I'm in Cambridge, in the heart of establishment Britain,
to meet an anti-establishment Australian.
She's challenged, confounded and invigorated us for generations.
It's the fearsome and fearless Germaine Greer.
Hi!
Germaine. Thank you so much for meeting me here.
(LAUGHS) Mwah!
Now, Cambridge is the first place you came to when you left Australia.
What was your notion as a young Melbourne girl
of where you were coming?
I had a Commonwealth Scholarship. Mmm.
That was one thing that was clear.
That meant that I had a little weeny-teeny income
that might keep the wolf from the door.
But I also was a snob
and I didn't want to go to Oxford because they kicked Shelley out.
Mm-hm. But Cambridge kept Byron.
Even though he kept a bear under the stairs
in the quadrangle in Trinity College.
So you had to come here.
Where are we?
We are at the Cambridge University Library.
It's one of those things. It's a bit like a member of the family.
(LAUGHS) You can't object that it's ugly.
Shall we go in? Yeah, let's go in.
The thing that's puzzling me today is the Royal Standard.
'Cause the Queen is not in residence. As far as I know.
Let's go to the loo and see if she's in there.
SONG: ♪ Jump in my car
♪ I want to take you home
♪ Mmm, jump in my car
♪ It's too far to walk on your own. ♪
If they don't listen to their own women,
if they don't lend ear to what's being said,
then Australia, God damn!
Germaine Greer has been one of the world's
most important and high-profile public intellectuals
for half a century.
She left Australia for Cambridge in 1964.
Her epoch-making masterpiece of liberation, The Female Eunuch,
inspired and empowered women everywhere,
and she continues to tirelessly write, teach, debate and provoke.
Why have you spent so much time here in this library?
You said you worked in all the nooks and crannies.
Well, it's what I do.
I'm a scholar, so libraries are... are my treasure.
My playground.
My... My mine.
(CHUCKLES) Here I come and mine things.
This book is Daddy, We Hardly Knew You,
the book you wrote about your dad,
but in it, you talk about libraries and you say,
"Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit,
"reminders of order, calm and continuity,
"lakes of mental energy.
"It was inevitable that I would begin my search for my father in a library,
"although I would reckon
"that my father was never inside a library in his life."
(LAUGHS) Poor Daddy.
In terms of where you began,
you've said that you've always been a little girl that wanted to escape.
What were you escaping from?
Suburbia, I think. Mmm.
I really can't bear it.
I remember Edward Street,
which was the street we lived in in Sandringham.
Hated everything about it.
The windows that don't open. The blinds that are always drawn.
No people in the street. No conversation.
That's partly to do with my mother,
who I realise now was probably on the autistic spectrum somewhere.
Right.
And she didn't make friends with people.
Mmm. She preferred to imagine them.
What did your parents do?
My mother, I would... if I had the lettering on her tombstone,
I probably would have put,
"Say what you like - she had a fantastic tan."
(LAUGHS)
And that was pretty much what she did.
Her whole life was geared towards going down the beach.
What about Reg, your father? What did he do?
He sold advertising space.
So, most days, Daddy would appear in the office probably around about 11
and would go off for lunch at the CTA at about 12,
and then he would spend the afternoon, um...
..refereeing card games and billiards.
He was an A-grade billiards referee.
So, Daddy never worked an afternoon in his life.
But he came home exhausted. (LAUGHS) Did he?
And we children had to keep very quiet.
How is it that a young girl in the '50s in Sandringham
can learn four languages before she's a teen?
I always say it's because I didn't have any pocket money.
So the only thing I could accumulate
was a 'Wortschatz' in German - a 'word treasure'.
And so I accumulated one.
And I did German as soon as I could do German at school.
I did French from... probably merit, around there.
(LAUGHS) My father used to bring home from work
the foreign editions of the Reader's Digest.
So, there was La selezione aus Reader's Digest,
there was Das Beste aus Reader's Digest...
No! ..and Selection...
..du Reader's Digest.
And I would sit on the train with these in my bag
and I'd study the new Australians
to see which ones might speak my language.
THEN I would - usually Das Beste - then I would take out the German
and sit there, looking over the top...
No!
..expecting to do conversation on the train.
Everybody always helped me.
And I would speak German all the way home from school.
How did your siblings react when you left Australia?
Well, they had a bit of reacting to do before that,
'cause they had to react to me leaving home.
Oh, of course.
And that... that was a bit weird,
'cause my mother pretended she was terrified of me.
