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Greer dreams of Aboriginal republic

Compere: Tony Jones
Reporter: Tony Jones

9 September 2003 - Never one to shy away from an argument, Germaine Greer has embarked on her own dreaming. She has written a 78-page essay titled, Whitefella Jump Up. "Jump up" meaning to reach a higher level, to be reborn as Aborigines. Ms Greer wants the Australia she grew up in turned upside down, to become an Aboriginal republic. Tony Jones asked Ms Greer if the essay is just pure whimsy.

TONY JONES: Germaine Greer, how should we read this essay of yours?

I personally took the view that, despite the tone, it must be satirical?

GERMAINE GREER, FEMINIST AND AUTHOR: Did you?

Did you, that's interesting.

No, it's not meant to be satirical at all.

I know it's an odd idea, it's a sort of an upside-down thing, but it's like I said in the beginning of the book, you know, say it to yourself: "I live in an Aboriginal country."

Look at yourself in the mirror and say that and after you've said it a few times, it stops being merely weird and actually becomes interesting.

We know that there's Aboriginal archaeology, we know that there's Aboriginal pharmacopoeia, Aboriginal botanising, we know that there is an Aboriginal presence in every inch of the country.

We know the Birdsville track is an old Aboriginal highway.

We know they colonised their own country.

We know that there was an empire of cultures and that there is not a bit of the country that hasn't been affected by the Aboriginal presence.

We're also beginning to realise that without firestick farming or, as it's now called, fire ecology, we're really facing a pretty grim future because the wild fires will come whether we will or no and despite the insurance market.

We're beginning to understand something about the complexity of the interrelationship between Aborigines and the country.

So actually it's quite liberating to finally say, "Crikey, we're not American,".

That's a relief.

"We're not British," we've always known that.

We're too Irish to have lain down under the British identity.

Maybe we're different because the Aborigines have got at us.

TONY JONES: I'll get to that in more detail later, but the -- what I'm getting at, I suppose, is the central idea that Australia could become an Aboriginal federation.

That we should sit down on the ground, take a good look at ourselves and decide we are in fact an Aboriginal country and become an Aboriginal federation.

It's just not going to happen, is it?

GERMAINE GREER: I must say that this time, coming back to Australia, the Aboriginal presence is much less visible than it was six months ago.

And that's for rather simple and obvious reasons - that so many local authorities have been bringing in "no loitering" orders, forcing people to move on, and the Aborigines have, as usual, obligingly melted away, gone where they were pushed.

Now, they were pushed to Mt Druitt. Fine.

They used to be all over Redfern, they're not all over Redfern anymore.

The actual immediacy of Aborigines, that physical closeness, is less apparent than it was even six months ago.

And Australians are really -- it's becoming clear to me that they just aren't interested.

White Australians, they just couldn't care less.

TONY JONES: And yet you point out yourself in the essay that, in the last census, there were more people identifying themselves as being Aborigines --

GERMAINE GREER: Of Aboriginal decent, that's the expression used in the census.

TONY JONES: ...alright, of Aboriginal decent, than in any time in history?

GERMAINE GREER: Yeah, there's more Aboriginal people now in Australia by that criterion, which is pretty exiguous criterion.

It gives you 1/16th would make you "of Aboriginal decent".

But there would be, by that calculation, more Aborigines in Australia than there were before contact.

The interesting thing to me is that the Aborigines have never insisted on what we might call "pure blood" or even a majority of Aboriginal genes.

They have never excluded fair people from Aboriginality if they wish to be included in Aboriginality.

It is an inclusive set of cultures, ring of cultures, and it was with the Macassans and it was with the Islanders and they're not racist in that sense, and that's tremendously liberating for us, I think.

TONY JONES: Let's go back to the utopia, if you like, Germaine Greer's utopia.

You spell out here --

GERMAINE GREER: I don't think it would utopia.

TONY JONES: An Aboriginal nation wouldn't be utopia?

GERMAINE GREER: No, no --

TONY JONES: You make it sound like something that would be much different or perhaps a lot better than the world we live in now?

GERMAINE GREER: I don't think it would be a utopia.

I think you'd be swapping some very boring problems for some very interesting ones.

TONY JONES: What would it be like?

How would you set it up, what would it be like?

GERMAINE GREER: I don't know the answer to those questions because I'm not in charge of the scheme.

