Earlier on the 10th there had been what we used to call a ‘cloudburst’ on the Toowoomba Range, when 150mm (6 inches in the old money) fell in about half an hour. I posted some Toowoomba flood pics taken by my cousin’s brother-in-law. Yesterday I heard Anna Bligh tell the story of a year ago, how she was addressing the umpteenth, by that time, press briefing on the Queensland floods. From September 2010 there had been many cities and towns flooded across Queensland, some of them totally evacuated several times. As she fronted the media a minder handed her a sheet with breaking news. She found herself talking about swift water rescues in the main street of Toowoomba. “This can’t be right”, she thought. “It’s impossible.” It wasn’t. This is what was going on in Toowoomba:

Toowoomba flooding

Raging floods_Toowoomba

Those photos are from a Toowoomba Chronicle gallery of reader pics.

From memory two people died in the Toowoomba floods. Of course on the eastern escarpment a worse tragedy was unfolding as a tsunami of water was launched onto the small town of Grantham and the Lockyer Valley. People were barely warned when minutes later they were fighting for their lives. Whole houses were washed away. Some people went to the railway bridge for a good view and found themselves running for their lives.

Railway bridge at Grantham

The image comes from this article in The Australian. I picked it up from Google images.

Wikipedia gives an account of the Queensland floods in the various river basins and tells us that as on January 28, 2011 the death toll was 35, 21 from Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, with 9 missing. Most of the missing would have been from the Lockyer Valley.

Very soon in Brisbane the big cleanup was underway with a citizens’ army as well as the real one:

Cleaning up in Brisbane

Citizen Rudd was there to help:

I'm in Queensland and I'm here to help

I believe he got an infected foot out of it. Perhaps he wasn’t wearing these:

Approved footwear

Those pics came from the ABC gallery, the best I’ve seen.

There was a lot of social capital created by the Queensland floods, much of which exists today. Wounds were also created, many still open or thinly covered by scar tissue. A year later it’s a time for looking forward as well as looking back, but we’ve changed forever, and not just those directly involved.

Points along these lines were made at a dawn service and a string of memorial events on 10 January, all attended by Anna Bligh and at least the first by Julia Gillard and Quentin Bryce.

The media were there in force. Here are reports, for example, from
Courier Mail, the ABC and The Age. Perhaps the best was this one in the Toowoomba Chronicle and syndicated through other rural papers.

Today (11th) the caravan moved on to Ipswich and tomorrow it will be Brisbane.

The Brisbane floods were not the end of the matter as far as nature was concerned. At the end of the month Cyclone Yasi came steaming in:

Cyclone Yasi course

Yasi brought broken houses:

Yasi_broken house

smashed crops:

Smashed banana plantation

piled up boats:

Yasi_boats

and utter devastation in Cardwell:

Devastation in Cardwell

The experience of the summer is written on Premier Bligh’s face:

Bligh and Swan in Cardwell

I must admit to shedding a tear or two when finding that one amongst the other images in the Brisbane Times photo gallery.

OK, here are a few links from the media, mainly the ABC and the Courier Mail.

The ABC has a gallery of flood pics contrasting before and during the flood.

The Courier Mail’s gallery contrasts during the flood and a year later.

This CM page has links to specific stories.

The ABC has an interesting account of the role played by twitter.

ABC OPEN has a feature: Aftermath: disaster, resilience and recovery which collects stories from within the community.

Bligh has emphasised the a complete rebuild will take about three years. Here’s a gallery of buildings still under repair.

Property prices have been affected, not always logically.

Here is a list of all our posts on Queensland floods, not all of them already linked above:

Brian on Queensland floods

Robert on Queensland floods get worse

Mark on Brisbane flood maps and up to date flood information

Brian on Toowoomba flood pics

Brian on Brisbane floods in retreat

Kim on Political cheap shots and the Brisbane floods

Kim on Quick link: Quiggin on water policy after the Queensland floods

Kim on Quicklink: Interactive map of Brisbane flood damage

Kim on Germaine Greer wrong on Brisbane floods

Mark on Social capital, social networking and the Brisbane floods

Brian on Open thread on Queensland floods

Brian on Wivenhoe dam management

Brian on Cyclone watch

Brian on Yasi – it’s big, bad, ugly and coming our way

Brian on Wivehoe’s floodgates open

There were some posts on other blogs:

tigtog at Hoyden on As if the floodwaters weren’t enough (about snakes in the floodwaters)

blue milk at Hoyden on Observations from West End, Brisbane

Grog’s Gamut on leadership is a wonderful thing to behold

blue milk at Hoyden on What would Anna Bligh do?