But were you not allowed to leave home? Why couldn't you leave home?
I came home one day during the holidays
and I ate a banana in the fridge,
and my mother came into the kitchen
and said, "Those bananas are for MY children."
And I thought, "Tell you what. I'm out of here."
And I just wanted a place, uh, where you could see beautiful things.
And the great Australian ugliness was what we had then,
and it's arguable we've still got it,
and I really did want to know what those spaces were like.
I wanted to see a grand opera. I wanted...
Mmm. All the good things. Everything. Everything.
Did you regret leaving anything behind in Australia?
No matter where you go in your life,
when you dream, you will dream the skies of your native land.
So I think, "Do Australians realise their sky is a different colour?
"Do they realise that their clouds are polystyrene?
"They bump around in the sky."
And the smell of eucalypts. I missed... everything.
Did you think sometimes you might have been born into the wrong family?
That I was a changeling? Maybe.
Ooh! (CHUCKLES)
Well, yes. I'd even think, "Do I look like them?"
Did someone leave you in a basket somewhere at the door
and they just picked you up?
No, I was told the story of my disastrous birth
enough times to believe it.
'Cause I was a high forceps delivery and they pulled my ears off and...
Oh!
..and my mother screamed and said, "Take it away. It's not mine."
(GASPS)
Oh, well, that's her story, but you don't have to believe it.
It's a good story, isn't it? Yeah.
Well, it'd make the kids feel guilty anytime.
Shall we go to the tearooms? The teaROOM.
Oh, it's just the tearoom?
There's only one. Singular.
Yeah, and they used to have wonderful cheese scones.
This is not what I expected a tearoom to be.
Very quiet for our tearoom. It is. Very quiet.
Are you after what I think you're after? (LAUGHS)
They're there! They're there?!
This is the cheese scone in question.
Oh, fantastic. We should probably get one.
There we go.
Alright. Here's the test.
Oh. Uh...
In the olden days, there was so much cheese in them
that it used to have little lakes of warm cheese.
Mmm, nom nom.
Nom nom nom. Is it good?
Uh-uh.
Let's go to the stacks.
Now, what do 'stacks' mean, Germaine? What are the...
Well, these are stacks.
Literally just, it's stacks of books? Books stacked on top of each other.
And would you come up here and work?
I used to like being next to the heater
and hanging over the void.
I did not expect this black handrail to be heated.
This is really lovely.
And you can really snuggle up against it.
Are you happiest at work in that way?
I think I'm always happy when I'm working.
I think it's what I'd rather do. Mmm.
Playing, I'm not good at. I get bored.
But I'm happy to do almost any sort of work.
Mmm.
And sometimes I'll make physical work
so that I can break sweat and feel virtuous.
Let's talk about Female Eunuch.
So many woman have said to you
that they feel that you changed their lives.
How do you feel about that comment?
Well, you really can't change anybody's life,
except your own, presumably,
but if the women had already lifted up their heads
and were already snuffing the air and thinking,
"There has to be more to life than this.
"I'm not staying on this particular treadmill,"
um... and if my book was of any use to them then,
if it helped them not to feel that they were mad or bad,
uh, then good.
But they can't blame me for changing their lives.
It's down to them. They've done it.
But they don't blame you.
It'll be men that will blame you sometimes, won't it?
It's funny. I mean, I have been accused of destroying the family...
..and I remember saying mildly, "You do me too much credit."
(LAUGHS)
What do you think of the book now?
Oh, I don't think it's a particularly good book.
And I don't think it's my best book.
It was the best book I could write at the time.
I think The Whole Woman is a better book, for older people,
um, and more considered.
Aw! You were part of the Footlights.
Yes, I was.
Oh, so, Eric Idle's the president.
I... cutted me hairs.
"Germaine is a research student in English literature
"at Newnham College.
"She was born and raised to six feet in Melbourne, Australia
"and semi-educated in a convent school."
(BOTH LAUGH)
You were the first female performer allowed...
There were three of us, taken in together.
We had to do a smoker. What's a smoker?
Um, it's a smoking concert, where you put on your performance
for the other members of the Footlights, who are smoking.
So it's an audition? Yep.
And I remember pinching a joke from Barry Humphries.
He probably hasn't forgiven me, either.
Oh, do you want to give me the $20 and I'll pass it on to him?
(LAUGHS) Um, he... What did you do for your smoker?
Well, he'd done a joke about how to have an Australian accent.
Oh, brilliant!
