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August 15, 2008
Germaine Greer is currently in Australia as she is the keynote speaker at the Melbourne Writers' Festival on August 22. She has written an essay on rage, indigenous culture and the silence of aboriginal men, which explores what is driving the violence in Indigenous Australia and how gender has a role to play in this. I have yet to read it, and I am going by this op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald. Greer says:
Rage is not just an extreme form of anger. Anger, which can range from mere crossness to blazing indignation, is an emotion like any other. Rage is a disabling mental condition that can be lethal. It is the end product of repeated insult and humiliation that the sufferer has been powerless to avenge, and it is utterly destructive ... Rage is what overwhelms us in unbearable situations that we can neither fight nor flee....When the person in the grip of rage seeks a palliative for his agony, we can expect him to abuse it, so incorporating it in the general scenario of self-harm. In a culture of reticence, such as Australian Aboriginal culture, disinhibition is an aim in itself. Drink allows the festering poisonous rage to find an inefficient outlet in incoherent yelling and screaming, and finally in violence towards the self and others.
She goes on to say that:
In considering the desperate condition of Australian Aboriginal people after 200 years of abuse physical and mental, we should not be surprised to find towering rates of domestic violence. Children taken from their parents and treated cruelly in institutions will learn cruelty. Children who are bashed by their parents will bash their own children; children who see their fathers bash their mothers will replicate the same pattern in their own relationships.
Greer goes to say that what is obvious is that when the Aboriginal man was dispossessed by the white intruder he lost his moral authority over his family:
How was he supposed to cope when the woman who was his designated wife was taken from him and used by the white intruder, and then as insolently abandoned with her children by him at foot? If she went voluntarily it was bad enough; if she was kidnapped and he was powerless to rescue her, his misery would hardly have been less. When he found himself with the responsibility of rearing the children of the white man who would neither acknowledge them or support them, his feelings toward them and their mother can hardly be expected to be benign.
Greer says that Aboriginal people pass through our courts every day, but we have never allowed Aboriginal people to judge us. We hear every day of their crimes against our laws, but nothing of our crimes against theirs. As long as the Aboriginal silence is filled with whitefella noise the situation can only get worse.
To the soul crushed by rage, words like "reconciliation" and "apology" sting worse than taunts. As for intervention, it is simply more of the same.
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I would like to know just how much time Germaine has spent in Aboriginal Australia.........it’s pretty clear from her comments about Aboriginal men that she is incapable of referring to the topic other than in her own invented stereotype......she appears to knows very little of the reality of traditional aboriginal life, like so many of her ‘views’ expressed for the promotion of her own self the above referred are vacuous and ill conceived………