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| home | news lGermaine GreerTRANSCRIPT 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”. Nell Schofield: Germaine, thanks for joining us on Arts Today. It was widely reported here that you cried at the Australia Week Literary Forum a few weeks ago. Germaine Greer: How annoying. Nell Schofield: Well what exactly was it that moved you to tears? Germaine Greer: Well I get done in on this question whenever I think about it; I just can’t believe that the most egalitarian, the fairest-minded people in the world, cannot see that you can’t go on treating the Aborigine question in this way; and they’re getting themselves a lousy reputation, and it’s going to get a lot worse; they’re going to become the new South Africa, and they just don’t get it. And one of the reasons why they don’t get it is because you’ve got someone called John Howard running the country. Nell Schofield: Frank Moorehouse has said that you hijacked the Forum. Germaine Greer: Who would know what Frank Moorehouse thought the Forum was about? I barely know who Frank Moorehouse is, although I’ve been told that he’s an ancient sparring partner of mine. As far as I’m concerned he’s a novelist I’ve never read. I don’t know what that Forum was supposed to be about; it was one of the worst organised things I’ve ever been involved with. First of all they told me that John Pilger would be there and that Carmen Khalil would be chairing. Then it was chaired by somebody completely different who I’ve never heard of. And Phillip Knightley had to stand in for John Pilger, like everything to do with this nonsensical 100th anniversary of the Commonwealth here in London, it was a ludicrous afterthought. I wasn’t told that I was taking part in any jokey session and supposed to be making a jokey after dinner speech. That was Moorehouse’s idea, because that's all he's got to offer. But I wouldn’t have done a chore like that unless I thought I could make a statement about the Aborigines. That was my only reason for doing something so unrewarding. Nell Schofield: So you levelled some pretty severe criticism at Australians and our treatment of Aborigines; do you accuse all of us living here of being guilty of sort of unforgivable negligence? Germaine Greer: Well that’s a funny way to put that question. All of you living where? Isn't Australia supposed to be a democracy, isn’t this how you advertise yourselves? Don’t you get the government you deserve? And the government is only following anti-Aboriginal policies, refusing to say Sorry, for example, which wouldn’t cost them a dime, because it thinks it’s the way to gain popular support. That’s why a government like John Howard’s does anything; that’s why they have no courage to do anything daring at all, because they’re desperately afraid pf alienating the electorate. It would have made no difference at all if John Howard had said Sorry; it wouldn’t have mattered a tinker’s damn. What made a difference was refusing to say Sorry. That was so unnecessary, so gratuitous that it had to be a display of animosity towards Aborigines which was picking up on the lowest common denominator of Australian politics. And the whole business about celebrating the Commonwealth in London with a ludicrous banquet at the Guildhall was because the Monarchists won the referendum. So Howard thinks the way to go is to imitate Robert Menzies and swarm up the behinds of a German family living in a palace in London. This is ludicrous behaviour. None of it is principled. It is all flying by the seats of their pants. And Australians deserve better from that, that’s one reason why you would cry about it. I mean it is the defeat of democracy, it doesn’t work. The scum rises to the top, which is what you’ve got, and decent people want nothing to do with it. Nell Schofield: There’s been other criticism about your stance, along the lines that reconciliation is work that must be done here, not in ‘comfortable exile’. I was wondering how comfortable your exile actually is. Germaine Greer: I’m not interested in reconciliation. Whose idea is that? As far as I can see, reconciliation means that Aborigines get reconciled to their fate. That’s what happens all the time. I mean I’ve been asked to sit on nonsensical Boards, involving all kinds of pawns of the Government to make it look as if the Government is doing something, because they’ve got to try and keep everybody happy, got to be all things to all men, and I’ve had to ring around the people I know who are on the ground and say, ‘Who are these people and what is this Board?’ and in the end have decided to have nothing to do with it. If I was in Australia—let’s be quite clear about this—if I was in Australia, first of all I couldn’t earn a living; I wouldn’t have a job. I have been offered jobs all round the world but here in Australia. What am I supposed to live on in Australia, the dole? I’m 61, I don’t think I’m eligible for the dole for too long. Nell Schofield: I’m sure there’d be a speakers’ circuit you could go on and earn a bit of cash. Germaine Greer: You’re sure of that, are you? There are speakers’ circuits now, Nell. There are speakers’ circuits now, and they know exactly where I live. Do you think they write to me? Nell Schofield: And they don’t make any approaches? Germaine Greer: No, of course not. I get approaches from Canada, approaches from the United States, approaches from Japan, but I don’t get any from Australia. I’ve never been offered an academic job in Australia. I’ve never been advised that a job was being advertised. And also, I mean every time Australians want me to do something, they want me to do it for nothing, and they say, ‘Oh, but you could do it for publicity.’ They don’t seem to understand I don’t even enjoy the publicity I’ve got. There are various ways of handling this, and one is to make a noise somewhere else. As I have an international following, which I wouldn’t have if I was in Australia, I can actually alert more people, and there are various ways of doing this. I mean I think you’ll find that British black trade unionists are quite interested in how the Aborigines will be involved in the Olympics, and will be wanting to know some answers. And I think you’ll find that all kinds of things are going to happen during the Olympics, at least I hope so, where people are just going to say, ‘Hang on, haven’t you got Aborigines here?’ I mean what Australians say to me are things like, ‘Oh, you know, the Australian blacks are the richest blacks in the world; they don’t have to work, you know, they live on kid money, they call it, they live on the dole, you know, and they have a great life, and we take care of them. And look at blacks in Ethiopia or blacks in Zimbabwe, or blacks in Sierre Leone, you know, they couldn’t run a country to save their lives. We’re taking care of these people, and if they don’t know how to make use of the help we give them, then bugger them.’ There are some very simple things that need to be done that wouldn’t even cost the people anything, and the only reason why they’re not done is because the Government is playing the xenophobic card, without wanting to make it obvious, without wanting to say so in as many words. That’s what they’re playing to. And it’s getting worse. Nell Schofield: What sort of things do you think could be done, simple things could be done towards reconciliation? Germaine Greer: Well don’t make me a supporter of reconciliation. It’s a bullshit word that’s meant to conceal real facts. If we’re talking about some sort of justice for the Aborigines, then the first thing we need to do is to sign the treaty with them. And I hoped that we were going to do that in millennial year, because it would have been a good move. Years were spent on drafting a treaty, and there is a draft treaty around, and as long as you’ve got a working document, you can just revivify it, sit down, start talking, go to the various communities. The difficulty is of course that in order to deal with Aborigine people we have to turn them into something that we can deal with, namely a single nation. We can’t have them existing in their separate nations as they prefer to do and as they always have done. So it’s very hard work to actually bring together some sort of consensus among the Aboriginal people, because we’ve managed very skilfully to divide them and to set them against each other, and also to destroy their own ethnic integrity. But they can still do this, it can still be done. It takes patience and it takes dedication. And it’s do-able, and you’ve got people who can do it. But I spoke to Malcolm Turnbull about the treaty years ago, five years Nell Schofield: Yes, eat kangaroos. Germaine Greer: Well, you could grow kangaroos, surely. Nell Schofield: Yes, farm them. You said in your address, and you’ve said it before, that you won’t come back to live in Australia until the Government negotiates a treaty with Aboriginal Australians and that your archive won’t come back here either until such a treaty is signed. So what sort of content do you think that treaty should contain? Germaine Greer: I don’t know. I don’t want to tell the Aborigines what they should want. And I don’t want to dictate to the Australian people either. I think, first of all, it has to recognise the Aborigines as the original inhabitants of the country, and it’s got to recognise the fact that their country was taken over with no war being fought and no peace being agreed. There are lots of people working on this now, working on the question for example in Canada, which resulted in a third of the country going back to the Inuits, which is the kind of big thing that you have to do. Now we’ve only given back tiny bits of land. We haven’t even accepted the notion of head rights, as the moral right of the Aborigine people, which the Americans did in the 1920s. We thought Mabo was such a breakthrough, Mabo was 70 years out of date in terms of modern legislation about the rights of indigenous people. Nell Schofield: You’re very passionate about this – Germaine