And he'd showed an egg slicer
and said, "You have to put this in your mouth,
"and then you can speak with a proper Australian accent."
And I did a version of that joke.
How did it go? Fine.
You won Best Actress of the Year.
You didn't have to be THAT good to get Actress of the Year.
Some of the people you worked alongside
ended up working, of course,
in Monty Python and Yes, Minister and The Goodies.
How did those men react to you?
Well, I think it's true to say that at that time, and possibly still,
the men of Cambridge were terrified of women in any manifestation.
I mean, there were eight men to every woman
and there was nil in the way of sexual interaction going on.
Oh, really? Oh, really!
If you care to find it, you can.
You doing TV sketch with Kenny Everett.
It's called Nice Time, and you are hilarious in it.
Well, that's a funny story too, and that came out of the Footlights,
and Granada was looking for a new kind of comedy program,
and they wanted something that was just silly.
But Kenny and I had a different agenda as well,
which was that we wanted to break the convention of TV.
And now, for the first time on European television, we present...
Psst! Hey, Kenny! What?
Jonathan wants to ask you a question.
No, I don't. Go on! Whisper it, then!
(BELLS JANGLE)
That was the musical boot - runner-up in the 'sole' section.
JULIA: Had you ever considered it? Acting as a career?
Well, I'd been acting ever since I was at school, really,
and then in my first university, and then in my second university,
and then in my third university.
But by the time I'd actually gone through all that,
I decided that a luvvy was the last thing I wanted to be,
that I was sick and tired of theatricals,
that they bored me and annoyed me.
My secret ambition was to be a librarian.
And... that didn't happen.
How about we go for a little wander around Cambridge?
It is lovely.
You reckon? No?
(LAUGHS) Yes, it's lovely! It's lovely!
But a lot of it's fake, you've got to understand.
Is it? In what way?
Well, it's built in the 19th century
but it's pretending it was built in the 14th.
Right.
Because they wanted it to be all religiousy-looking.
And where's this place that we're going to?
Uh, St Edward's Passage.
Did you live there? Yep.
So, this is it. Ohh!
It's funny, isn't it? This is great!
You lived at No. 8, which is now, I think, a coffee house.
Well, well... (LAUGHS)
My poor little house! (LAUGHS)
(SIGHS) And my kitchen!
People used to piss into the grating.
And that is your kitchen down there?! Yeah.
(GASPS) That is incredible.
And my study was there.
And then above... If you come back, you'll see the window.
Oh, yeah! There.
Well, let's go in and have a look. See what's there.
There might be nothing.
Well, I don't think there'll be anything of mine left!
(STAIRS CREAK)
(GASPS) It's tiny!
Of course it was tiny.
My desk was there.
Oh! Germaine... And I sat there.
And it was your own place? Just you?
I rented it. £8 a week, it cost.
£8 a week!
It was quite a lot of money then.
And did you have friends over much, or it was really a place of solitude?
No, there were people in and out all the time.
And I shared it a lot. There were always people who needed a doss.
And I lent it to these two kids when I went to Europe
and they set it on fire.
Did they?! They did.
We found a little nook here at the university to sit in.
I wanted to ask you - you know history always carries on
about how the '60s were dangerous and glamorous and exciting?
You were there. Were they?
I always thought of where we were at then in the '60s
as being a playground that had been created by surplus value.
We slept in each other's apartments, on each other's sofas.
We hitchhiked. We went to Bhutan. We did all those things.
And mostly - outrageously, given my puritanical bent -
um, we were exploiting other people's poverty,
which we never really figured out.
We all thought the revolution was round the corner.
That was the good bit.
The bad bit was that we were completely wrong.
Mmm. Were you puritanical?
Yes, I was, quite puritanical.
How do you define that? Is it...
Well, I didn't approve of the drug culture.
I definitely didn't like not being in my right mind.
Um, even when I wasn't in my right mind, out of my skull, I hated it.
Yeah, I do too. (CHUCKLES)
Threw up all over the place
and thought, "The one thing I don't want to be is stoned ever."
I thought you should have one boyfriend at a time. (CHUCKLES)
That was a bit hard. (LAUGHS)
What with touring and everything, I mean, half of them were away...
(LAUGHS)
..and there you'd be in the speakeasy
and there'd be a musician who was just as lonely as you were.
It was pretty obvious what was gonna happen.
I'm not gonna tell, 'cause they're gonna say, "She's mad."
And now I'm beginning to forget anyway.
