I don’t know what qualifications you need to be a public intellectual. I think you get such a gig because readers of The Age have voted for you, or something. But apparently playwright Louis Nowra is one.
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.
Well, as I 
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