‘I don’t want to explain myself’

There is an African bird called the ox-pecker with which Germaine Greer, conversant as she is with the natural world, will doubtless be familiar. Oxpeckers ride on the backs of large mammals — giraffes, buffalo, wildebeest and the like — feeding off their lice. Once thought an example of mutualism, the relationship between diner and host is now understood to be more complex than this. On the one hand oxpeckers reduce the larvae, and on the other they jab their beaks into any open wounds on the hide in order to keep the blood fresh.

Elizabeth Kleinhenz is Germaine Greer’s ox- (or rather Oz-) pecker. A few years younger than Greer, who is now 79, and raised in the same Melbourne neighbourhood, Kleinhenz has been pecking away in the archives of the University of Melbourne where, in 2013, Greer deposited 82 metres of letters, manuscripts, clippings, contracts, commissions, drafts, diaries, photographs and research files (the $3 million fee received for her papers was donated by Greer to her Rainforest charity). Greer’s whole life is boxed up here — even the hate mail. ‘Shut your mouth fucken bitch or I’ll slam you in your fucken mouth,’ reads one letter, filed by her under ‘Nutters’.

An instinctive autobiographer, Greer is no fan of biography. She called her first biographer, Christine Wallace, whose Untamed Shrew appeared in 1997, a ‘dung beetle’, an ‘amoeba’, and a ‘brain-dead hack’. Despite being ‘shocked’ by Greer’s ‘venomous attacks’ on Wallace, Kleinhenz has nonetheless persisted in her own search for ‘the truth’ about the world’s most famous feminist. In her single exchange with her subject, Kleinhenz tells us that she ‘wrote politely’ to ‘Dr Greer’ to introduce herself, only to be ‘admonished for failing to get her title right. She was ‘Professor’, not ‘Dr’. Greer addressed her ‘rude’ response to ‘Mrs Kleinhenz’ when she ‘knew full well that my title is ‘‘Dr’’’.