THE AGE Our noble savages, by Germaine Greer BY GUY RUNDLE Saturday 8 July 2000 Journalists are still scurrying around the country trying to find all or any of the Aboriginal people who may or may not have met Germaine Greer at a variety of airports on her visits here. As with most Greer stories, fact and myth are inextricably intertwined. She appears to have been met at Sydney airport by one group, but maybe not the right one. Was she met by people from the La Perouse mob - whose domain includes Sydney airport - or the Eora people, whose traditional lands cover Sydney proper? Was she met at Melbourne at all? It's a classic Greer intervention, honorable in intent, chaotic in practice, somehow turning the whole debate back on her behavior rather than the issue at hand. From telling The Big Issue that the homeless were welcome to come and stay at her farmhouse (most who took up the offer were undercover journalists), to getting her gear off for London's Daily Telegraph to make a point about lingerie (don't ask), she specialises in a sort of political performance art that apparently we can't get enough of. When the subject matter is lingerie or shopping, it doesn't matter much. But the way in which indigenous politics is presented to the world is too important to be done in such an ad hoc manner. Greer is right to keep up the pressure on the international stage, but the way she does it creates as many problems as it solves. Greer's argument - aired endlessly through the British media and beyond - is that Australia's Aboriginal people are more spiritual than their white counterparts, have a deeper connection to nature. While this is undoubtedly true of Aboriginal cultures, Greer repeatedly crosses a line to suggest that this is some essential quality of Aboriginal human beings. It's noble savage stuff and it's principal result is to gloss over the complex nature of indigenous politics, and to crowd out the more concrete political points Greer herself makes. It's particularly counter-productive in Europe, where ignorance of indigenous Australia is almost total. The mental picture most Europeans have of indigenous Australia is of a people living a traditional lifestyle. They know all the statistics on Aboriginal health, but are amazed to find there are Aborigines living in cities and towns. They have heard about the stolen generations, but not about ATSIC or land councils, or that indigenous people run cattle stations and negotiate with mining companies. On streetcorners from Galway to Warsaw you can find Spanish crusties playing didjeridoos for spare change, and smart city cafes are full of anguished Teutonics reading Marlo Morgan's Mutant Message Down Under. Nothing will convince them that it is a fraudulent New-Age fiction, or that corroboree instruments are not heard at their best when accompanying broken-English renditions of Imagine. Aboriginality has been co-opted into primitive chic, as African and native American cultures become too familiar and known in their complexity to be available for such misconstruction. For Europeans, Aborigines are the last of the innocents, and they need them as a guarantor against the spiritual emptiness of life in the new EU superstate. Greer's maverick interventions feed these misconceptions, and hinder the process of convincing the world that indigenous politics is a political struggle by communities which have many dimensions and internal differences, who live in both the modern and traditional worlds. Greer's undefined status within the British media - one day she's a distinguished intellectual, the next she's a batty party turn - means her deeply felt pronouncements on the matter end up as little more than fuel for the tabloid fire. Maybe, on balance, her comments do more good than harm. Maybe she has the active support, or at least the silent consent, of indigenous community leaders. But there are better points to make, and smarter ways to do it. Guy Rundle is a co-editor of Arena Magazine. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- ********************************** 'Click' to protect the rainforest: Make the Rainforest Site your homepage! http://www.therainforestsite.com/ ********************************** ------------------------------------------------------ RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." RecOzNet2 is archived for members @ http://www.mail-archive.com/recoznet2%40paradigm4.com.au/
