White Beech: The Rainforest Years (Germaine Greer, Bloomsbury)

This wide-ranging book is Germaine Greer’s account of her search for a home in which to lodge her archive, taking over two frustrating years but ending serendipitously in the Numinbah Valley in South-east Queensland. Here she found an abandoned dairy farm, quite unsuitable for her primary purpose, but clad in degraded subtropical rainforest that cried out for rehabilitation. When a bower bird performed a mating dance in front of her entranced eyes she accepted the ritual as a sign that the property was her destiny. In telling this story, the author takes us on an exploration of the myriad indignities inflicted on Australia by white settlers, from indiscriminate land-clearing to the introduction of lantana and other unsuitable plant varieties, from the over-development of Twofold Bay in southern NSW to the banana glut in Queensland, from the poisoning of Indigenous tribes to the burning of native bush—the list of follies is endless and daunting. Towards the end of the book Greer devotes two charming chapters to the creatures of the rainforest, from microbes to animals, birds and reptiles, and tells us a little about her charity, Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, that will hopefully continue the work once she has, as she puts it, been ‘recycled’. This is an important, challenging book.

Max Oliver is a veteran Australian bookseller 

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Category: Reviews