Are you? Great.
I do sometimes look at somebody and think...
(LAUGHS) "Did I?"
"Did I?" "Did we?"
Was it at least a time of ideas?
Of course, but were they good ideas?
We all thought, really, that...
..capitalism was so obviously an unjust system
that it couldn't go on forever.
That the revolt of ordinary people -
peasants' revolts, workers' revolts, whatever -
must eventually... gain power.
But the whole point was we didn't understand power.
We had no idea.
And feminists still have no idea.
We can say we're 51% of the population.
Mmm. "So?
"That doesn't mean we have to take care of women,
"because you can't make us.
"We can, you know, shut down your maternity units at will.
"We can have you looked after
"by women who don't even earn the living wage.
"And this is where you belong.
"This is what you get
"for having served your families and... and your employers
"faithfully all your lives."
They're still getting away with it.
We're further away than we ever were.
We haven't talked about fame and how that felt...
..you know, when it first came.
That initial wave, it's quite an interruption.
Well, but it's different being an author.
You know? Oh, OK.
Because most people don't actually know what you look like.
To be recognised is boring,
but to be appreciated is different.
Even when I'm doing the hard gigs around here -
not up the North.
The further I go away from London, the more likely I am
to a packed hall and people who are really excited and turned on
and want to ask me things and hear what I think.
You go inside the M25, it's a bit different.
Everybody's a bit jaded. Mmm.
Um, and they've seen it all... (MOANS)
And to actually have a full house at one of those,
and these days, I have full houses all the time.
And I think, you know, "I'm over. Um, I soon won't be here anymore."
Um... and it's...
..it's touching.
It is very touching.
You've been spending a lot of time now in conservation.
Let's go to find your woods.
I think that would be a good idea.
OK, so, this gate is meant to keep the goosies...
Where are they? Where are the geese?
They've had 13 of their relatives eaten by the fox.
(GASPS) So they're easily frightened.
No, no, there you are!
Oh! You were hiding!
(GEESE HONK)
That's a beautiful colour. Look at that!
So, this is the wood. It is.
And standing as sentinels before the wood are two fastigiate features.
'Fastigiate' means that they're bundled.
Can you see that? A beech should stand like that...
Mmm. ..and they stand like that.
Now, you planted all of this?
Every single thing.
It's a tremendous source of joy. Mmm.
I come down my hill and think, "Why do I feel so fantastic?"
And it's because I've been in the wood.
And because, did you realise, if you put the effort into it,
that there's enough energy left in these residual systems
to re-establish themselves?
If we can just start getting it right.
Why grow this wood?
Is it about having something here that will last forever?
But it WON'T last forever. That's the thing people don't understand.
They don't understand that trees have life spans and trees die,
and fallen trees and rotting trees
have a very important role to play in the ecosystem,
because you need them for your beetles,
and your beetles are the genuine bottom of the food chain,
and so all your other creatures need the beetles.
You're president of Buglife.
That is true. That's your charity.
I'm very proud of that. I keep wait...
They're gonna sound too old in a minute.
Why do you love being president of Buglife?
Because it's a very important charity.
If we lose our bugs, we lose our invertebrates,
we've lost everything - the planet is dead.
The premise of this program, or this show,
is that we deliver people home.
Is this home?
No.
Where's home?
This is gonna sound like such a pious answer. (CHUCKLES)
It's just gonna make you cross. Is it?
I don't know any bit of earth that I don't think of as home.
I'm an Earthling.
Before I'm an Australian or English, or a PhD, or an author,
or... a heterosexual or Catholic or ex-Catholic or atheist,
I'm an Earthling.
And so every day's dollop of bad news about Earth
is like being told that a beloved relative is dying.
But that property you're, uh... reinstating in Queensland,
you wrote about it in White Beech, and even to the point
that it started to repair the relationship with your sister, Jane.
In what way?
I realised my sister was a botanist
and I was, to some extent, an amateur botanist,
so my growing closer to Jane begins
when we both go to South-Western Western Australia and botanise.
So, we crawl through the undergrowth
taking pictures of orchids and things.
So, my sister and I would return from a day's foraging
black from head to foot,
but with wonderful photographs - hundreds of photographs.
I do like the idea
that the two of you were crawling around in the forest taking photos,
getting all black and dirty and going, "I found it! I found one!"
And getting that nice reward at the end of the day.
But it's a funny thing. It's part of being a woman.