What I'm doing is I'm suggesting an idea.

Supposing we could become a modern hunter-gatherer nation, what would that be like?

How could we do that?

Let's model it.

Let's play games with it, like we play war games.

Let's play this game.

Now we have a war on our hands which Australians are refusing to fight and that's the war against the degradation of the country.

We are still mowing down trees like grass, we're still setting up hugely expensive irrigation schemes where we're too cheap actually to line the channels or use pipes properly and we're still getting screwed on them.

So the whole --

I went to see the St George irrigation project and all I could think was, "Will somebody tell these people to stop!

"For God's sake, stop what you're doing!"

Because they've removed all the cover, they've built these laser-levelled polders everywhere.

The only problem is there's no water in the Balonne River so their cotton crop has failed two years in a row.

They're still going on because they think the rain will come.

"She'll be right, mate.

"We'll still make our million, we just have to yank our belts in a couple of holes."

It's not true.

And even in the short-term, a system like that will result in a disaster.

You will get salination within a lifetime.

But you could also get, if we get heavy rains in November, the whole bang lot, all the stuff they've shifted around into barns and channels, could end up in the bed of the Balonne River.

TONY JONES: Alright, Australia becomes an Aboriginal nation.

That changes, does it?

GERMAINE GREER: Yeah, I think it does.

TONY JONES: How?

GERMAINE GREER: Because we identify with country.

We don't look at the country and say, "How can we make money out of this?"

We actually look at the country and see something that is, in the great Emily's phrase "Awelye".

It's everything there is, everything comes back to here.

My identity, my notion of the world, my notion of morality, it's all based in this.

So that I cannot just swoop in and say, "Hey, there's uranium here, let's dig a big hole and get it out.

"Oops!

"We can't sell it, let's put it back in the hole and pretend that we've gone green."

TONY JONES: Well we could pretend the people in the Northern Territory aren't in fact profiting from the mining of uranium, but they are?

GERMAINE GREER: Wait a minute, wait a minute --

TONY JONES: Go on.

GERMAINE GREER: It depends how you calculate profit.

The traditional owner of Jabiluka wouldn't agree with you.

Money isn't everything, that's one of the things that Aboriginality could teach us.

That money is just money.

You could throw money at a problem, as we know, and just make it worse.

Rich kids are no happier than poor kids.

I think it's arguable that rich kids are even more unhappy than poor kids.

TONY JONES: Let's then look at the other side of the coin, if we can.

It appears that underneath this, there's a sort of contempt for white Australia, what your view of white Australia.

I'll give you one example: It's not the heart of the country, but the 'gubba's heart that is dead, empty of attachment?

GERMAINE GREER: ...to the country, yeah.

That was describing -- remember, the context of that --

TONY JONES: The gubba being white man.

GERMAINE GREER: I'm a gubba, you're a gubba.

But that's southern speak, it's not universal language.

Um, I was actually discussing the fact that we have always characterised the country as hostile, bleak, the aching sky, the relentless seasons, the drought, the drought, the floods, the floods, that we have never really created an image of the country as a sympathetic environment.

We actually have in this country the opposite of the pathetic fallacy, the land does not sorrow with us.

The land is the cause of our sorrow.

And I've always been amazed as I've racketed around the outback at how benign Australia is, really.

And I get really fed up with the endless television programs about the most dangerous reptiles and spiders.

You have to go for miles to meet one and then it's going to run away.

I mean --

TONY JONES: Just like this interview is running away at the moment.

GERMAINE GREER: You see a crocodile and you have to torment the damn thing.

Just leave it alone!

TONY JONES: Alright, here's another one: "My white countrymen appear to be afflicted by an emotional paralysis, a pathological indifference?"

GERMAINE GREER: Yes.

If I say to people, "Do you realise that the richest ecosystem in the world is being threatened by cinnamon fungus", which is in the rising water table, which is wiping out the vascular system of our woody plants, our celleraphyls, "Do you realise that all the most beautiful forests in Australia are afflicted by this pest?"

They go, "Oh, Oh."

They couldn't give a toss.

They could not care about it.

They'll drive around the country, gazing at it on their way to the Birdsville races or the Todd River regatta or whatever, and they won't feel -- as I don't think they feel a stab at the heart that says, "My God, this country is in terrible trouble."

TONY JONES: But leaving that aside, is there something good in white Australians?

