Greer kicks off writer's festival
Academic, social commentator and feminist life force Germaine Greer opened the Perth Writer's Festival in strident and entertaining style last night with a call to environmental arms to women everywhere.
In her address, Eco-Feminism Then and Now, Professor Greer's targets ranged from mining magnate Gina Rinehart to physicist Stephen Hawking as she demanded urgent action to protect Earth's threatened biodiversity.
Starting with the environmental and social damage from the mining industry, she told a full house at the University of WA's Winthrop Hall that modern eco-feminists must "stem the tide of eco-side".
Professor Greer said she had been asked recently to write a piece for The West Australian about whether, as the mining capital of Australia, WA was too male-dominated.
"Do I not know that the most rapacious miner of all is a woman?" she told a laughing audience.
Mrs Rinehart's very existence was "all the proof you need that Australia needs to rethink the system that has condemned the Lucky Country to a dangerous and agonising cycle of boom and bust", she said.
"For every Gina Rinehart figure there are hundreds of thousands of hard working Australians condemned to penury."
The results were an absurdly inflated currency, exorbitant food prices, unaffordable housing and ecological degradation, she said.
"What will be kept when the mineral wealth has all been shipped away? The answer is nothing. Mining doesnât bring development unless governments make it bring development."
"All mining brings is holes in the ground."
Our real inheritance should be bio-diversity, not bricks and mortar, she said.
Women had historically been at the forefront of the environmental movement but Professor Greer called for the women of today to do more and follow the unlikely example of the growing activism of the Country Women's Association against coal seam gas projects in Queensland and New South Wales.
Having been subordinated by men for centuries, women better understood the natural world was ordered from the bottom up, rather than the top down, she said.
"We have to mobilise as if resisting the bombardment of an invader."
Humans shared their DNA and depended for their survival on slime moulds, mycorrhizal plant fungi, bacteria and tree frogs, she said.
"We are all earthlings," she said.
After Professor Greer's speech, the Perth Writers Festival was officially launched at a garden party outside Winthrop Hall. Guests included international writers Chetan Bhagat, Glen Duncan, Andrea Di Robilant and Inua Ellams. The writers festival, a component of the Perth International Arts Festival, ends with a family day on Sunday.
