I have assembled my own legion of creative giants, as I potter through life. 

My personal vanguard of greats are the people to whom I return, and return. These creative masters fascinate me, and make life more stimulating. In an abstract way, I love each of them. 

And here they are. Listed.  

I choose Wilde, for his love of beauty. I choose Mozart for his dedication to symmetry. I choose Austen for her enthralling wit. I choose Vidal for his caustic bite. I choose Hitchens for his pugnacity. I choose Victoria for her trips to Menton. I choose Wright for his angles and lines. I choose Bach for his invention. I choose Carmen for her deathly heroism (yes – she’s fictitious). I choose Van Gogh for his fresh perspective. I choose Bernadette for her authentic tale. I choose Yeats for his submission to love. I choose Shakespeare for his trove of sonnets. I choose Joyce for her disquisition of Trans. I choose Cleese for his perfect farce. I choose Brontë for Cathy. I choose Minghella for his depth of story. I choose Sinéad for her vulnerability. I choose Williams for Stella and Stanley. 

And I choose Germaine Greer. 

Like the Spring which needed death for nourishment, Germaine Greer’s ideas flow from a well of deadly paradox. 

She is a writer and thinker who reframes the flabby assumptions of tabloid life, from a female perspective. In doing so, she is eternally lively. 

Consumerism is antithetical to freedom. Leadership builds challenge, not consensus. The pursuit of equality is thin gruel for women. Mister Sheen is corporatist fetishisation of cleanliness. Love is enslavement, unworthy of sonnets. 

***

I fell upon Ms Greer this morning, and wondered how she was doing. 

Born the year Hitler’s tanks rolled into Poland, she is now in her mid-winter. I wondered how she sees it all, from her elder point of view. How does she look back on the hurly-burly of youth, when she became a mainstay of British media, and stayed for forty years?

Greer’s husband-of-three-weeks wrote a memoir entitled ‘Let’s Hear It For The Long-legged Women’ (1973), a muck-savage reference to the six-foot stature of both his brilliant wives. I find it easy to measure the hidden charms of one Paul du Feu, a Welsh bricklayer who wed both Germaine Greer and Maya Angelou, and punctuated his notoriety by stripping for Cosmopolitan.  

Greer was blessed with physical beauty, for sure, but her most potent allure was the freshness of her ideas. With this intellectual heft came humility: she wondered, again and again, why The Female Eunuch (1970) is still read, as so much has changed for women and, anyway, her ‘Australian Gothic’ style is over-written, and averagely argued. 

My Sunday sleuthing delivered some updates.

Greer, who never had children, signed herself into a Nursing Home in Murwillumbah (close to the Gold Coast), and stayed for a year. But she bored of it, found that the residents’ quizzes lacked zest, and concluded that the elderly are first cloistered, and then imprisoned, until the end draws in. 

She escaped. 

Her brother, Barry, 11 years her junior, became a beacon. It is reported that she’s moved into a house next to his. Presumably, her treasured godchildren have more access to the world’s most opinionated godmother in this new situation, without visiting hours.

***

Greer’s own writing has long suggested that getting old is no picnic; except, perhaps, one of the Hanging Rock variety. 

Things go awry as the years fall. There is pain, separation and loneliness. These feelings of dis-ease are amplified, she observes, by decades of marketing messages which frame women’s ageing as an enemy. And yet, she concludes, age also brings freedom for a woman. She is unshackled from being the object of men’s desires; from being the object of commercialism; from being the subject of procreation. 

In this invisibility comes opportunity. 

Indeed, invisibility made it rather hard to find her traces online. But finally, I did.  

She was to take a starring role at the 2022 Canberra Writers’ Festival, but a fall  – that curse of age – curtailed the plan.  Instead, the Festival was treated to a Zoom appearance of an 83-year-old Australian ‘national treasure’, now living back home in Oz. 

In a review by Whispering Gums (there is no video record), Germaine Greer’s performance is described as wonderful, somewhat dizzy, prone to tangents, a little bellicose, and always witty. She spoke of ageing, and of her carers – from Nepal and Indonesia – who are paid a pittance for their hardscrabble work. She described how elderly care is now feminised, whether delivered by a man or a woman. 

In the account, I could feel the scent of her charms.

***

Does she care for the impact her life’s work has had on so many? 

Not much, I suspect. Greer never wanted disciples. Her objective was to get people to pose their own questions, more than pay heed to her answers. 

Whispering Gums carried a screenshot of that Zoom interview. Greer’s face dominates a giant screen. It is a tad more bloated and tired than any photo I have previously seen. The sight of it makes me a little sad. 

“I’m as old as you like”, she said, a while back, when interviewed by Channel Four. Even then, she seemed unbothered by the advance of time. Unbothered by her place in the vanguard. Unbothered by the love of so many who listened. 

Unmoved by it all.