Is there something that you can see?

GERMAINE GREER: I think they're the best people in the world, that's why I cry when I say -- when I can't understand the way they behave, I cannot understand their callousness.

Just as I can't understand, really I can't understand, the history wars.

I mean, how insulting to go backwards and forwards about who did the most and who hurt the worst and who started it, and da da de da.

Anybody who doesn't realise that something dreadful befell this country and its inhabitants is just not thinking or feeling.

TONY JONES: Let's stick to that for a moment.

Where do you stand in these history wars, because I know at least at one point in your essay you do suggest that much of first contact was actually very positive for both sides?

GERMAINE GREER: I'm not -- I don't want to overstate that.

The way the Aboriginal groups existed together in this country was by negotiation and diplomacy.

There were message-stick bearers who went ahead of advancing parties, and sometimes there were skirmishes, and sometimes there was a display of force, and so on.

TONY JONES: But were they prepared, do you believe, to accept white settlers?

GERMAINE GREER: Well, it would be an awful lot to expect, wouldn't it?

But they had dealt with foreigners before and they had a system for absorbing foreigners into their web that controlled the whole country.

They were prepared to incorporate the white man, if they could.

But the white man never thought anything of it.

I mean, he always assumed that he was superior, "What do these little animals want?

"And besides they're offering us their women.

"My God, how immoral!"

Not understanding for a moment that what was happening was an attempt to establish relationship, to draw them into the kinship system and all the affines and alleles that belong to that system.

TONY JONES: But it's very different, isn't it, from Henry Reynolds's view of a protracted guerrilla war?

GERMAINE GREER: That happened too.

The two things, it all happened.

Alwelye, remember.

TONY JONES: So both sides of the history wars are right in a way, you're saying?

GERMAINE GREER: Yes, but I have a different view because I think that all the early settlers - all the Anglo Celts who came here - had no choice.

They didn't want to be here and they couldn't escape.

Whether they were my free settler ancestors, who were driven out by poverty and by a family decision to get rid of the least promising individuals by taking their land from them and giving them a ticket to Australia, or whether they were driven out of their crofts and farms, whether they fled before the Irish famine, whether they were my Swiss ancestors, who were shut out of northern Italy when the Austrians closed the border, for all of them, coming to Australia was a soul-deep shattering trauma and then trying to survive was relentless and terrible.

And we still don't know the death toll because so many families kept no record of the person who went to Australia.

Rebuilding that story is very difficult.

If you walk over the goldfields graveyards, you realise that there's a grave under every step and there's no grave stones.

I really think that we were innocent in our crimes against the Aborigines.

We were desperate people, ill-informed, unsupported, thrown on our own devices and ignorant.

What would we know?

If a black person threw a spear at us, to be sure, we shot him.

We weren't going to stand around and talk about it.

TONY JONES: Let's look at one final and key aspect of your essay, which is your suggestion that in fact something central, in fact many central attributes of what we come to call the Australian character, have actually come from Aboriginal people.

That's your view anyway.

Explain it for us, if you can.

GERMAINE GREER: Well, take mateship, for example.

I'm more interested in the aspect of mateship that it is actually one of shared reticence.

Mates don't interrogate each other.

Now Americans do and the English don't have to, because the minute you raise a glass to your lips, they know exactly what income bracket your family was in and when you open your mouth they know what part of the country you come from.

Americans, [in American accent] "Where are you from, what do you do?"

Australians have never done that.

They're beginning to do it now under the malign influence of soap operas, but in fact we don't talk about it, we don't confront people.

We let people have a slippery identity.

We let them have their different sets of nicknames, which fits in very nicely with the Aboriginal way of having a skin name, a name for one side of your moiety and a name for the other and then using your whitefella name when dealing with whitefellas because you don't really want them to know too much about you.

It's none of their business.

The whole Australian thing about "that's none of your business", I think that's an Aboriginal thing.

When I first used to wander around the back blocks and I'd sit down with blackfellas to talk, I soon discovered that you really don't sit and stare at them, like I'm doing at you now, you sit and look in the same direction.

It's very Henry Lawson - you say something every now and then.

And gradually the communication is set up but you also understand what its limits are.

I remember asking about Lang Hancock's early relationship with Aboriginal women and his Aboriginal children.

It was a very funny conversation.

It was conducted in the most elaborate ellipses and never descended into gossip.