Greer: So I don’t know, I’m not going to dictate about the treaty, but there is a treaty. I’d quite like to see it published, I’d quite like to read it myself, I’ve never seen it. And I’d quite like to see what Aboriginal leaders think about it, and what input they would like. It may be that they say that you have to sign different treaties with every single group in every single area. We can do that. Christ, it’s easy. It is so easy, that’s what does me in. And we just won’t do it. Nell Schofield: When did you first become involved with indigenous issues? Germaine Greer: Well like you, I guess, I grew up not knowing a single Aborigine. Nell Schofield: That’s right. Germaine Greer: I’d never met an Aborigine, and I thought they were kind of living fossils that drifted around somewhere in the dead heart, busily dying for my convenience. Then when I went to Sydney in what? ’60 I guess, I saw a few black people drifting around the dock area, black prostitutes who always seemed to me to have been extraordinarily beaten up, they always seemed to have plaster on some part of their bodies. But I didn’t think about it, like any of us, I just thought Oh, you know, there’s one, as you might say 'There’s a blue-tongued lizard'. I didn’t think about it at all. And then I came to England and got involved with other things, like the war in Vietnam and then with anti-apartheid and then was amazed to discover that Australians had hit the streets to demonstrate against the South African Rugby Team, and I thought, What? You’ve got successful apartheid, Australia, you’ve driven your blacks out to the back of beyond, you’ve destroyed them where they were actually in places that effectively inconvenienced you. So then when I came back I had a different attitude altogether. I thought, I cannot live, I couldn’t live in England where I’d been on a Commonwealth Scholarship, with African students alongside me asking me about Australia, and me not knowing. So when I came back in ’71, I went to the Todd River, and in those days you could camp in the Todd River. And I camped with the people in the Todd River and discovered how amazing they are, how extraordinary, and how important they are to Australia. I mean the thing that makes us Australian I reckon is Aboriginality. You look at our kids running round. All they own is a surfboard and a beaten up wagon and loincloth. Aboriginality will take over eventually. Nell Schofield: What’s been the most confronting experience that you’ve had with indigenous Australia? I mean what was it that made you so aware of this problem in this country? Germaine Greer: A lot. Many things. But one of the worst things was when I was staying in the Todd River, I was in the Alice Springs Hotel beer garden when the police made their regular weekly visit at 11 o’clock, or whenever it was, and arrested all the Aborigines, just one after the other, bang, bang, bang, bang, into the wagons. And the Aborigines just stepped into the wagons. And I thought, Hang on, what are they supposed to have done? So then on Monday I went to the Magistrate’s Court, and I sat myself right in the middle of the Magistrate’s Court and looked hard at the Magistrate through the whole proceedings, and everybody who came up before him pleaded guilty, including one woman who’d just got out of prison that morning, and she went into six months hard labour. She’d done three months, and you know, it accumulates, and in she went in her threadbare dress. I can still remember the missing button on the back of the dress. And I was just sitting there, shellshocked, because I had not seen any offence committed. Drunk and disorderly. They’d been sitting in the beer-garden as quiet as mice. I’d actually seen a drunken Irishman beating up on cars in the main street, screaming and howling, and the police had just cautioned him and told him to go home. And here are all these Aborigines on their way to prison. And there was one little tiny woman who said ‘Not guilty’. And the Magistrate said,’ What did you say?’ And she said, ‘Not guilty.’ And she was so nervous, she was shaking like a leaf, and he said, ‘Oh well, stand down, I’ll deal with you later.’ So he sentenced everybody else to prison, and then she came up again, and he said, ‘Now, what’s your story?’ She said, ‘Not guilty’ So he had to call the police to give evidence. So the copper stands up and says, ‘Oh I was proceeding in an easterly direction’, or whatever rubbish, ‘and I came across the defendant being obstropolous’. Nell Schofield: Obstropolous. Germaine Greer: And the Magistrate said, ‘What?’ ‘She was being Nell Schofield: Yes, and I guess 30 years on now, we have mandatory sentencing in the Northern Territory which is the issue that Cherie Booth taking the Australian Government to task over. Germaine Greer: Good on her. Nell Schofield: You mentioned at the Literary Forum that you’d been made an Honorary Aborigine, I’m wondering how this came about. Germaine Greer: Well when I came to Victoria, one year. I do this thing of having the Aborigines greet me, so that I can be admitted into the country, I go through all the other nonsense, the people in shorts and everything. Nell Schofield: The Customs. Germaine Greer: Yes. And then I go and I’m usually met just outside Customs by a group of Aborigines, who belong to the place, they usually try to make contact with the people who actually own the land the airport is built on. You can imagine how rich they’d be if their rights to it were recognised. So that’s sometimes very easy to do, as it is in Queensland for example, where the actual people from the Brisbane Airport area came to meet me, nine of them. The white people would say, ‘Oh, you’ve got to be joking, you won’t get Aborigines out of bed. Your flight comes in at 5 o’clock.’ And they were always there, because that’s the point; to them it’s important. So this time I had to meet women from a Fitzroy drop-in centre. The Victorian Aborigines are so dispersed, it’s very difficult to get any clear picture of what the situation is. So actually they wouldn’t meet me at the airport. I had to go into Fitzroy, and I met them in a bar in Fitzroy, in a café. And we were talking about this, and I was saying - the whole point is that all Australians could be Aborigines. The Aborigines are not racist, the Aborigines would be very prepared to incorporate white people in an Aboriginal system, but we have to be very much more daring than we are, to understand what kind of thing they’re wanting us to do. We never let them tell us, for one thing. Nell Schofield: So when you say that you’re an Honorary Aborigine - Germaine Greer: Well what happened was, it turns out that adoption is very normal in Aborigine society, because they’re a nomadic people and because you need children, and if you don’t have children you can’t survive, when there is infertility for whatever reason, children are very readily adopted, because no-one can have more than one child that cannot keep up walking you see. So if you’ve got two littlies, you look to give one away, and you look for somebody who needs one. So they said, ‘Oh, we’ll adopt you.’ And I said, ‘You will?’ They said, ‘Sure.’ And I said, ‘Well what do you have to do?’ They said, ‘That’s what we have to do, we’ve adopted you. It’s done.’ Nell Schofield: So did you get a skin name? Germaine Greer: No, I don’t think so. I think I would have had to go and - I might have had to be initiated, that might have hurt. I know somebody who’s being initiated at the moment in the Northern Territory, and he’s saying it’s a bit uncomfortable; he doesn’t want to go into details. Nell Schofield: No. Secret sacred men’s business. Germaine Greer: Yes, but also I’d have to go back and sort it out, I mean I’ve been invited by another group who live on their land on the south coast of New South Wales, as a member of their community. I’ve looked at what happens to white people who try to work out their own problems by devoting themselves to Aborigines and it’s a difficult situation. It still smacks of imperialism to me. I don’t think I can move in; I mean I don’t want to be like those transsexuals who have their operation on Monday and start talking for women on Tuesday. I don’t know what it is to be an Aborigine, and I would never ever, ever, speak as an Aborigine. I may decide though, I mean when it comes to decisions time, I may decide that that’s what I should do, that I should go and live somewhere charming, like Papunya and die there, because I do think the situation’s desperate. Nell Schofield: Just going back a few years, you wrote quite an inflammatory piece about the Aboriginal art industry, claiming that much of the work being done was crass, flashy, predictable and artless. Germaine Greer: Heartless. Nell Schofield: Yes, heartless, and compared the market to that of the Germaine Greer: Actually that’s not what that article said. I mean that article, first of all, tried to set out that all Aboriginal art is a negotiation between Aborigines and Gubbas of one sort or another. One of the things they’re trying to do is to teach us. They’re having to adopt a kind of graphic language that we would understand, but there is no such thing as authentic Aboriginal art, in the sense that it is a spontaneous expression of their culture, even paintings on bark from Arnhem Land are trade objects. And to understand what’s going on, you have to understand them as such. If you treat them as objects of ethnological interest, you’re just getting it wrong. And it hasn’t helped that there’s been this map reading approach to Aboriginal art, saying that This is a this, and This is a that, and This is where the woman walked, and This is where her dog was, and so on. Which was the fashionable way of dealing with it in the days when Geoffrey Bardon was important. There is a lot of wonderful Aboriginal art, but there’s also a lot of very perfunctory Aboriginal art, and giving it this sort of cash value is kind of mad. The Aborigines think it’s funny, and you can’t blame them for taking advantage of it. Some of the artists are