By Stafff Writers
First published in The Age on March 11, 1972
Youths riot as Dr. Greer fined
AUCKLAND (NZ). Germaine Greer, the champion of Women’s Liberation was cleared yesterday of charges of indecency for using one word, but was fined 40 dollars for using a word only half as long.
Miss Greer, 33, who returned to Sydney last night, told the magistrate that she did not consider the Anglo-Saxon word she used in a lecture at Auckland University to be obscene.
Germaine Greer takes part in a march in Sydney in March 1972, just days after her Auckland court appearance. Credit: Kevin Berry
“The word is considered obscene because the act it refers to is something we disdain,” she said.
She thought the students’ would not have accepted her “pandering to circurmlocution”.
Before the hearing police arrested 17 youths after they had demonstrated outside the court, chanting both words Miss Greer was accused of using, and throwing tomatoes, eggs and jellybeans at the police.
Miss Greer, a university lecturer in Britain and author of The Female Eunuch, the best-selling book on Women’s Liberation, defended herself against three charges — two of using indecent words and one of using an obscene word.
Magistrate Mr Donald Sinclair, acquitting her on the first two charges, said he did not think the evidence showed that people at the lecture were offended by the word.
One witness had said it was greeted with guffaws of laughter.
On the third charge, however, he said, the use of a certain four-letter word has been found obscene before and until the Supreme Court changed this ruling he had to follow it.
Mrs. Blanch Wynn, who said she complained to the police over Miss Greer’s use of the first word, told the police prosecutor she did not actually know what it meant.
Miss Greer, cross-examining, told her: “it means literally the excrement of a male animal.”
She then asked Mrs. Wynn if she was aware that the word was used to denote specious forms of argument that were meant to mislead people Mrs. Wynn replied: “Yes “.
Making a statement in her own defence Miss Greer said it was not her intention to offend or deliberately to flout conventions.