It was a very good lesson for me, but a very Australian thing.

TONY JONES: It brings us a full circle, and I will just finish with this note, you say, "The persistent invasion of black Australia passed down our culture as surely as white genes passed into the black genome."

GERMAINE GREER: Yeah, I would agree with that.

Very beautifully read.

TONY JONES: You would have to agree with that since you wrote it?

GERMAINE GREER: I think it's obvious.

I think it's as plain as the nose on your face.

TONY JONES: So we should now all become Aborigines?

GERMAINE GREER: How are we going to be post-colonial any other way?

TONY JONES: How do you suppose Aboriginal people are going to think about this?

GERMAINE GREER: Wait and see.

I'm not going to speak on their behalf.

So far they say things like, "Of course".

They say "Yeah, of course".

One Aboriginal activist came up to me at the launch and said, "I've been waiting years for whitefella to talk that way".

He said, "I've been trying to teach whiteness for years."

TONY JONES: Germaine Greer, I think that's a perfect note to end tonight's interview.

We could go on all night, obviously, but thanks for those provocative, interesting thoughts and thanks for being here today.

GERMAINE GREER: Thank you.

Source:ABC Lateline

Interview: Germaine Greer

Transcript

Reporter: Jana Wendt

September 7, 2003 - Australia's most famous feminist and activist for a myriad of causes, Germaine Greer has taken up the cudgels for Aboriginal Australians in an essay to be published tomorrow. It's called Whitefella Jump Up: the Shortest Way to Nationhood, and makes the controversial suggestion that we become an Aboriginal republic, perhaps known as the Aboriginal Republic of Australia, so that we will all become Aborigines. And living up to her outrageous reputation in this exclusive interview, Germaine Greer also talks to Jana Wendt about her love of good-looking young boys ...

GERMAINE GREER: I live in an Aboriginal country, I was born in an Aboriginal country, I'm third generation born in an Aboriginal country. If I was saying that about France, it would be understood that I was French. If I say it about Australia, could it be understood that I'm Aboriginal? That Australian means something like Aboriginal. It doesn't mean European, certainly doesn't mean white Anglo-Saxon Protestant anymore. Perhaps it means that and if it meant that, what would that mean? What can I do with that idea?

JANA WENDT: OK, but in clear terms, to get a grip on what you're proposing, you are proposing that we consider ourselves to be part of an Aboriginal country, declare ourselves an Aboriginal Republic?

GERMAINE GREER: It would be ridiculous in one sense because Aboriginal is a funny word. It means "there from the beginning". And so it's not like saying you're French or Indian or something. But it seems to me the best word. I mean, there is no reason why you shouldn't reinvent a word. We could see ourselves as identifying with hunter-gatherer peoples. It would be an amazing thing to do.

JANA WENDT: It's an amazing proposition, and you know as well as I do, that people listening to you now saying that will say ‘she's bonkers’.

GERMAINE GREER: Well, that's all right. I don't mind. They've called me mad ever since I was born.

JANA WENDT: But you're suggesting that we reinvent ourselves as a nation of 20 million people, for the sake of 400,000 Aboriginal inhabitants?

GERMAINE GREER: No, no, I didn't say that we'd do it for them. In fact, they may be extremely disobliged by the whole idea.

JANA WENDT: So we're doing it for us?

GERMAINE GREER: Ourselves, we're the people who need to do it.

JANA WENDT: And why do we need to do it?

GERMAINE GREER: I think we will never be at ease with ourselves. It is interesting, isn't it, that I wrote the stuff I wrote in my essay about abuse of alcohol in Australia. Alcohol was used by the settlers as an anodyne. Before they could make anything else they made alcohol. It wasn't just what was being unloaded and being trafficked by John Mcarthur, they were making it in every humpy in the country. What was the pain they were trying to deal with? It was, from one point of view, the pain of not belonging, the pain of not being at home.

JANA WENDT: At the heart of that, at the heart of that dysfunction, is a sense of guilt and shame, that we're in a country that's not our own?

GERMAINE GREER: The thing we cannot admit to because it's so scary. But if I asked people why does it seem to you so strange that we would identify with black Australians, that we would want to insist on a spiritual affinity with them, we wanted to make them, as it were, the typical Australian rather than Paul Hogan or Crocodile Dundee, or whoever. It's interesting in that case you did have an attempt to reintegrate, that he wanted to put out that he was black in some sort of way. Why are you so shocked at that idea? And if you stare at yourself long enough in the mirror you'll realise. The reason why you think "Don't be ridiculous" is because somewhere, right inside you, is a conviction of your own superiority. That we cannot live with.

