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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lThoughts Germaine: our future is AboriginalBy Peter Ellinsen in Brisbane Now, at 62, the expatriate writer and intellectual bomb thrower Germaine Greer is fighting the biggest battle of all. As she made clear in Brisbane yesterday, the project that will occupy the rest of her life is trying to turn Australia into an Aboriginal nation. It is, she said, the only thing that will stop Australia becoming a country of apartheid, and Australians being trapped in a "strange nightmare" of alienation. "We are caught up in a system as bad as apartheid, and [unless we change] will become pariahs on the planet," Greer said. "Why can't we stop tearing the entrails out of the country? ... We have to understand what sacredness is." Greer said reconciliation actually meant telling Aborigines to "get over it" and was "bullshit". A treaty was needed, but only as part of a process of incorporating Aboriginality as the true Australian identity. "It means nothing to say you are sorry," she said. "But it means a huge amount not to say it." The author of The Female Eunuch has not abandoned feminism, but she is placing it in an Aboriginal context. Brushing aside questions about the feminist author Doris Lessing's recent fears that feminism was damaging men, she said Aboriginality was the next phase of feminism. "Doris thinks men are having a hard time. Well all I can say is it's about time," Greer said. "They're still not being murdered by their spouses. They're insecure. We've been insecure all our lives." Addressing a capacity audience at a conference on ideas, Greer said Aboriginality "can teach women how to avoid being stooges of male society. I'm not denying Aboriginal women now are taking a tremendous amount of punishment. I'm not saying there is no sexism in Aboriginal society. But it has some structures of female empowerment that we can learn from." Greer, who was "adopted" by a group of Aboriginal women in Fitzroy, Melbourne, some years ago, now asks for Aborigines to welcome her when she arrives from London. Yesterday she denied, however, saying she would not come to Australia without permission of Aborigines. "What I said was that I recognise this is an Aboriginal country. I want to persuade people that this is not a terrifying idea. It does not mean appropriating the Hills Hoist in the backyard." Speaking without notes, and just before asking the media to leave the auditorium (she said the talk was more private that way), she thundered that white guilt was destroying Australia. "Settlement was a dreadful, dreadful, mistake, a mistake we continue to pay for. It makes us feel guilty. I am concerned for my own [white] people who can't consume this toxic cocktail of guilt. Aboriginal people are stronger than we are." Australia was neither British nor American. Its essence, she said, was Aboriginal, and Aboriginality could teach the population what it is to be Australian. Aborigines were already doing so, but the whites were not getting it. Aboriginal painting, she said, was a map of a "holistic" way to live, but whites saw it as a way to make money. Greer's solution included some lateral thinking, such as making the Aboriginal community a senate. After all, Britain's House of Lords, she said, is made up of non-elected people who go "hunting and fishing ... and are often drunk". "We have got to change. First thing is to ask for recognition from the traditional owners - a treaty - but do it differently. We might end up with a diagram of a treaty, not words. It must be done with humility. The masculine power structure can't do this because it can't bend." The younger generation was "getting it", she said. "I sometimes think Aboriginality surrounds us like a gas, and our children are breathing it. They take care of the ecosystem, and move from caring about property to caring about the right to dream. They don't want to work for IBM, all they own is a surfboard and beat-up vehicle, and go to strange ceremonies on the foreshore." Greer said the change was still a long way off, but already underway. "Something is happening to us all. We don't want to be Pacific tigers. Australians are always talking about being relaxed. What does that mean? It means wanting to be hunter gatherers, egos assuming a different structure. There is a power in the land, it is very old, very holy, and full of extraordinary messages." Her revolution means less consumerism, and more learning to do things the Aboriginal way. "We need to learn to sit side by side listening, responding, taking time over something important." She was heartened by the fragmentation of the media, which meant more voices being heard. "The treaty is just the beginning." It was necessary to stop treating Aborigines as an "exotic sideshow" and "recover from our spiritual blight". "Our kids use drugs because there is no other adventure." The audience loved it. As Maureen Hancock, a teacher, said, "Germaine is not exactly a role model, but we have all thought the things she says. "She's an icon." related links :
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