I mean, I love her more than anybody else in the world,
but she's got lots of other people to love,
like sons and grandchildren and a husband.
So I come down the pecking order.
And people say, "But isn't that sad?"
And the answer is no, it's not in the least sad.
Mmm. And at least you've got her.
She's there. Yeah, yeah.
The one thing I won't forgive her for will be dying!
You had such a fractious relationship with your parents.
I mean, in a way, you might not have had the life you led
if that hadn't happened,
if there hadn't been that kind of... trouble,
that kind of pain, that kind of distancing.
Would you have become the activist and the writer that you are?
Uh, I have no idea.
I have no idea.
In fact, as I get older, I realise that I am very like my mother.
My mother, she was on the autistic spectrum, certainly,
and she was retentive and thoughtful,
but she was also...
..like many autistic people, she was easily frustrated.
But why do you think you're more like her now, as you get older, then?
Because I realise that some of her value judgements
are still stuck in my mind.
They're still markers.
What traits did you get from your father?
Oh, I wish!
(LAUGHS) I wish. My father was a gentleman.
He was just instinctively well mannered.
People loved him.
He was the manager of the St Kilda cricket team.
They thought he was wonderful.
They'd be dead nervous before they went out to the crease,
and Reg would know exactly what to say.
He never knew what to say to me! But he knew what to say to them.
Never said anything to me.
He made one speech one day, which was to say
that my mother was going through the change of life
and I ought to understand
that she wasn't to be expected to be rational.
And I had to say, "Dad, her periods are more regular than mine.
"Go away." (LAUGHS)
Considering your father never spoke to you, did you find any resolution?
You wrote the book and took two years of your own life...
I ran away. ..to write the book...
Yeah, that was the resolution. I ran away.
I mean, that was the thing.
I can still remember sitting on the Mentone railway station
thinking, you know, "Great God almighty! Free at last!"
I was free of everything. Free of money, free of prospects!
Free of a place to live!
But I was free. Mmm.
No, it was impossible.
I sort of thought that my mother didn't accept me
as one of her children,
um, and that she was different with the others
and their lives would be easier if I left.
And that was the thing I learnt very much later from my sister -
that my little sister...
..never forgave me for leaving, never.
And she needed me, but I needed to survive, and I ran away.
Two years doing Daddy, I Hardly Knew You
and finding out the fact that he was a fraud in many ways.
Yeah. An invented persona.
Did it help you, finding out all that stuff about your father?
I went through the thing of, "Daddy, you're a liar. You're a liar!"
And then I realised
that he didn't actually say the things I believed about him.
I probably made them up. Mmm.
He just didn't say ANYTHING.
Um... I couldn't have handled that.
Poor Daddy, really. Yeah.
And then I realised something -
that my father lived a lie so that I didn't have to lie.
He made it possible for me to be true to myself
in a way that he wasn't.
But ultimately, he was,
because I think the personality he invented for himself
of the slightly toffy Englishman
with the public school history at Launceston Grammar -
he didn't go to Launceston Grammar -
um, that that was nearer his actual personality
than, you know, the abandoned child of a servant
who was impregnated by her boss while his wife was pregnant.
Conservation. All this lovely stuff all around us.
Is that a healing?
Well, I'm not aware of being sick, really.
I'm more aware of dying than being sick.
In what way? Well, it's got to be done.
And so I do sort of wonder. I wonder what form it'll show up in. (LAUGHS)
79, I am.
So, what does the 79-year-old Germaine Greer have in common
with the 14-year-old girl from Sandringham?
Well, one answer to that would be that I've never grown up.
I've always been a schoolgirl.
I didn't... I had a go at being married
and realised it was a very, very foolish idea.
Um, and so you'd have to say everything.
I'm still that same person.
Probably still as much of a show-off.
Still as studious. Still as retentive.
Memory's going a bit weird. Mmm.
And I can remember all sorts of things I don't need to remember,
and then I can't remember something I do need to remember.
And I think, "Who's actually writing this scenario?"
Germaine, thank you. Has it been alright?
Yeah, I don't like living in the past all that much.
Uh, but I shouldn't be living an unexamined life either.
So you've probably done me good. I'm glad.
Shall we go and get a hot drink?
What a good idea. Oh, it's a great idea.
I don't know. Are you a tea-drinker or a coffee-drinker?
We haven't got any coffee. Oh, well, that's that, then.
We ran out. Oh.
On purpose. No, we ran out. (LAUGHS)
Captions by Red Bee Media
Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation