A WOMAN UNBOWED
ONLY a brave woman tackles the cranky colossus that is Germaine Greer. The last person to attempt a biography of the Shakespeare scholar, proto-feminist and one of Australia’s most famous expatriates was described by Greer as a species of “flesheating bacteria”.
And that’s not even getting to the bit where Greer instructed her family and friends not to talk to Christine Wallace, author of 1997’s Untamed Shrew, warning Wallace she would have her “kneecapped” if she went anywhere near her mother, Peggy Greer.
So it must have been with trepidation that Melbourne author Elizabeth Kleinhenz, 77, approached her formidable subject.
Kleinhenz laughs: “I really didn’t know … when I started in 2015 I just had the idea for a biography and I certainly didn’t know the extent of her opposition to a biography. I just pottered around, doing research.”
The former teacher had published a biography of little-known Melbourne historian Kathleen Fitzpatrick, which she’d enjoyed writing, and was casting around for another subject when she heard Greer had donated her archives to her alma mater, the University of Melbourne, which Kleinhenz also attended.
Filling 150 filing cabinets and 487 archive boxes, the archive spanned the years 1959 to 2010, and if the juicy love letters from Greer to British novelist Martin Amis were anything to go by, there was enough new material to fill a dozen more biographies.
“I didn’t know she hated the idea of biography, and by the time I discovered it, I was well into my research,” Kleinhenz says. “And by the time I met Christine Wallace it was abundantly clear what I was up against.”
Kleinhenz says she faced two problems. The first was whether she wanted to subject herself to abuse? The second was an ethical problem: “If someone really doesn’t want to have a biography written about them, is it right to do it?” She considered the second question deeply.
“No one wants to put in a huge amount of work on something that’s morally indefensible,” Kleinhenz said. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realised Greer has written extensively about herself. It’s not as if she’s a private person. I wasn’t invading the life of a very private person. She’s never kept things private, she’s even written about her gynaecological problems.”
Besides which, Kleinhenz grew to feel that Greer had not been given her full due in her home country. “In Australia she’s often regarded as a sort of caricature, an idiot, a ratbag. She’s absolutely more than that and she’s about to turn 80, and in a way I wanted to put the record straight.”
In Kleinhenz’s assured hands, putting the record straight involved going back to Greer’s school days and tracing her blazing path to where she stands today, as “a force of nature”.
Kleinhenz is not the only one to regard Greer as a kind of genius, in that she possesses a formidable intellect, tremendous energy and the capacity to “produce new knowledge that changed the lives of millions”.
According to Kleinhenz, Australia has forgotten how radical Greer’s book The Female Eunuch was when published in 1970 and the profound impact it had on the lives of ordinary women. Kleinhenz says the many thousands of letters in the archive from women all over the world attest to her extraordinary reach.
Greer now spends a good part of each year in the rainforest at Cave Creek in Springbrook National Park, in the Gold Coast hinterland, mostly alone. So did Kleinhenz discover the unknown Greer among the archives?
“Not really. What you see is what you get,” she says. On January 29, Greer turns 80. She may celebrate her birthday alone in the forest, a woman who has long thought differently from the rest of us.
SUSAN JOHNSON