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August 1, 2004
Another English review of Germaine Greer's recent Whitefella Jump Up. It says that the book is Germaine Greer's brilliant and original - but highly provocative - solution to Australia's problems. If we grant her account of something has gone terribly wrong with her Australia (native country): --the trashing the environment, being a racist settler culture and the white culture being spiritually desolate.
On this English interpretation Greer's suggestion white Australians adopt a "hunter-gatherer lifestyle means that Greer:
'...wants every Australian whitefella and whitesheila to sit down in front of a mirror and say, "I live in an Aboriginal country". She says that this simple declaration could change Australia and its relationship with the rest of the world. "All the trappings of fake Britishness could be ditched" and "with one bound [Australia] could free itself from its spurious identification with the WASP 'axis of evil'". [Greer says that] "If we followed the Aboriginal course, we could follow the Aboriginal precedent and simply absent ourselves from activities that we knew to be evil and pointless." Most important, accepting that Australia is an Aboriginal country could save the environment. "Whitefellas simply look away when I point to the devastation inflicted on the island continent," she writes. "The denial of the disaster continues; the devastation accelerates."'
Australians do not look away from the devastion that they have wrought on their country. Many are fighting to repair the damage and restore the landscape. . Australians have not just fled from the land and its droughts and flooding rains, bushfires, salination and open-cut mining. They cluster along the suburbanised eastern foreshores---and other foreshores--- and returned to the beach where they landed, they are fighting to protect the ecology of the beach from destructive forms of development.
Greer's idea of Australia as an Aboriginal republic is a counterpoint to running away from the ecological devastation. She says:
"Australia doesn't owe whitefellas (including me) a living. They should stop ripping its guts out for a pittance, and sit on the ground. Sit on the ground, damn you, and think, think about salination, desertification, dieback, deforestation, species extinction, erosion, suburbanisation, complacency, greed and stupidity. As if."
Note the "dam you". That giveaway phrase ignores that Australians are addressing the above issues. The dam you is coupled to the old exptriate lament about her choosing "to endure the manifold disadvantages and discomforts of life in England rather than to return to my birthplace."
Why not engage with Australians are trying to do in caring for their country instead of just damming them?
From this perspective of Australians tryingto do something to restorethe ecological devastation Greer is not forcing Australians to think the unthinkable at all. Nor is her account one of using written English as a polemical weapon to provoke fresh thought on the issue of ecological devastation.
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