Anarchist feminist Germaine Greer’s intriguingly-titled new book–“Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood”–hasn’t come out in the U.S. yet.


But the book is reviewed in the current issue of London’s The Spectator.  


In it, Ms. Greer has turned her attention to her native Australia–and she wants it to become an Aborigine Republic.


“[T]he exact meaning of this term is unclear even to her,” writes reviewer Anthony Daniels, “which is not altogether surprising, since Aborigines lived in stateless societies before the arrival of the Europeans. However, her mind is so completely stocked with clich’s that she often uses words that have connotation but no denotation, as a kind of shorthand. For example, she suggests that Australia should become a hunter-gatherer society, presumably because hunter-gatherers are assumed by the modern right-thinker to be environmentally friendly and at one with the beneficent vibrations of the cosmos.”


As an Aborigine Republic, Australia, she believes, “could make common cause in the United Nations with other formerly colonized countries. It would thereby join the ranks of victim states, thus achieving the moral purity of, say, Idi Amin’s Uganda, Hafaz Assad’s Syria or Ne Win’s Burma.”


But isn’t Australia already a nation? “No concrete suggestion is forthcoming,” the reviewer notes, as to how the five million Sydneysiders, for example, are to transform themselves into a bow- and-arrow brigade, living on assorted roots, grubs and game.”
 
Greer’s Australia is “unrecognizable” to the reviewer. “For her, it is a continent utterly ruined by rapacity and colonized by none but crude alcoholics, who have created a society of which nothing good whatever can be said. This society has only destroyed; it has created or built nothing of any value. Its inhabitants are wretched, sobering up only to inject themselves with drugs in order to sink back into unconsciousness or to commit suicide. They aren’t even prosperous, working, according to her, for a miserable pittance.”


Ms. Greer has always had her own amusing notions of reality.