JANA WENDT: Is that really the reason, or is it the fact that simply by virtue of, sadly, of numbers now, most white Australians have very little to do with black Australians?

GERMAINE GREER: I think they're having more to do with black Australians than they did before. They're everywhere now. Most Australians watch sport, hypnotised by sport, which itself is displacement activity, I think, and how many Aborigines are now the face of Australian sport.

JANA WENDT: You're proposing an Aboriginal Republic, the idea of a Republic was anathema to the majority of Australians. Why would it suddenly become attractive now with the word Aboriginal in front of it?

GERMAINE GREER: I don't think it was anathema to Australians, the idea of a Republic, it just didn't have any substance. It had no more charisma than Malcolm Turnbull and you need a bit more than that.

JANA WENDT: You pitch this new Aboriginal Republic to me now, you're the new Malcolm Turnbull.

GERMAINE GREER: What do you have instead of a Governor-General? It is ludicrous Australia has a Governor-General. I mean, for God's sake, how embarrassed do I have to be for my poor country – a Governor-General. So what you have instead? Well, you have a council of elders. Who are they? They will people versed in the law. What is the law? Well it might be the law of an Aboriginal group. That would be very difficult and divisive. Or it could be a body of law, meaning 'lore' as well as 'law' that is evolved out of an intelligent interaction between Australians of all kinds.

JANA WENDT: You said earlier that we'd be doing this for us, that is for white Australians. What's this going to do for Aboriginal Australians?

GERMAINE GREER: Well, the most important starting point for my essay is that I don't want to problematise Australian Aborigines, I don't want to speak on their behalf, I don't want to exceed my brief. They will do with it what they want. Separatists...

JANA WENDT: Or they won't do it at all, right?

GERMAINE GREER: Well, it probably won't ever happen. It's an idea. Australians don't run with ideas. Most of their ideas are pinched from somewhere else.

JANA WENDT: OK, but rewinding the tape, I ran some of these ideas past Senator Aiden Ridgeway, for instance, and he said – you smile, why?

GERMAINE GREER: Never mind, go on.

JANA WENDT: He said that it struck him that it was something that might make white people feel better about themselves but had no tangible benefit for Aboriginal Australians.

GERMAINE GREER: Doesn't mean any increase in kid money, you're quite right.

JANA WENDT: You're not taking his comments seriously, are you? He is saying that it's going to make us feel – it may make us feel good. But why take away the opportunity of Aboriginal Australians to use their own race as a reason for achieving their aims?

GERMAINE GREER: That's a very strange idea. To use their own race as a means of achieving their aims. I can't use my race as a means of achieving my aim. That would be disgraceful. I can't go about saying I deserve X, Y and Z because I'm part Danish, part Swiss. What nonsense. That is nonsense. And it's the way that Aboriginal politics have gone so far and it's something I don't want to get involved in. But one of the things I thought – one of the things to me is important is that Aboriginal people shouldn't be ripped off by a group of Aboriginal professionals or professional Aboriginalists who get them involved in ruinists and extended court battles over kinds of legal title that are not, as far as I can see, justified.

JANA WENDT: So are you saying that Aboriginal politics itself has been damaging to Aborigines generally?

GERMAINE GREER: I don't want to be heard to say that.

JANA WENDT: But you think it?

GERMAINE GREER: Well, I don't know about Senator Ridgeway, but you have to ask yourself how someone like Geoff Clarke ends up in a position he ended up in and it's the same question, the same post-colonial question that you ask when you say how did Idi Amin end up in the position he was in. This is part of the pathology of colonialism.

JANA WENDT: Now Germaine Greer, you've come with this big idea, big idea...

GERMAINE GREER: Just an idea.

JANA WENDT: ..it's a big idea, I have to ask you about another idea, your forthcoming book on boys. I have to ask – what's the attraction?

GERMAINE GREER: You better read the book, girl. You've read this one.

JANA WENDT: I'd love to, I'd love to. I haven't seen the book but what is the attraction?

GERMAINE GREER: You'll see when you see the book.

JANA WENDT: OK...