Latika Bourke on Tweeting the floods

You have to understand that the summer of floods came on top of a series of floods and extreme weather events. For example in early March 2010 I posted on the unprecedented floods in SW Queensland. I didn’t do a post on the summer of 2008-9 but the Courier Mail has a photo gallery A season of disaster which began with the supercell storm that ripped through The Gap in November 2008, then spectacular electrical storms in Brisbane, extensive flooding in Queensland and finishes with the tragic fires in Victoria.

I did post on the toxic waste spill from mines in NW Qld. That post mentions extensive floods in Central Queensland a year earlier. I read the other day that half the water that swamped open cut coal mines in Central Queensland last summer is still there. Stream flow has been insufficient to pump it all out.

At this point, however, I’m mainly remembering and leaving analysis of the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry Interim Report. The final report is due in February.

“If you don’t like what they’re asking you don’t accept the premise of the question.”

– Annabeth Schott, The West Wing

‘Boring’ is not a demonstrable intrinsic quality of anything. It’s not that it is boring, it’s that you are bored.

– Pavlov’s Cat

In thinking about the SlutWalks and what they mean, these two quotes keep coming back to me, as getting to the heart of what, for me, is their main point. The SlutWalk is not an argument that calling someone a slut is OK. It’s about demonstrating that the word slut is a meaningless concept, which refers to nothing more than behaviour that the accuser disapproves of. As Clementine Ford argued, the difference between expecting women to wear the burqua and expecting them to go around in “mom jeans” is one of degree, not kind.

Germaine Greer attacked the concept from a different angle, pointing to the word’s origins as referring to a woman who was dirty, unclean:

In mixed digs in our tolerant universities, it’s the women who are forever cleaning the shared facilities, because the men won’t. The con is a simple one. If you don’t mind that the toilet’s disgusting, then don’t clean it; if you do, then do. Girls don’t have the option of not minding. Dirty house equals dirty woman equals tramp.

It’s about the fact that a man can be dirty or sexually promiscuous and generally society gives it no extra significance. He is still assumed capable of being good at his job, fun to have a beer with, and he is always assumed to retain the right not to be assaulted. SlutWalk seeks to address the idea that a woman’s behaviour in one sphere of life should have no bearing on how she is judged in other spheres. She can be a “slut” and manage a business, and she can be a slut without giving up her legal rights.

Of course the concept is messy, hard to pin down, because it is one that is deeply embedded in our culture. But at its most basic, the SlutWalk is where people march in short skirts, business attire, or exercise gear; the word slut is hurled at women in all of those outfits, because it is never really about the clothes.

This is what a slut looks like.

I hesitated in writing this post, because the concept of “slut” is so broad that it is open to many interpretations, not just from the people who would use it to insult a woman, but also by the women who choose to either reclaim or demolish the word. When I saw that the Perth SlutWalk was going to be sponsored by Sexpo, I was troubled, because it felt like missing the point, but I also understand that because the concept is so huge and so subjective that it’s OK that I don’t identify with everything that progressive/feminist activists do (and also because I am not doing the work, and my attitude is that if you’re not helping you should think very carefully before jumping in to criticise those who are).

But now they have announced “HOVEMBER – a month dedicated to promoting the true aims of SlutWalk” and I now I want to say no. I am not interested in critiques of SlutWalk that say we shouldn’t use the word slut because it is divisive and off-putting to “non-sluts”. I recognise that the attitude that a slutty woman brings rape upon herself is the same attitude that causes governments to ignore centuries-old principles of the rule of law in order to punish those who do not conform. I strongly agree that part of the aims of SlutWalks should be to oppose taking away the legal rights of prostitutes in the same way as it is about using sexual “morals” to take away the rights of any woman who is not sufficiently chaste. It is the same fight.

