Fantasies under the river gums

Just as vulgarity can sometimes transcend itself and become something else (I am thinking of Gillray and Las Vegas), so silliness can sometimes transcend itself and attain sociological significance.

Germaine Greer has written a transcendently silly pamphlet about a proposed future for her homeland, Australia. She wants it to become what she calls an Aboriginal Republic, though the exact meaning of this term is unclear even to her, which is not altogether surprising, since Aborigines lived in stateless societies before the arrival of the Europeans. However, her mind is so completely stocked with clichés that she often uses words that have connotation but no denotation, as a kind of shorthand. For example, she suggests that Australia should become a hunter-gatherer society, presumably because hunter-gatherers are assumed by the modern right-thinker to be environmentally friendly and at one with the beneficent vibrations of the cosmos. No concrete suggestion is forthcoming as to how the five million Sydneysiders, for example, are to transform themselves into a bow- and-arrow brigade, living on assorted roots, grubs and game. Of course, like all great conurbations, Sydney already has its hunter-gatherers: they’re called burglars and robbers, but I don’t suppose this is what she meant.

She thinks that Australia as an Aborigine Republic could make common cause in the United Nations with other formerly colon- ised countries. It would thereby join the ranks of victim states, thus achieving the moral purity of, say, Idi Amin’s Uganda, Hafaz Assad’s Syria or Ne Win’s Burma.

Greer’s Australia, to whose problems her constitutional vapourings are supposedly the answer, is a place unrecognisable to me, and seems to exist largely in her fantasies. For her, it is a continent utterly ruined by rapacity and colonised by none but crude alcoholics, who have created a society of which nothing good whatever can be said.