great, there’s no question that Rover Thomas is a great artist, and there’s no question that Emily Ngwarreye was a great artist, but she was abused by dealers. The situation is so peculiar: you’ve got people going into the outback with ready-made canvases, already painted with their own ground colour, with their own notions of what colour the artist should use and how they’re going to display those canvases. There’s far too much white man in it at that level. And the Aborigines don’t mind. You want it, they’ll do it for you, and they’ll do it for the amount of money they think it’s worth, you know. They think it’s hysterical that something’s being sold for 45,000-pounds or dollars, or whatever. And it’s not that anybody’s criminal, or anybody’s ganging up to deceive—except I think that the dealers are—it’s that the people are still trying to negotiate. Some have a very strong inner vision like Rover Thomas or like Emily, and others just don’t. And that’s how it goes. Nell Schofield: Yes, and I guess we can’t say that all artists are the same, whatever group they belong to, whatever country they come from. Germaine Greer: Absolutely, but you’ve got a problem you see, because the iconic language that they’re using has been developed in a strange way, as part of a collective, and that’s how it seemed to begin, with the honey ant dreaming of Papunya for example. There are people who own the dreaming that is being painted, and their claim to that material has to be recognised. So from the beginning, the attempt was to organises the artisits into co-operatives. But the dealers didn’t want to do this, the dealers want to sell names, and the dealers fostered the names, and the names themselves learnt that they could snap off from the group and they could have all the money to themselves and their immediate kin group, which is what they did. And then when they went back to their out stations, that system broke down, so that now you’ve still got the struggle to market the work as the workers’ collectivity which is in head-on collision with the attempt to create names. And there is enough difference in the talent, obviously, of the people, for that to be do-able from the dealers’ point of view. Nell Schofield: Yes, I think there’s a sense that also individual artists getting recognition for their work sometimes is a bit of a shame job, when they’re signalled out of the collective. And anyway, the funds that do come back in do get shared around, don’t they? Germaine Greer: Well that’s what everybody was so shocked by with Emily, because you know, Emily lived and died on the same old iron bedstead, under the same old tarpaulin. Nell Schofield: Happy there, though, in her country. Germaine Greer: Even though she was earning huge amounts of money. Well I don’t know, because you see the other thing is that you are hooked into your kin group, and Emily was as hooked in as anybody. Nell Schofield: And in control. Germaine Greer: Well not in control, that’s not true, and her kin group was in trouble. Because Utopia is one of the places where alcohol is a nightmare, frankly. And we don’t talk about it much because it doesn’t help the Aborigine cause in the great wide world, because they think the Aborigine should be living like saints, or something. The women do live like saints as far as I can tell; they pray and sing and dance and paint, and make medicaments, and go hunting, and have an incredible lifestyle, but the men are a disaster. And Emily’s menfolk were a disaster too. Nell Schofield: They’re not all unwitting victims though, of the commerce of the market, are they? I mean there are a lot of artists who are in control of their destiny there, and they will paint to get the money to buy whatever they want, and to give themselves autonomy. So to sort of say that the art market is ruling them and that the white - Germaine Greer: Now who said that? I didn’t say that. Nell Schofield: But by saying that it’s controlled by the dealers who come in with their canvases and give them paintbrushes and colours - Germaine Greer: The word ‘control’ wasn’t used by me. You can go into a very well-known Aboriginal art gallery in Melbourne and there are Emilys for sale there that are awful, nightmare. And all that’s going to happen is that Emily’s reputation is going to take a pounding. And it’s the same, I guess, with any artist. Look, I saw the same thing happen with a young Sydney artist, whom you and I both know, who had a sale when he was very young, very clever, which was hyped by his promoter who stuck Sold dots on every single picture, even though some of them weren’t even dry and were certainly not sold. And it completely derailed him as an artist; he thought it was easier than in fact it is. You’ve got to have a very, very strong inner drive to remain uncorrupted, as I think Rover Thomas did. But look at the Rover Thomas industry now, and look at the imitation Rovers that are being done by other members of his kin group that are working that ticket. I mean some of these are downright