But a month of burlesque and pole-dancing to protest slut-shaming is accepting the premise. Yes, part of the aim is to make it clear that women should be free to do any of those things. But it also needs to be about breaking down the us-and-them dichotomy. The idea of women being free to have sex “like a man” should not be about replacing one stereotype with another. Women should be free to have sex like men in the sense that a man’s sexuality is seen, accurately, as just one facet of his character. The response to those who want to force women into one specific role is not to spend a month focussing on another specific one.

…recent events like the celebration of ANZAC Day and the Royal Wedding and it is clear the left has definitely lost the culture wars and that generations of Australians continue to embrace and support conservative ideals and values.

So definitive is this victory, it would seem, that the Royal Wedding also implies that marriage should be “between a man and a woman”.

It’s all there – Dr Donnelly even manages to sneak in a reference to “strident feminists like Germaine Greer”, however unrelated that snark is to what he is allegedly writing about.

A few points occur, not so much in response to Donnelly’s piece, which is seriously short on argument, but on the thesis itself (and the declaration of victory, which is a key trope in the “culture wars”, since it alone enables the needed equation between a bunch of scribblers in elite newspapers and journals and “the battlers” or “ordinary Australians” or “young people today”).

1. Presumably in a liberal society, questions of personal choices about the gender of partners, or whether one wishes to institutionalise a partnership, and under what conditions, are just that. Culture wars rhetoric does something much different from asserting that “the personal is the political”, it effaces the personal entirely in favour of the political. Particular “lifestyle choices” are themselves held to invalidate a claim to speak in the public sphere, as they immediately imply a deep divide between “liberals” and the body of the social. Anyone arguing for same sex marriage is portrayed as an alien invader, seeking to subvert the body politic. So the borders of illiberalism are the borders of the social.

2. In an electoral landscape where class is supposedly not a voting cue (a thesis which can be disputed), culture is supposed to be constitutive of identity, and the prime mover of voting intentions. However, no evidence is adduced for this thesis. It is, for instance, very unclear that Kevin Rudd won seats in Western Sydney (the imaginary heartland of the “normal”) in 2007 because he went to church on Sundays rather than because WorkChoices attacked the economic foundations of social life and the ability to make a living.

3. Anzac Day, and in a different way, the Royal Wedding, are better seen as hegemonic rituals than fields of struggle in the culture war. The resonances of Anzac Day entrench themselves precisely because of their connections to lived memory – so many families and individuals can identify themselves with forebears who fought. This still makes it something of a White occasion, because those lineages necessarily exist largely for those descending from people who were Australian soldiers of past generations.

The passing of the Anzacs themselves has been a necessary condition for a different form of memorialisation, and it’s interesting, in passing, to recall that many of the Anzacs refused to march, or placed a very different meaning on the act. Without living witnesses, reinvented traditions must be resignified, and the battle is actually over that, not over the sacrifice of war dead. Continued anxieties (see Paul Kelly) about open discussion of the meanings and symbolism of Anzac Day and the “militarisation of Australian history” show that in Durkheimian terms, there’s an attempt to fence off profane politics from the sacred, and the sacred overwrites history and memory. But the contestation is not reducible to “right” and “left”, and nor does it have any real implications for electoral politics.

4. Those who are more pessimistic about the future of the left than I am might like to read Jeff Sparrow’s (excellent) piece on the Royal Wedding. But, again, royal wedding drinking games, talking about absurd hats, or reverently watching the show go much more to a hegemonic event of which one must take note than to a set of political choices. There is a cultural choice to be made, and ignoring it is also a choice framed within its parameters. But the organisation of cultural space around the event of the Royal Wedding depoliticises rather than marks a return to an imagined reverential and conservative past. Again, left and right are barely in play. The case for a Republic, which Sparrow correctly identifies as one which must be made in a far more political register, is not dependent on and is not affected by the Royal Wedding.

