Betty Friedan, was that after World War II women had been sexualised because they’d been sent back home to have babies and they were suddenly wearing push-up bras and big skirts and lots of lipstick.”

 

“And I thought, what’s that got to do with sexuality? Isn’t sexuality that other thing – that elan vital, that curiosity, that, the thing that makes us take risks, the thing that makes us fall in love – that thing – that thing that makes us endure the vicissitudes of a blood sport … Sex is a blood sport. I will allow no mitigation of that basic sentiment … And so I wrote a book, the best book I could write, the first thing I had ever written.”

 

“I had written lots of things before, for the underground press, you know, I’d done my apprenticeship, and I set about writing a book, and at first I had no real idea. Then one day I realised that the women I wanted to read the book had no time, and I had to write short things. I had to write a lavatory book that you could actually swallow a bit of before you went back to what your daily chores might be. And so I wrote the book the way did.”

 

“Now what is extraordinary is not the book. A book doesn’t exist until it is read. What was extraordinary was the way women read that book. And they filled in its inadequacies; they built out its juvenilities. They turned it into a phenomenon and I am immensely honoured. All those women who say to me ‘you changed my life’, there are some of you here today. And you know what I always say? No, I didn’t. YOU changed your life and if I was of any help to you in that process I am truly, truly honoured and grateful. You owe me NOTHING. I owe you EVERYTHING. I owe you the courage to go on doing things the way I do them.”

 

AND:

 

“There was a lot of rubbish when I first appeared on the scene. I was supposed to be the one good-looking feminist. I was no better looking then than I am now. I was the feminist that men liked. As if! As if I gave a shit!”

 

Germaine Greer has a book in progress with Melbourne University Press, On Rage. I can’t wait.

 

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