I have just finished reading Germaine Greer’s latest book -
On rage - a small red book, an essay really, put out by MUP. Like much of Greer’s work it is contrarian, but unlike someone like Christopher Hitchens, she here signally fails to make you think, except to ponder how mad she really is. The book has caused much controversy over here with apparently everyone lining up to attack her, including such Aboriginal luminaries as
Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson and everyone else as well. I read some of the critiques before reading it and so was expecting something a bit more strident, but it’s not so much that. Essentially the book is about Aboriginal male rage, and how it is a result of white dispossession, and how the men’s response is to drink, suicide, commit crime, rape and generally abuse their families (it is no secret that some Aboriginal women and children are the victims of incredible levels of violence and sexual abuse by some Aboriginal men). Greer sees that the rage emanating from dispossession of traditional lands, the ending of a patriarchal hunter gatherer society, and the consequent loss of role for men has seen them turn their anger onto themselves and their families. It is indeed a fact that Aboriginal violence is turned to a surprising extent inward, and does not impinge so much on white society. If it did I’m sure much more would have been done to ameliorate some of the conditions in which it grows.
What has raised the ire of all is Greer’s belief that Aboriginal women have connived in the dispossession, that they assisted whites to settle, and have sided with whites to sideline men within their own communities. In Greer’s view the latest of these attacks on male power is Aboriginal women’s support and engagement with the Australian government’s intervention into the Northern Territory (a 2007 crisis measure in which soldiers, doctors, nurses, social workers etc were brought in to try and halt the continued sexual exploitation of children in remote Aboriginal communities). Greer says that women have chosen to side with white society as it seemingly offers them more security, less work and more freedom. Traditional Aboriginal life was hard on women, in that there is little to deny, when white society offered them greater choices they unsurprisingly took them up. Greer sides with Aboriginal men in her book, she thinks that the women have abandoned their men, that their first responsibility is to their menfolk rather than their own liberation, which is initially surprising if you haven’t been following Greer’s movement to this position in her writings on Islam (in which again she prefers maintenance of a traditional culture to women’s rights).
What Greer wants apparently is for a treaty to be made between White and Aboriginal Australia (including a division of land), and then for a hunter gatherer society to continue equal but separate alongside modern westernised Australian society. This is not a bad idea, but what it involves is, that is Aboriginal women are expected to continue in and accept a hunter gatherer society, to their own detriment, so as to maintain a culture. That women must give up their rights to assist men suffering from a loss of status, a status that was often built on the backs of women, is a thesis that happily today the leaders of the Aboriginal community both women and men find insulting.