These are the previous threads I can identify:

Brian on Queensland floods

Robert on Queensland floods get worse

Mark on Brisbane flood maps and up to date flood information

Brian on Toowoomba flood pics

Brian on Brisbane floods in retreat

Kim on Political cheap shots and the Brisbane floods

Kim on Quick link: Quiggin on water policy after the Queensland floods

Kim on Quicklink: Interactive map of Brisbane flood damage

Kim on Germaine Greer wrong on Brisbane floods

Mark on Social capital, social networking and the Brisbane floods

Hope I haven’t missed any.

A case in point is Germaine Greer, who, unbeknown to me at least, is now a part time SEQ ‘local’, writing in The Guardian.

Among other things, Greer has this to say:

The Wivenhoe Dam on the Brisbane river was built to protect the city of Brisbane from another flood like the one of 1974. For years it has been at 10% of capacity, so when it filled this year nobody wanted to let any of the precious water out. It eventually became clear that the dam had filled to 190% of its capacity, and the authorities realised with sinking hearts not only that the floodgates would have to be opened, but that the opening would coincide with a king tide in Moreton Bay. The question nobody has been heard to ask is whether or not the level of water in the dam should have been reduced gradually, beginning weeks ago

It’s hard to know where to start in pointing out what’s wrong with this paragraph, let alone some of the other premises of the article, which masquerade as ‘fact’ while being untrue. Note – not just debatable interpretations of facts, but untrue. For instance, in the second sentence of the paragraph, the statement about “for years it has been at 10% of its capacity” is just wrong. Have a look at the interactive graph on the SEQWater page, and tweak it to Wivenhoe over any number of years, and you can see how wrong.

Secondly, not only Greer but a stack of other people who seem to go to no trouble whatsoever to inform themselves, have in fact been asking the question she poses. The answer is simple – the level of water in the dam was being reduced gradually, beginning weeks ago. Except it kept raining at unprecedented levels – up to 220mm a day in the immediate catchment of the Wivenhoe. Greer seems unable to comprehend how dams and rainfall patterns work.

A good explanation of what was going on at Wivenhoe is found here, a link posted last week on LP.

Greer also recites another urban myth, the view that seemed to become entrenched that Wivenhoe would somehow eliminate flooding, on anything other than a minor scale. Its purpose was flood mitigation. She appears not to know, or not to take into account, the fact that at least half the flood waters came down the Bremer River, which has no dams on it designed for flood mitigation, or for that matter, the fact that a stack of water which came down via the Lockyer River was never going within cooee of the Wivenhoe Dam. When you read things like this – “One of the penalties of living on the east coast, as most Australians do, is that all the rain that falls on the mountains known as the Dividing Range heads your way”, you just want to weep. Where does she imagine the water that flooded Toowoomba came from? Where does she think a lot of the tributaries of the Murray-Darling system rise?

It really is a bad thing that stuff like this gets published.

In 2007, he wrote a short book, Bad Dreaming, which to put it mildly, met with some legitimate criticism. Nowra, disavowing the work of Indigenous women, took it on himself to solve all the problems of Indigenous Australia himself. Last month, he published what could reasonably be described as a laudatory piece on the life and character of one Tony Abbott in The Monthly.

He’s now followed that up with an amazing rant about Germaine Greer, to be published in the same mag on Friday. Allegedly, it’s to mark the fourtieth anniversary of the publication of Greer’s The Female Eunuch.

You can get a taste of it from this article in The Independent:

In the essay… Nowra not only attacks Greer’s work, but criticises her appearance, her character and even her sanity. “She will do anything to get noticed,” he says, adding that when Greer appeared on the reality TV show Celebrity Big Brother, she looked like “a befuddled and exhausted old woman” who reminded him of “my demented grandmother”.

Yet Nowra has the gall to accuse Greer of misogyny. Nowra says that Greer doesn’t understand “what makes women tick” and that her work is too “middle class”. Presumably he is immune to such criticisms because:

Nowra… lives a studiedly bohemian life with his writer wife, Mandy Sayer, in Sydney’s red-light area, Kings Cross…

To allege that because women still wear make-up, Greer’s work had no value at the time it was written is risible.

This is not the first *controversial* editorial decision Monthly editor Ben Naparstek has made. What possessed him to commission such a piece of abusive raving? Were there not any women who might have written a fair and measured reflection on Greer’s influential book? To build sales? I won’t be giving him the satisfaction of buying a copy. I’ve already read more than enough of Nowra’s “intellectual” contribution.

