By Gina McColl
A damask napkin with a sketch of a woman's back, waist and "big arse" – souvenir from a tryst, most likely, with former lover, Italian film director Federico Fellini. Early drafts of The Female Eunuch. Pages torn from international editions of Playboy magazine of her much-translated essay "Seduction is a four letter word." A 1959 Farrago article ridiculing Christians' anti-rationalism. Furious letter-rows with editors and subeditors over payment and commas.
Germaine Greer, once the most famous feminist in the world, has been collecting material for her archive since her
Germaine Greer in 1970, at the height of her campaign for women's rights.Credit: Topham/Australscope
university days.
Massive ego and sense of destiny? If so, richly deserved, says Dr Rachel Buchanan, curator of the archives, acquired by the University of Melbourne in 2013, the $3 million project funded by distinguished alumni including businesswomen Carol Schwartz and Margaret Jackson.
Items from Germaine Greer's archive at the University of Melbourne.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
Greer, now 78, is a true polymath, Buchanan says. A gigantic thinker and writer about feminism, art and literary history, Shakespeare, opera and gardening just for starters, speaker of four languages, a columnist, foreign correspondent, academic, reality TV star and comedian. And then there are the contradictions: the anarchist who adores grammar. The mad environmentalist who digs cars and hoon driving (there are even recordings of her road raging against slow motorists in the archive). "It's like she crammed in as many lives as she could in a single human allotted span," Buchanan, an historian and former journalist, says.
Melbourne-born Greer lives between her house in Essex with its orchard, fish pond and flock of geese (each fish and fowl named, apparently) and her sliver of rainforest, Cave Creek in south-east Queensland, which she has founded a charity to rehabilitate.
But her life's work lives in a flat-roofed brown-brick building in Brunswick, in the University of Melbourne archives. It's an industrial space, built for ageing whisky. Climate-controlled, with fluoro lighting, metal-grille walkways and towering steel shelving ("lockups for paper", Buchanan says), the collection includes the archives of former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and local publishers McPhee Gribble, alongside Bates Smart architectural models, a throng of obsolete business machines, and Communist Party of Australia anti-conscription posters. History on remand.
Greer's life's work – the largest of an individual woman in the collection – sits opposite historian Geoffrey Blainey's. Buchanan says she likes to imagine the two controversial academics, one associated with the Left, the other the Right, having epic barneys after lights-out.
Germaine Greer at home in Essex.Credit: Nathan Gallagher
Greer herself looked around the 150-filing cabinets-worth of documents, multimedia, letters and ephemera, as it was being packed up to ship from Essex to Melbourne, and noted: "Looking at all this, anyone can see I worked very hard."
Indeed. There are stacks of scholarship on display, from translations of out-of-print books by Flaubert to notes for Glyndebourne opera programs and course material from her groundbreaking courses ("the body in feminism") at the universities of Cambridge and Warwick in Britain and Tulsa in the US. Research notebooks and drafts of her major books including The Obstacle Race, Daddy, We Hardly Knew You and The Change.
Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch helped launch second-wave feminism and was a bestseller around the world.
Then there's the journalism, from the underground (she co-founded European sex paper Suck) to the high-minded (interviewing Primo Levi for The Literary Review) to the niche (columnist for Nursing Times).
She did Gonzo: "McGovern's Big Tease," about the 1972 presidential campaign, gave contemporaries Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe a run for their money-shots.
Dr Rachel Buchanan with items in the Germaine Greer archive. Credit: Luis Ascui
She did accessible, including regular columns in this paper and in major British publications, from Private Eye and The Spectator to The Guardian, where her subjects ranged from the habits of her dogs to sexual assault, including her own account of being raped as a 19-year-old in South Yarra. At The Sunday Times, where she had one of the first photo bylines, she alternated articles in praise of going knickerless with a report from the brothels and streets of Hanoi on life for Vietnamese women who had babies with American GIs.
We get a glimpse of coodabeen projects that never quite launched, including a David-Attenborough-style TV series, The Story of Human Reproduction, funded by the Whitlam government; and a work on Margaret Thatcher and British Labour in the 1980s with the delirious title Fortune's Maggot.
She said what? Germaine Greer regularly causes uproar with her remarks on the ABC's Q&A. Credit: ABC Q&A
She worked hard, then – but that's not to say it's all hard work. The archive also records the romps, the hobnobbing and chance connections, the pop culture and ephemera.
Her encounters with the Zeitgeist include Lou Reed, Kris Kristoffersen, Frank Zappa, Princess Margaret, Janis Joplin and Diane Arbus (who shot her at the Chelsea Hotel). There's Greer interviewed by Michael Hutchence for Elle (1995). Her £35,000 tell-all 2005 article about leaving the Celebrity Big Brother household, which included '80s film star Brigitte Neilsen and Jackie Stallone, mother of Sly.
Germaine Greer takes part in a Women's Liberation march in Sydney in 1972. Credit: Kevin Berry
And in one delightful archival find, there is never-screened 16mm film footage of Greer in an early reality-TV skit from the late 1960s with a scrawny, grinning Kenny Everett. He's a milkman and she's a housewife, curlers in her mane of hair, stepping into a tub filled with milk, sipping it through a straw, tempting a cat to slurp – part Cleopatra, part feminist soft-porn spoof, part Carry On film.
