How harsh the lot of the celebrity expatriate, condemned to wander constantly between two worlds - shining with brilliant, well polished ease amid the codes of an adopted country while yearning, in some secret mental recess, for the familiar simplicities of home.
All the key figures among the mid-century "great generation" of Australian expatriates betray a certain tension in their relations with their country of origin. Barry Humphries has built a career on mockery of Australian ways, while Clive James has spent half a lifetime in dazzling, polylingual overcompensation for his antipodean background. Phillip Knightley, perhaps the most illustrious of Australia's journalistic exports to Fleet Street, recently wrote a definitive, affectionate yet barbed millennial portrait of his own country (Australia: A Biography of a Nation). Ur-feminist Germaine Greer is, in some circles, the best known of this group of Australians abroad, and she has her own distinctive take on the homeland.
Her polemical arguments are brought together in Whitefella Jump Up, a thin essay which first appeared in Australia last year, and is now published in Britain as a book. Greer believes there is something gravely amiss with Australia, something that might begin to be set right by the simplest of remedies. Her view, widely shared by modern Australia's professional classes, is that the country was founded upon an act of territorial expropriation whose consequences echo to the present day. But rather than merely lament this fact, she believes an active process of engagement and correction should be pursued. Australians should acknowledge that they are not, in any simple sense, "at home." Indeed, they should look in the mirror, and say to themselves: "I live in an Aboriginal country." Even the obvious, Greer suggests, "cannot be recognised as true until somebody says it." There is a rhyme here with the controversy that has raged in Australia over the question of an apology to the Aboriginal population (the present conservative government is resolutely against this). Greer, though, doesn't want just to apologise; she wishes to acknowledge Aboriginal priority and primogeniture.
Greer's journey towards this position is briefly sketched. She thinks of herself as still Australian, and is proud of the fact that she spends four months of the year in the country of her birth. When she came back to Australia in 1971 after her first forays into international controversy, she went to central Australia with friends and slept on the Alice Springs sand river bed beside local Aborigines. It was love - or at least romantic primitivism: "In the days that followed, many of them walked quietly through the deep warm sand to sit with me on my mattress under the river gums, tolerating my insensitive questions, explaining kinship and the laws of avoidance, teaching me far more than I was able to learn."
This spiritual awakening lies behind Greer's suggestion that Australia should declare itself an Aboriginal nation. The Australian government could become truly non-aligned, and break free in one bound from the grip of American and British influence. That annoying tie to the British Queen, and that derived flag could be junked. The native replacements are just waiting. It's a seductive idea: a spare nationality for a people without one of their own.
There are, though, a few problems with this schema. Modern Australia, as a matter of fact, is not an Aboriginal nation, nor is it on the way to becoming one. Most Australians seem fairly happy with their current national affiliation, and have a strong sense of who they are and what's distinctive about their shared world and life. There are perhaps 0.5m Aboriginal people in Australia, out of a population of 20m. Moreover, it is not clear whether Aboriginal groups would like to see mainstream Australians annex the last thing they have to themselves, their identity - a point on which Greer is vastly sanguine. The more elusive matter is this. Greer assumes that "being Aboriginal" is straightforward, and that you can almost think yourself into that state. Like many other writers before her, she argues that Aboriginal ways and thoughts, habits and accents have found their way into the mainstream. Influence, however, is not the same as transformation. Everyone who knows the Aboriginal world would acknowledge that the weight of change has gone the other way, and it is Aboriginal society that has been shifted, altered, profoundly westernised. Becoming "Aboriginal" is not an option for Australia: it has its own trajectory to make.
Greer, though, doesn't much care for modern Australia. She paints a bleak picture of her homeland, which she regards as anti-intellectual, suburban, greedy and stupid. This view provides the motive force of Whitefella Jump Up. It is not so much a love for the Aboriginal domain that inspires Greer's blueprint, but a contempt for the mainstream. Miners, pastoralists, politicians, writers, journalists: they are all guilty of despoiling and raping the heritage they stole.
A few representatives of those groups, rather puzzled by the loosely threaded arguments in Greer's essay, made some gentle responses, which are reprinted here. Greer has the last word, and it is bitter. Other expatriates, as they look back on the fast-evolving society they left behind, have come to different conclusions. One often finds, in their writings about Australia, a soft, half-disappointed, nagging sense that they may have made the wrong call by leaving and seeking fame on a wider stage. Greer, though, has only her fury to bring to the table, her sense of exile, her isolation and exclusion: this book is about her, and all she has lost.
