I’m an Australian born in 1949. I didn’t understand the posters of Barry Humphries on Newcastle (NSW) telegraph poles advertising his show “A nice night out” in 1958. My female friends of the mid 1960s introduced me to Germaines book “ The Female Eunuch”. I cottoned on to Robert Hughes watching “The Shock of the New”, and later reading “The Fatal Shore”. I watched Clive on BBC TV. Now at age 70 I finally get it. This is Aboriginal Land, always has been, always will be. Australia ( thank you Matthew Flinders) has a lot to give the World. They can learn from the oldest continuing culture on planet Earth. Thank you to my Aboriginal colleagues for welcoming me as belonging to Country, being born in Gudigal land of the Eora nation. The World has a lot to learn from Australia’s 240 different Aboriginal Nations.
The more interesting intellectual and political sociology is why Australia and not Canada or New Zealand produce this type of public intellectual? I suspect there something in the Anglo-Celtic thesis Greer mentioned rather than Anglo-Scots or Franco-Anglo-Scots but there is potentially something about the absolutely amazing resources that Menzies put into the universities thinking it'd make conservative voters but Sydney and Melbourne universities produced these four minds.
Germaine, sorry to disagree with you, but being ignorant and uniformed is not an especially Australian thing (even if it is thick on the ground down under) - it's a very British thing too [ eg Brexit! ], an American thing [list is endless], and an every country thing - it's a human norm, to which you are a rare exception; good on yer, mayt; yer an orl ryte shiela, an' not stuck-up. :) But there's another, very different moment when you speculate that men will stop bothering with women once extra-uterine birth becomes possible - oh my goodness, how little you understand about men! But what awful thing happened to you when you were growing up to ever imagine such a thing? i found myself suddenly feeling very sorry for you, seeing you as a little child watching your father ignore/disrespect your mother. Is that what happened?