Alongside Greer's high jinks and ego and scholarship, Buchanan says, there is tremendous humility and generosity. While her feminism was always individualist and libertarian, the archivists have discovered Greer's financial support for more collectivist projects, such as a health centre in Los Angeles that taught women how to use speculums on each other and access early terminations. Decades before the art-museum-punk-feminists the Guerilla Girls, there are dozens of letters from Greer to the directors of major European galleries, including the Uffizi, seeking reproductions of the work of female artists in their collections, and asking why they were not on display.
Files inside Germaine Greer's Essex office, before their journey to Melbourne.Credit: Nathan Gallagher
There is also voluminous correspondence from women whose lives were transformed by Greer's work, and most often, copies of Greer's replies. One letter, dated June 1971, is from a 28-year-old high school teacher called Helen Garner, half-way through The Female Eunuch.
"I feel a bit foolish saying this, but whenever I am listening to one of the men talking shit to me about the value of corporal punishment or some such monstrosity, and whenever I feel that awful feminine deference eroding my urge to argue back, I call to mind your picture on the back of The Female Eunuch," wrote Garner in a neat cursive script. "[A]nd I think, 'F---, SHE wouldn't stand here silent, and neither will I'. And I don't."
Books lined up inside Germaine Greer's Essex office.Credit: Nathan Gallagher
A year later, the young Melbourne teacher would be sacked by the Victorian Department of Education for a frank sex-ed lesson, and go on to publish Monkey Grip and The First Stone.
Echoes, encounters and reverberations between Greer and Garner, the Guerilla Girls and many more have made cataloguing the archive like a giant jigsaw puzzle, Buchanan says. There are dozens of names in the record – including Australia's Wendy Bacon, and Britain's Laurie Penny – who would go on to make major contributions as feminists and activists.
Some of the items that made the journey from Essex to Melbourne. Credit: Nathan Gallagher
"Because Greer kept everything, you see every aspect of a person and all these other people too," Buchanan says. "It's like time travelling."
Archivists have to think into the future as well as the past. Buchanan and her team devised a taxonomy that will allow future generations to find their way around Greer's life and work, and the way both intersect with the artistic, cultural and social movements of her day. Anyone who thinks archives are just nerd pilgrimages should take a squiz at the catalogue terms: "Cave Creek rainforest. Celebrity Big Brother. Children – Sexual Behaviour. Christina Rossetti. Country Notebook (the Telegraph). C--- Reappropriation".
A note from Margaret Atwood among items from Germaine Greer's archive.Credit: Nathan Gallagher
Greer's standing has been tempered by recent infernos over her comments about Indigenous men and domestic violence, or transgender women, or her remarks on the late Steve Irwin ( "The animal world has finally taken its revenge") or then Prime Minister Julia Gillard's "big arse". It can be hard to know where the line is between Greer's deliberate trolling of audiences and the media and a nuanced intellectual point. What's clear in the breadth of activities on display in the archives is her trademark, lifelong, anti-fundamentalism. Whatever the field, she's always involved in a kind of intellectual performance art, making an anarchic or un-PC point to show up modern pieties.
One of Buchanan's finds is Greer's contribution to a 1971 series of celebrity-dressed Christmas trees, sponsored by greeting-card company Hallmark, purveyor of hokey sentimentality. "Dr G's Tree", for a Christmas at the height of the Vietnam War is a ficus, indigenous to the forests of south-east Asia, that has been immolated to look like it has been hit with the napalm and defoliants developed to strip the jungles of cover for the enemy. "This tree has not been treated with a defoliant, because if it had, it would constitute a danger to any pregnant woman who came near it. No such precautions have been taken in Vietnam," reads the explanatory card. It goes on to talk of the legacy of disability and environmental devastation being perpetrated in liberty's name, and the hypocrisy of the Christmas message of peace and goodwill.
Germaine Greer will speak about her archive at the University of Melbourne on International Women's Day.Credit: Neil Spence
Dr G's Tree is poignant, clever and trenchant, but its skewering of the Christmas message, given the Hallmark sponsorship, makes this a priceless bit of up-yoursery, as well. She loves a scrap, and in person is hilarious, says Buchanan.
"I've come to see her public image as quite one-dimensional," Buchanan says. "The nature of the collection, the range and skill and diverse motivations – it's both building a monument to herself and commemorating the lives of ordinary women who have read her ... and ensuring the work of female writers and artists is not forgotten.
A noticeboard inside Germaine Greer's archive.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui
"She is a performance artist – everything, including her scholarship, research thoroughness and passion for the popular and comedic, is a performance.
"I've never had a relationship like it."
The Germaine Greer Collection will be available for public researchers for the first time this month, following a public conversation between Greer and her archivists at the University of Melbourne on International Women's Day (booked out). events.unimelb.edu.au
WHAT GREER MEANS TO ME
CLARE WRIGHT, historian and author: Germaine Greer is a provocation. She changed the way women represent themselves. I love that she keeps us guessing.
CELESTE LIDDLE, Indigenous union organiser and BlackFeministRanter blogger: Greer has long been a skilled feminist provocateur and abject intellectual. To this day; regardless of whether her views cause applause or derision, she retains the ability to command space for feminist dialogue, usually with just one well-placed sentence.
EVA COX, sociologist and activist: She's not someone you slot into a box. People set her up on pedestal, as a leader of the women's movement, but it's not a role she's comfortable in. Greer is a libertarian who would find the idea of a correct line quite offensive.
ELIZABETH BRODERICK, special adviser to the United Nations on women's issues: I can definitely see her influence in the advice I have given my daughter and other young women: a man is not a financial plan.