news | action | information | events | contact | search | news | action | information | events | contact | search |
key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lGreer's civilising force is heading for utopiaBy Chris Johnston
The expatriate feminist icon and academic yesterday launched Whitefella Jump Up, The Shortest Way To Nationhood, her 20,000- word plea for an Aboriginal republic in the latest Quarterly Essay journal. It was, she wrote, a "modest suggestion" not a definitive study. But it is also her utopian vision for Australia where the white population is being slowly seduced into an Aboriginal "web of dreams". It has already been branded nonsense by Aboriginal leader Michael Mansell. He said black and white Australia had always been two nations. Not that such barbs would put Greer off. She's made a life, and a household name, out of contrary idealism. "Get out of your car," she said. "Get off your trail bike, get out of your four-wheel-drive, which you smash down the foreshore with, get out of the vehicle, get off the Jet-ski, stop racing around. Sit down. Sit on the ground. And think. Think about it. Think about the country." In his introduction to her piece, Quarterly Essay editor Peter Craven wrote that the image of humbly sitting on Australian soil recalled Cathy Freeman after her win at the Sydney Olympics. "Didn't we know, without thinking about it, that she was one of our own . . . (that she) knew the land as her own?" Greer, 64, said Whitefella Jump Up inverted the normal way of thinking. It was the same idea that spawned The Female Eunuch, her groundbreaking treatise on feminism in 1970. "People were going about saying women have been sexualised, they've been sent back into the home, they're not allowed to be thrusting and forward looking and dynamic and energetic, and I just thought it was absolutely the wrong way around because we had been de-sexualised, we had been castrated." She said "instead of thinking about the blackfella as the whitefella's problem", turn the accepted wisdom around and realise that "the whitefella is the unmanageable one. We are the ones in terminal social decline". Evidence of this were environmental degradation and salinity, ignorance of Australia's biodiversity, the Government's "renegade" stance on the Kyoto protocol on global warming and uranium mining at Jabiluka. She also blamed migrants' sadness. "The problem is that we're not at home. We always think of using the country as if it existed for an ulterior purpose." To Greer things like the male drinking culture, the white view of the outback as empty and even "misunderstanding" Aboriginal art were symptoms of a greater malaise. But now white Australia was being drawn closer to black Australia. Many white traits - egalitarianism, evasiveness and social segregation of the sexes - were due to contact with Aborigines. Mr Craven said at yesterday's launch that the essay would "set the cat amongst the pigeons". "I can't remember the first time I said to myself Australia is an Aboriginal country," Greer said. "I think I always knew it. Aboriginals have been struggling to civilise us for 200 years." Source:The Age Greer's latest: it's time to reclaim our Aboriginality 6 September 2003 - Germaine Greer has a new mission: to get white Australians to embrace their inner Aboriginal. Go ahead, call her barmy, she's ready for it. Gabriella Coslovich reports. This time last year, the irrepressible Germaine Greer was invoking women to don black burqas in protest against the prospect of Australia joining the war on Iraq. Predictably, the proposal made headlines; perhaps just as predictably it failed to activate the nation's women, who showed more enthusiasm for actor Kerry Armstrong's later call to rally for peace while wearing bras on the outside. This year's message brought to you by Greer is guaranteed to cause as much controversy. The outspoken academic is now urging "whitefellas" to embrace their Aboriginality, to look unflinchingly into the mirror and admit and affirm: "I live in an Aboriginal country." In her utopian essay, Greer asserts that "Australia will be truly self- governing and independent only when it has recognised its inherent and ineradicable Aboriginality". Reclaiming our Aboriginality and becoming an Aboriginal republic is the path to salvation, the way forward to a more meaningful existence, living in harmony with our fellow Australians and our environment, and an escape from our toxic alignment with "proto American, secular, acquisitive, hedonistic insouciance". So Greer argues in typically provocative fashion, favouring emotive effect over logic, in her essay Whitefella Jump Up, The Shortest Way to Nationhood, in the latest issue of the journal Quarterly Essay, to be launched on Monday with the expatriate professor in attendance. Anticipating the guffaws of indignation and disbelief, Greer beats her critics to the table, acknowledging she will be denounced as having lost her marbles. On that point at least, she is spot on. Michael Mansell, former president of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, says Greer's vision could not be more misguided. "Her theory is so out of this world it's not likely to be given any credibility," Mansell said yesterday. "It's is so unreal, it's so remote and its foundation is so flawed. It's like saying the state of Israel is really the state of Palestine. Australia has never embraced Aboriginal society, it has fundamentally rejected it in every form." It is not the first time that Greer has campaigned for an Aboriginal republic. Two years ago she told a Brisbane conference she would spend the rest of her life trying to turn Australia into an Aboriginal nation. In her wide-ranging, 20,000 word essay, Greer makes her case for the move, arguing that only as an Aboriginal country will Australia "free itself from its spurious identification with the WASP 'axis of evil' ". She expounds on the white settlers' mismanagement of the land, which she compares with his early exploitation of Aboriginal women. She criticises whitefellas' failure to learn from the continent's ancient caretakers and takes swipes at mining companies, the Anglo-Celtic hegemony that belies the nation's cultural diversity, and laments the leadership that is our present lot - branding it "the eternal flunkydom". Greer also argues that the whitefellas' legendary egalitarianism, evasiveness, accent and even segregation of the sexes at the barbie or booze-up is the result of contact with the country's original inhabitants - a theory Mansell dismisses as utter bosh. "It is nonsense to say Aboriginal society has influenced the development of white society. There is not a shred of evidence to support that notion," he says. Philip Ruddock, Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister, however, was a little more receptive to Greer's theories about the influence of Aborigines on whitefellas. "I think she reads more into it than I suspect is real, but I would agree that in any society the aspects of one culture impact on those of different cultures and people share and benefit from that over time," he said. Clip from Sydney Morning Herald related links :
|
its one year on from the Australian Governments controversial intervention into NT Indigenous communities
action Roll back, listen to Indigenous community voices speaking about the intervention |
|
