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January 22, 2004
Bill Leak
I prefer the cartoon to this text. Leak comes closer to putting a finger on Conservative Australia that parades itself as mainstream.
The text is by Germaine Greer. She says that she belongs to the left. But her criticisms of Australia seem to have a lot in common with those of Barry Humphries, minus the humor of course. Australia is the big negative--the land of nowhere from which the talented and creative few have to escape, if they are to be true to themselves as free spirits. With Greer we have a modernist scorn for the common suburban life that most of us Australians inhabit.
How else can we make sense of what Greer says here about the oceanic tracts of suburban doldrums:
"I love Australia with a fierce passion that churns my guts and makes my eyes burn with tears of rage and frustration. But I would rather not be there. For the vast majority, life in Australia is neither urban nor rural but suburban. The reality is [an] endless, ever-expanding replications of Ramsay Street that spread out as rapidly as oil stains on water, further and further from the tiny central business districts of the state capitals.
Each street has a nature strip; each bungalow faces the same way, has a backyard and a front garden, all fenced, low at the front, high at the back. Somewhere nearby there'll be a shopping centre with fast-food outlets and a supermarket. If your ambition is to live on Ramsay Street, where nobody has ever been heard to discuss a book or a movie, let alone an international event, then Australia may be the place for you."
Greer says that she cannot live in Australia because she loves the country too much.
I wonder what sort of country she has in mind? One in her imagination? One where you live in romantic harmony with nature?
Well, I'm off to the beach this long Australia weekend to relax amidst the sand, surf and sun
Update
Having just come back from the beach to notice PP McGuiness's reponse to Greer. He says that it is the lefty chattering classes living in the inner city who either sneer at mainstream suburban Australia, or wish that those living in the outer suburbs were deprived of the vote.
Yawn. It's the old anti-democratic totalitarian song endlessly replayed.
I also notice that Susan Mitchell is defending Germaine Greer. She stirred us. Mictchell says:
"Germaine Greer, professional provocateur, ideological bomb thrower, maestro of the eye-grabbing headline, won again. We fell for it. She must be sitting in her garden, squawking with all her geese at the gullibility of all the television, radio and print commentariat who attacked her recent spray on Australia in this newspaper last Thursday. That one post-menopausal expatriate woman can create such a stir in her home country is truly astounding. What power she has...She's the original leg-puller. And we get sucked in every time."
This is a bit of sisterhood in action. Mitchell gives Greer too much credit.
My judgement was that Greer 's construction of Australia as sport-obsessed suburban nation was that it was a voice a voice from the past. She is trapped in the 1960s. She is a historical curiosity playing the same old song over and over again. The mirror image of John Howard really.
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Of course, Germaine's critique of the "suburbanisation" of this country could probably be applied just as well to the country she prefers to live in. And frankly, if she's going to complain that each suburb looks the same, she should realise Scotland's long since beaten us to that. That was something that I really noticed for the first time when I was last there in '99: the extent to which so many of the towns look the same in terms of the style of the housing. Small, narrow, usually four to a block, and almost invariably grey. This held true for a remarkable number of places I saw.