Elsewhere: tigtog at Hoyden and [H/T Gummo] Philippa Martyr at Quadrant.

Among other things, I queried the practice of addressing a discourse about left politics to the presumed centres of power, describing those who do that sort of thing as “court philosophers”. I also suggested that labourism might be a better place to look for an explanation of how the left has shaped Australian society and politics than social democracy.

Guy Rundle has taken up the torch, reviewing the full series of articles in today’s Crikey, and going where none of the “left thinkers” dared to tread – propounding an “idea of what the left’s basic principles are or should be, and what sort of positive programme, rather than reactive policy, they should propose.”

Read his piece (reproduced with permission) over the fold.

Guy Rundle writes:

For the past week, The Australian has been running a series entitled ‘what’s left’, with people they nominate to be ‘key left thinkers’ articulating a left vision of politics and society.

Well that was the stated intent anyway. With The Oz you have to assume the purpose is other — and with all due respect to some of the people involved, it seems obvious that the real purpose is to make the left look rather bereft of ideas (not, it must be said, a tough call at this juncture).

The first and most essayistic was a large piece by Tim Soutphommasane, arguing that the left should reclaim patriotism, a piece of brand refashioning that David Goodhart has been arguing in the UK for years. Subsequent contributions (run in a strip down the Op-ed page, about as marginal as they could get without being pushed out entirely) were less inspiring — Julia Gillard’s was without interest of any sort, Dennis Glover’s piece talked of the “mystery of social democracy”, David McKnight had a piecemeal defence of the family, and CFMEU supremo John Sutton defended Marxism by saying it was about restraining corporate power, which suggests he has never understood Marxism.

What was missing from all of these contributions was any idea of what the left’s basic principles are or should be, and what sort of positive programme, rather than reactive policy, they should propose. Not surprising when all the people who could and do this were excluded from the series.

Off the top of my head one could have chosen from: Lindsay Tanner, Bob Brown, Peter Singer, Eva Cox, Mark Latham, Mark Davis (of Land of Plenty), Geoff Boucher, Germaine Greer, Boris Frankel, Mark Bahnisch, Geoff Sharp and others from Arena, Evan Thornley, J.K. Gibson-Graham, your ‘umble correspondent, Jeff Sparrow, and many others — many of whom I’d seriously disagree with, but all of whom have a greater ability to relate the “is” to the “ought” — to offer an analysis of how society is changing, and offer an alternative of how it might.

To be fair to David McKnight, probably the only one of that group capable of making such an account, the room provided — 700 words — was derisory.

However, while we’re on it, it’s worth saying a few things about what the left is or could be, such as didn’t make it into the series. What was common to all the contributions was that they saw their role not as outlining a view of how society worked, how it had changed, and what a better society could be — but outlining a series of micropolicy and strategy initiatives (support the family, reclaim patriotism etc,) which barely acknowledged the profound change in the idea of ‘the Left’ over the last generation (a point to which I’ll return in Part Two).

In Australia, articulating a Left vision which might have mass support is difficult because of one paradoxical fact — labourism (sometimes Left sometimes not) has won. Comprehensively. For a century it has seen off challenges to the arbitration system set up by the Harvester decision — and more importantly the principle behind it, that the public, as represented by the state, should tell the economy how to set its wages.

Whatever limits or transformations have been made to it, its core principles have survived — and, the 2007 result would suggest, been cemented into the culture, even as the industrial era that generated it passes away. To that has been added Medicare, public broadcasting, equal opportunity laws etc etc — all institutions the political right has had to accept in order to regain power. The left may look a bit ragged, but the single greatest failed movement in Australian political history is classical liberalism, if judged by results.

The problem for any greater transformation within a Left framework is that, as Marxist historians have noted, labourism freezes social relations in such a way that certain types of powerlessness and inequality are also cemented into place. Australia may congratulate itself on being the land of the “fair go”, but for groups outside of the mainstream, it is shockingly backward and unfair. Educational opportunity is some of the worst in the OECD, class mobility — especially from welfare-dependent groups — is terrible, daily life for those groups is one of perpetual poverty, pensions are derisory, services are over-priced, public healthcare is limited in application, and indigenous Australia suffers all of the above at once.