bad, and some of them are not. And it’s a very difficult line to draw. I would very much question though, the notion that the Aborigines who are successful, I mean if you think in terms, well I don’t want to name names, but a name that comes to mind is Clifford Possum Tchapalljari. Now Clifford does these huge pictures and Clifford is everybody’s favourite Aborigine. He panhandles like a genius, he knows how to work with dealers and the market and the public, and he still goes back to his out station. My problem is, I think the work is awful. Nell Schofield: Well there’s been big controversy around the work of Clifford Possum recently, because there’s been claims of fraudulent work in it, and there’s a whole new issue that’s been brought up about the collaborative nature of a lot of Aboriginal art. But you know, he might not do the whole thing. Germaine Greer: Well you wouldn’t paint all those stripes if you didn’t have to, now, would you? You wouldn’t do all that ditzing around. Neither did - Nell Schofield: And also having an apprentice. Germaine Greer: This is what’s ridiculous about Australia for goodness’ sake. I mean if they knew anything about the history of art they would know that Rubens always used assistants. It’s normal to use an assistant. Nell Schofield: That’s right. But I’m thinking that the growth in the Aboriginal art market surely has had a positive impact on the way whitefellas look at Aboriginal culture and open their minds and start to understand a different view of the country. Germaine Greer: Well it depends how many people think it’s rubbish. Australians understand so little about art anyway, I mean half of them think that modern art is abstract art. I think actually it looks to the people who think the Aborigines are getting away with murder, it looks like another fraud on the public and it looks as if a lot of pinko Liberals have been ripped off. That’s not true as it happens. Of course, the fact is much more complicated than that. But in the end the people who’ve made the money haven’t been the Aborigines you know. I mean there’s a famous story about Emily giving one of her nephews a blue Ford that had to be bought for him; it cost, I don’t know, it wasn’t that smart a car, it was what? $7,000 or something. And a month later he’d sold it for $500. And somebody said, ‘Well what did you do that for, it was worth a lot more than $500.’ And he said, ‘But I only needed $500.’ That’s what you’re up against. Nell Schofield: It’s a different economy, yes. Germaine Greer: Aborigines don’t think things have intrinsic value, and they’re right, of course. That’s what Australians need to understand, and our kids know they’re right. Nell Schofield: Do you have much Aboriginal art on your walls? Germaine Greer: Yes I do actually. Quite a lot. But yes, I’ve got a huge picture at the moment, which I - Nell Schofield: Who’s that by? Germaine Greer: By Alice Nampijimpa I bought it from the Telstra exhibition. It’s huge, blue and pink thing, everyone hates it. Nell Schofield: But you love it. Germaine Greer: It’s a swamp, it’s a picture of a swamp. I think I love it. The problem with Aboriginal art is that it crowds everything else off the wall. You wouldn’t want to hang it next to a Rembrandt. Well that’s not the only thing I’ve got, I’ve got lots of pieces, and some are minor little things, I’ve got lots of drawings and lots of prints, and I give them away to people. There are some really wonderful works, but as usual, I mean the art market’s mostly crap but there’s a bit of good stuff in it. And the same is true of Aboriginal art. But what I was writing that piece about was to try and stop this nonsense of people standing on their hind legs deciding what was authentic and what wasn’t. It’s all inauthentic in that sense. Nell Schofield: Or maybe even all authentic and completely contemporary and an expression of someone’s state of mind at any given moment. Germaine Greer: I don’t think it’s got anything to do with states of mind, to tell you the truth. No, I don’t. I do tend to the view that it’s haptic. One of the most interesting conversations I had with Aborigines about painting was, I was asking about the ground colour, said 'Always black one, why black one? No white ones?' ‘No, no good. Black one.’ I realised that what was happening was just like body painting, you actually eliminate the identity of the individual by putting the totemic marks on that person. That’s not the right way to put it, but you make that person become the thing they are in the dreaming, and the thing that they represent, and you made vivid their relationship with the countryside by placing this dazzle on the black background. And that what’s really going on in Aboriginal art is the same as what goes on in Aboriginal culture, that it’s a culture of avoidance. If you want to talk to somebody you don’t confront him and stare in his face You sit beside him and look in the same direction, and talk as if there was no particular direction in your conversation, it was just happening. And the art is like that too. And that it’s really a question of secrets. So finally I said, ‘Oh, so the important thing about the painting is not the dots, not the stripes, it’s the black underneath.’ And they all said, ‘That’s right.’ And I thought – and we’ve got such a long way to go before we’ll understand these people. But they’re making all the effort so far, my goodness, all of their painting is an effort to explain something to us, that there are certain questions that are inappropriate to ask and there are certain things that have to be understood and taken as given. And they are things like blackness. Nell Schofield: There have been some very strong indigenous theatrical works staged as part of the recent centenary of Federation in London. There’s been ‘Stolen’ and ‘Box the Pony’ and ‘White Baptist Abba Fan’; how powerful do you think these sort of artistic expressions are? Can they effect change? Germaine Greer: Not by themselves, they can’t. I didn’t get to see any of them, for various reasons. But the reaction in the English press was not as - they just didn’t make enough fuss about it really. Which is a shame. I mean I would have thought, if it had been anything else you know, if it had been some bloody French circus or something, we would have had the faces of the performers on every newspaper, but, there you go. I think it was all part of it being a bit of a hurry, I mean all of our colour supplements go to press so far in advance, and I don’t think any of these things had been tabled by that time. Nell Schofield: There’s been a strong push here, a big groundswell of support, for want of a better word, reconciliation, justice for Aboriginal people, evidenced in things like Sorry books and Sorry days and the recent Sorry march. How important do you think events like these really are in the journey towards justice for Aboriginal people? Germaine Greer: Very important I think. They’re important. I’ve never been sure about marching. Marching’s a great way of exhausting people for no particular purpose. Nell Schofield: I remember marching with you in feminist marches in the ‘70s. Germaine Greer: Yes, but I thought it was bullshit then. I think it probably still is. But it’s a good thing for the government to be made to see that there is a body of feeling there. But then they can always say, Well that’s it, we saw it, and it’s nothing to worry about. You know, it didn’t bring the city to a standstill, and we all know what kind of people they are. And they’re not going to be people who even bother to vote, most of them. So we can probably discount it. But still it’s important for the Aborigines that they see this, and it’s important for the kids themselves, and the people involved that they do this. And it’s important for people like the Dobsons, you know, who are worn out of a lifetime of struggle. And have been saying very bitterly in the last few years that they’ve got absolutely bloody nowhere. And then for something like that to happen, it’s important for them. Nell Schofield: Do you feel sorry, or guilty perhaps? Germaine Greer: Sure I do. But I feel sorry in a different way. I feel sorry that I cannot claim my country. I was born there, but I don’t belong there, I have no right to be there, and neither did my unfortunate ancestors, all of whom were unfortunate people. They’re just a story of such sadness. After the stupid bicentennial, everyone was lurching around talking about as if the colonisation of Australia had just been a huge party, when in fact it was a dreadful ordeal and most of the people originally involved died, and died young, or died of bush typhus or some damn thing, not to mention the Aborigines who were decimated by our western diseases. We don’t even know about those people, they vanished without causing us any difficulties at all. And the thought of these people who themselves had been driven off their crofts into Scotland and off their farms in the west country, and my Swiss ancestor being sold out by his brothers and sisters and sent off to die on the goldfields, and so on and so forth. He didn’t die as it happens, and that’s how I come to be here. But it was all so, so tough, and it breaks my heart that these victims were sent to do war with another lot of victims, and of course they massacred them, they did whatever they could because there was struggle with their survival and many of them lost it anyway. That’s to me, a story of the most terrible sadness. Poor fella my country. Nell Schofield: If there was a treaty negotiated and you did some back, where in Australia would you like to live? Germaine Greer: Probably Northern Territory. I don’t want to live in white suburbia, I spent all my life running away from it. Nell Schofield: OK Germaine Greer, thanks very much for joining us on Arts Today. Germaine Greer: Thank you, Nell. Source: ABC Arts Today related links :
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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 |
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