GERMAINE GREER: There's 200 illustrations. It's there for all to see.

JANA WENDT: But are we talking post-pubescent boys and admiring their form, is that what we're talking about?

GERMAINE GREER: We're talking about the fact that there is a time in a man's life when he is not yet a man and not still a child, where he maybe more likely than any other time at his life, he may be very, very beautiful. If you look at Russell Crowe today, can you remember what he looked like when he was 18? He was gorgeous.

JANA WENDT: So you prefer the 18-year-old Russell Crowe?

GERMAINE GREER: I think so. And I think any woman of taste would prefer the 18-year-old Russell Crowe.

JANA WENDT: But what is the attraction in this for Dr Greer?

JANA WENDT: Nothing. I mean, nothing more than anything else. Nothing more than the attraction in my rainforest, which is costing me a good deal more blood, sweat and tears than writing the boy book ever did. I mean, you have to be blind not to see that Western art is not predicated on the female nude, it's predicated on the male nude, the nude beardless male. Beardy nude males aren't nearly as cute.

JANA WENDT: Is that so?

GERMAINE GREER: Definitely.

JANA WENDT: When I asked you before what Australians make of you, is this what appears to be wild swinging from a lofty topic like an Aboriginal Republic to boys that sometimes puzzles people?

GERMAINE GREER: Well, the boy book is just quite as lofty a topic, really. It's not actually about perving on boys. This is the Australian spin on it. Again, you know, don't present people with an idea in Australia because they'll just stand on it. So if they want to talk about Germaine Greer's collection of boy pictures they can go right ahead. They happen to be in the greatest art galleries in the world. I don't own any of them.

JANA WENDT: So this is a study in aesthetics more than eye candy?

GERMAINE GREER: What's the difference between aesthetics and eye candy?

JANA WENDT: You tell me, is there no difference?

GERMAINE GREER: Well, if you talk eye candy, you see, you're not talking about something you're going to debauch or abuse. You're talking about looking at something beautiful and saying how beautiful. I think it's a shame that we don't – well, D.H. Lawrence said it before me, why do men wear those awful clothes? Why can't they dress as once they did with, you know, one leg red and one leg green and a little nipped in jacket with a little skirt and big broad shoulders and a little hat cocked on the side of their head. Whatever happened to the beautiful page boys that thronged the streets? Where did they go? They're all slouching around in trousers eight sizes too big with baseball caps on backwards because they're so anxious not to be thought of as beautiful but ever mother knows that her son is beautiful.

JANA WENDT: So bring back the page boys and...

GERMAINE GREER: No, no, I'm not telling people what to do. They can do whatever they like. I'm just pointing out to them something that is already there. I mean, women have – women are going and watching the Chippendales and sticking $10 bills in their G-strings. All right girls, you've got eyes, Now can we show you something really beautiful? Forget the Chippendales – vulgar, pumped up and completely commercial – look at something truly, truly beautiful. Look at the unconscious beauty of a 16-year-old boy. It doesn't mean you're going to rip his pants off or penetrate his bodily orifices. You paint still life without being hungry.

JANA WENDT: Germaine Greer, thank you very much.

related links

• Greer's civilising force is heading for utopia
  9 September 2003 - "The whitefellas", according to Germaine Greer, need to sit down, connect with the country a little, go bush and spend time in it. Then keep on reconsidering its future.
• 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.
• Thoughts Germaine: Our future is Aboriginal
  August 20, 2001 - She has taken on patriarchy, paternalism and the pettiness of playing safe.Now, at 62, the expatriate writer and intellectual bomb thrower Germaine Greer is fighting the biggest battle of all.
• Germaine Greer
  25 July, 2000 - They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but sometimes the view from afar just makes the faults appear that much deeper. This seems to be the case for ex-pat Professor Germaine Greer, whose recent tearful outburst at a literary forum in London left no doubt as to what she currently thinks Australia's stance on indigenous rights. Speaking to an audience of 400 people, Professor Greer said that she had wanted to leave “white Australia” ever since she could think clearly and that her return to this country over the years has been exclusively to “black Australia”.
• Germaine Greer slams "cynical" plan to extinguish Aboriginal land rights
  November 11, 1997 - Dr Germaine Greer spoke out yesterday against an Australian Government plan which will leave most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples without any meaningful rights to their ancestral lands.

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