But labourism has been so successful at separating the fate and destiny of the mainstream from the marginal, that the latter have no political clout — and the former have no real feeling of common cause, beyond (politically insufficient) human compassion.

Thus one can see why so many of The Oz’s authorised “left” thinkers would take on, as Mark Bahnisch remarked, “the courtier role”, whispering in the ear of power, rather than talking to a broad audience. Suggesting a genuinely Left social democratic programme — transitioning large public utilities to part or total public control and/or ownership, schemes for social banking and finance which would make housing affordable, the use of super funds and other worker-derived capital for social reinvestment, public bond issues as an alternative means of infrastructure funding, defunding the elite private schools while increasing funding to community and smaller public-private schools, assisting the development of local economies and post-capitalist production systems in both urban and rural settings, and so on and so on — thus has the air of being futile.

It certainly appears to be well beyond the imagination of the figures that The Australian chose.

Such a programme would be one whose proposed changes are not piecemeal, but are based around a common principle — that economic power and control has to be transferred to social and public control (in forms better developed than old processes of nationalisation), as an expression of right (not rights, right). That is, these institutions — from Telstra to the universities, to mineral resources and the finance sector — are social and commonly owned by their very nature, that their management should be put to social ends.

That may involve managing them within the market, and gearing them towards returning a certain rate of profit/surplus — but that would be the means to an end, of social return, not private shareholder return as an end in itself. That is the basis for a genuine Left, that sees itself as something more than putting limits on the Right.

The thinkers that the Australian chose for its left series weren’t leftists, they were labourists – submitting their intellectual abilities to the pre-ordained goal of selling a stunningly unambitious political programme, and thus reduced to a mixture of PR spruiking (“try new Left patriotism!”), personal anecdotes, waffling about the ‘mystery of social democracy’, sucking up to social conservatism (“defend the family”!) or presenting a defensive and reactive unionism (“limit corporate power”!) as a positive programme.

On Monday, in Part Two of this piece, I’ll suggest why the world is about to take us far beyond the anodyne prescriptions of The Oz’s authorised left — and even beyond the more robust programme I’ve sketched out above.

The Oz meanwhile, will feature a series on the Right, and one can safely assume that more impressive theoretical guns will be wheeled out, with more space — thus giving the impression that the Right has more intellectual firepower, which was the purpose of the exercise all along. Silly, and irritating, of no great import — and very, very, The Australian.

Update: Rundle writes a sequel.

Update: Quadrant piles on.

Even those who have seem to be reacting to parts instead of the whole – for instance, Marcia Langton, describing the remarks about her in the book as an “astonishing attack on me”. That’s quite odd, because Langton is being challenged rather than attacked in the book – challenged to agree with Greer’s view that – on the basis of the evidence – the literal appropriation of Indigenous women’s bodies by white men, something Greer documents with footnoted citations from both historians and contemporary sources – is part of the reason for Indigenous male rage. All the rest of what Langton says – accusations of “a 1970s style argument”, a “panoply of protest slogans deployed as social theory” and so on – unless I’m missing something, appears misdirected, or at least based on inference rather than the text itself. On p. 88 of the book, any reasonable reader would see that Langton is not the one being accused of “collusion” with the state, what she took umbrage at, and that in fact the point being made is that the differential impacts of gender on the colonised is still used by whitefellas as a lever to avoid responsibility and to divide people. There’s a disagreement of view, but not an accusation, and it hardly justifies Langton’s claim that the essay is “racist”.

What Greer is doing in On Rage is a provocation to the degree that it’s asking a range of people differently positioned within Australian culture to reflect on the totality of what has occurred and how ineffectual slogans are – and there are slogans within the talk of the “responsibilities” crew as well – in the absence of both understanding and a genuine coming to terms with the parade of extraordinary horrors that is the story of Indigenous dispossession. Greer’s essay doesn’t make for comfortable reading, and that’s the point. Langton may be justified in taking umbrage at some of the things Greer has said in the course of promoting it, and I can quite understand that, but I think in this instance it’s vital to separate the force and quality of the argument in the text itself from the personality of its author. Much of what has been published and said elsewhere, for instance in Greer’s Sydney Morning Herald op/ed adds to (and in a way detracts from) the argument in the book, rather than reproduces it. Greer might be her own worst enemy in this case, but that doesn’t absolve her interlocutors from reacting with their own rage, or at least spleen.

