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.

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.

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.

As well as discussing the philosophy of mutual obligation (referred to as John Howard’s most significant legacy to social policy), the authors point to the lack of an evidence base for most policy initiatives in this area – something almost totally lacking in the research which justified Noel Pearson’s proposals for “family commissions” in Cape York, which is now being held up as a model for the rest of Australia. This appears inconsistent with Jenny Macklin’s disclaimers of ideological motivation and claims that evidence and “what works” would be the criterion for Indigenous policy. They also point to several studies which demonstrate that parental responsibility in sending kids to schools is at best only one factor in school attendance and outcomes, with the quality of schooling and child health also being very important variables.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that most policy initiatives in this area are at best blunt instruments. It also suggests that they are being driven by a new orthodoxy – arguments about “personal responsibility” and “social norms” being more assertion than evidence based. Most tellingly, perhaps, and here Greer’s comments are important too, is the suggestion that the obligation is almost entirely one sided and thus lacking in mutuality – and that the state is failing to put in place the preconditions for such experiments to have much chance of providing enduring outcomes. That doesn’t leave me feeling me feeling very hopeful about the prospects of closing the gap.

Germaine Greer will also be a guest. Greer has just released a new essay in book form – On Rage, which I’m very much looking forward to reading. I was interested to see her obvious frustration last night in a Lateline interview with Leigh Sales at the difficulty of articulating any position that goes beyond tired dichotomies on Indigenous Policy and the NT intervention (including those which claim to transcend tired dichotomies). Or perhaps it would be better to say the inability to hear any heterodox position. I suspect a lot of the rage directed at Greer herself comes from an inability to comprehend or recognise any thought that doesn’t follow the predictable grooves of a “debate”, and indeed any call for reflection on issues and stories a lot of us would rather not face. So it’ll be interesting to watch her in this format too.