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July 31, 2004
This is an interesting review of Germaine Greer's Whitefella Jump Up, where she advocates a return to Aboriginality for white as well as black Australians. She envisages an Aboriginal republic run on hunter-gatherer principles, distancing itself from the consumerism - and the wars - of the British and the Americans.
Greer says that whitefella spiritual desolation has its roots in settler guilt. This has created a culture of denial in which whitefellas drink to dull the pain. Furthermore, white Australians are destroying the environment because they know, deep down, that the land is not theirs. Greer says that "If we truly felt that this country was our home...we could not despoil it in this manner."
This is right. Many white Australians do share Greer's unease about their destructive relationship to the land. But, as the reviewer in the New Statesman points out, Australians are hardly the only people in the world seemingly hell-bent on exploiting their country, cutting down its trees, overfishing its oceans, pumping toxins into its air and taking too much water from their rivers.
Nor is whitefella spiritual desolation an Ausralian prerogative, either. The west is full of people suffering from the loss of the spiritual beliefs which sustained their grandparents, and who are attempting to patch over that loss by "borrowing" from whatever ancient tradition happens to be in vogue.
What does a return to Aboriginality as a way to whitefella spiritual desolation mean? Greer, it appears is urging white Australians to embrace a hunter-gatherer culture and eat kangaroo instead of beef. She is not suggesting that they abandon their houses, head into the desert and start digging up witchetty grubs.
Embracing a hunter-gatherer society is an odd approach to the need to develop a dwelling ethics. One that is popular though, in the sense of white people learning from the indigenous people about how to care for their country.
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