Unfortunately, and again here Greer is not an innocent in all this, I need to dispose of the “howlers” claim before moving to address the substantive arguments in On Rage. There’s been commentary on a previous thread about errors of fact in some other articles Greer has written over the years. But some of the factual inaccuracies – such as the claim that Bob Katter has a following in the Northern Territory are not in the book itself, but made in interviews by Greer. I could only find two errors in the text itself – the claim about the absence of younger Indigenous men at the apology on February 13 2008, and a slip where Katter is said to have been a Commonwealth rather than a State Minister. I suspect the first is an artefact of watching television coverage from outside Australia, but it doesn’t imply that distance devalues everything she says. It’s clear, for instance, that she does maintain contact with Indigenous people. The second, I think, is most likely an error that is easy to make when writing – and raises the issue mentioned here in the context of very slack editing and fact-checking at Melbourne University Press, which is a real worry and calls into question the rhetoric from Louise Adler and Glyn Davis about its role.

So while I think the whole question of why Greer herself attracts such personalised loud denunciation (and I find it hard to believe that any male Professor would be described as a “bint” and a “termagant”, for instance) is an important one, and one that throws its own (pretty unfavourable) light on aspects of Australian culture, I don’t want to discuss that further here – it was considered on this earlier thread.

I want to focus on what Greer actually has to say about rage. As she pointed out when interviewed by Leigh Sales on Lateline last week, in one respect, she’s reflecting on rage itself. It’s a good rule of thought, I think, not to do so in the absence of a concrete context, but to some degree anyway, her phenomenology of rage can stand on its own merits – though in practice it’s closely intertwined with a historical aetiology of rage in colonised hunter gatherer populations. Indeed, Bob Katter is mentioned because he’s relevant – he articulates rage on behalf of a particular group – farmers who he thinks have been dispossessed in their own way (whether Katter is right is of course neither here nor there, but it’s true to say he is representing pain in a real fashion). Greer questions what motivates Katter – who must know he is tilting at windmills – and wonders whether he thinks of himself as somehow sacrificing himself for “his” people. That’s a relevant question because she points to a range of clinical studies which show that extreme anger and rage are incredibly deleterious to human well-being. That’s because it’s turned against oneself – the position from which one expresses rage is an inarticulate one – one deprived of power, one dispossessed from the ability to negotiate – a last and futile act of resistance which eats up and destroys the self, and which is far too often turned against those closest to the self.

[Greer remarks that women tend to grieve while men rage. That may be true, and probably is, but it's unclear whether she recognises this as a cultural artefact. Perhaps the biggest problem I have with the essay - and one which commentators like Langton have rightly highlighted - is a certain essentialisation of gender that's not really foregrounded.]

Greer points to the prevalence of suicide among young rural white men, something Katter has made one of his causes. That leads her onto a consideration of the differences as well as the similiarities between white and Indigenous male despair and rage. Without diminishing the reality of the suffering of rural folk who have seen a way of life torn away by forces much greater than they can seemingly influence, she notes what life possibilities and resources remain to them, which are absent in the case of Indigenous dispossession. She is right to see dispossession as a secular and continuing process rather than a once-off act, and also rightly pings the casual intermingling of disparate cultural groups, which has a lot to do with much of the “dysfunction” Noel Pearson complains of in North Queensland – and it was going on as recently as the 1970s – Palm Island, too, being an effective dumping ground. That’s something I’ve heard myself from Murri people I’ve known.

