Germaine Greer’s mad, passionate quest to heal Australia

Like an old woman in a fairy story, Germaine Greer, now in her late seventies, has taken to lurking in a forest. Always inclined to reinterpret the world through her own changing needs and perceptions, and to instruct the rest of us accordingly, she has now written a book of passionate didactic energy about her quest for regeneration, personal, national and global. She explores in exquisite, sometimes  overwhelming detail the story of how in 2001 she bought a patch of subtropical rainforest in southern New South Wales, what she found there and what it has taught her and could teach the rest of us if we would only pay attention.

In its slightly mad way, this is a rather marvellous book. But then the whole venture was more than a little mad. Greer recounts how some 15 years ago she decided to sink her savings in a piece of land in her native Australia, despite having previously declared that she would never call it home until aboriginal sovereignty was recognised. She got round this by declaring that she was not buying a home but a project; she had decided to do what she could to put right the damage the European invaders had done to the land and its people. Money was no object. ‘I didn’t need anything nearly as much as I needed to heal some part of the fabulous country where I was born.’

So she sets off, accompanied and advised by her splendid, sensible sister, Jane, a qualified professional botanist famous, we learn, for her wallaby grass lawn on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne, to find the right place. She had originally envisaged buying a patch of desert, and almost did,  before an encounter with a dancing bird (a regent bowerbird, with black, yellow and red plumage,‘a sort of crow in fancy dress’) in a clearing in the forest at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley settled the matter.