Panelist for hire, feminist and writer Germaine Greer is kind of like Australia’s IRL equivalent of an all-flaming, all-baiting troll. But where trolls hide behind the anonymity afforded them by the Internet, Greer at least has enough of whatever the female eunuch’s equivalent of balls are (guts, I guess) to stand by her reliably quotable and incendiary comments, even when she’s accusing half of the people who came to hear her speak at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival opening last night of being both categorically dull and statistically illiterate. Gutsy.
The Courier Mail reports that Greer was invited to launch the festival’s fiftieth year in front of an audience of 250 guests at the Queensland State Library, where she then went on to accused it of being ‘monoglot, worthy instead of fun, guilty of cultural cringe and problematic’ in its inclusion of school age children in its program, as well as criticising the ability for writers to self-publish out of vanity. That last one is probably justified.
Greer stated that, according to statistics, 47 per cent of Queenslanders couldn’t read a newspaper or instructions on a medicine bottle, and those who could read – presumably many of those in attendance last night – and attended literary festivals as “supporters of culture”, were effectively really boring middle aged women with nothing better to do.
“You can not have a good time at a literary festival when that is the underlying bedrock truth. The backbone of your audience is middle aged women and over. It’s because they don’t know how to have fun. Men can go down to the river bank and sit there for eight hours and not have a bite and be perfectly happy but no woman can do that so she goes to a literary festival.”
After she’d finishing chewing on the bloodied stump that used to be the hand that fed her, it was left to BWF chairman David Fishel to thank Greer for delivering a “challenging and provocative” speech, before calling on the festival’s attendees to prove Greer wrong by having fun. Nice save, Dave.
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