I don’t actually want to follow her argument step by step, because my hope is that people will read the book itself and consider it on its merits, which are considerable – it’s well argued and passionately written. She doesn’t make this exact analogy, but the story she tells – of how Indigenous women were actually essential to the “frontier” and “progress” – as chattels, sexual objects, servants and how the Stolen Generation was a state action to re-impose norms against miscegenation among other motivations – reminded me of a post Mark wrote here last year on Charles Taylor’s characterisation of Native Americans as having suffered “culture death”:

A culture’s disappearing means that a people’s situation is so changed that the actions that had crucial significance are no longer possible in that radical sense. It is not just that you may be forbidden to try them and may be severely punished for attempting to do so; but worse, you can no longer even try them. You can’t draw lines or die while trying to defend them. You find yourself in a circumstance where, as Lear puts it, “the very acts themselves have ceased to make sense.”

Greer argues that hunters can’t survive in the absence of gatherers – and the gatherers had effectively been appropriated by white men, even if the whitefellas refused to recognise the kinship and cultural obligations of the women they took. She quotes the well respected Indigenous scholar Judy Atkinson on this:

Sexual violence, as well as physical violence, was rampant on the frontier. What must also be named is that the experiences of colonisation were different for Aboriginal women in comparison with Aboriginal men. This created tension and dichotomy in relationships between Aboriginal men and women that continues into the present.

According to Greer, this is the elephant in the room.

And the sexual violence of white men is still effaced and denied – she asks why the evidence that much of the sexual violence against girls in remote communities was perpetrated by transient white men and often in an organised fashion was totally absent from the justification of the Northern Territory intervention. Greer’s focus on Indigenous male rage is a gender aware anthropology of the discarding of Black men as useless by the colonisers, while Black women were to be used. It’s not unreasonable to believe that this dynamic continues to do its vicious work, although one can see why discussion of it provokes such affect. But it’s certainly not the case that Greer is in any way either justifying the incredible rates of self-harm and violence or that she’s somehow betraying feminism by focusing on the differential effects on Indigenous men of dispossession and cultural death. Much of what she is doing is just asking questions about the displacement of responsibility – if the reason for heavy drinking is disinhibition to allow rage to express itself, disinhibition driven by hopelessness and cultural death, will taking away the bottle salve all ills?

Finally, it’s also clear that Greer is not writing a prescriptive or a policy text. She’s arguing that a political structure needs to be created that brings all Indigenous people to the table, and that we all need to confront a whole range of things in our present as well as in our past which we would very much rather not see. In making this argument, she is in effect suggesting that incitements to responsibility and a fictional mutuality (as I’ve discussed previously) are forms of a displacement of a deeper and very painful wound that many of us – Black and White – don’t want opened. But we need to face our demons. All of us. Rightly she’s not prescriptive about how we do that. But she does insist that we do.

Mark wrote in the post on “The great Australian silence” I referenced earlier:

Recognition of your interlocutor in their own uniqueness and difference is, after all, a precondition without which there can be no meaningful reconciliation whatsoever.

Is it too much to ask anyone who professes concern about the condition of Indigenous Australians to try to see what the world might look like from their point of view?

Elsewhere: We’ve already linked to Legal Eagle’s post, but since then the comments thread at Skepticlawyer has developed quite a bit and makes for an interesting read.

[VanderMeer, along with regular guest bloggers, writes regularly at Ecstatic Days.]

Her book hasn’t hit the shelves in Brisneyland as far as I can tell, but I’m awaiting it with interest. There’s a taste of what’s to come at Public Opinion.

Update [by Kim]: Elsewhere, Legal Eagle agrees with Tracee Hutchison about Greer. I think the post is unfortunately all too typical of one of the weird confusions that swirl around Greer’s thought and indeed have a much broader contemporary purchase – that to explain something is to justify it. Greer appears to be setting out to explain Indigenous male rage. From what I’ve seen of her interviews over the last few days, she is insistent that this is not a justification. But apparently people either can’t understand that distinction, or believe that any reference to the origins of phenomena in Indigenous Australia in dispossession and colonisation signals justification. It does not. But it does indicate that we are not exempt from blame. Perhaps the demand that Indigenous people take responsibility, as I was arguing the other day, evades our own mutuality and our own responsibility, and as Greer has been suggesting, diminishes our humanity if we make it in the absence of providing the conditions of its possibility and understand that those conditions involve determinations made by communities whose freedom is a pre-condition of any successful partnership and any true reconciliation.