Germaine Greer, in the recent documentary on Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, describes seeing the show while living in England in 1968 :

"It was one of those dead moments and I kicked on the television and there was Skippy. And I watched it absolutely hypnotised, because it was very sunny and there was a cobalt blue sky, grey vegetation and ruddy brown rocks, and that was what I was staring at. Just staring at, because I don't think I even realised how homesick I was until I saw those tree shapes. There was all kinds of things about it that were totally unbearable, but the landscape, and the light!"

Greer Vs Ackerman On The 'Aboriginal Intervention'

Two columns about prime minister John Howard's 'Aboriginal Intervention' campaign from two of Australia's most hysterical, hyperbolic, clarity-challenged blabbermouths - Piers Ackerman and Germaine Greer.

One of the two thinks Howard is just brilliant and never puts a foot wrong and has a heart of pure gold and would never let politics or the thought of winning the coming election influence his decision making, particularly when it comes to the fate of Australia's Aborigines.

The other thinks Howard is the scum that grows on scum and wants to drink the blood of abused Aboriginal children while stealing their tribes' land so his rich mates can move in and start mining more uranium.

You can guess for yourself which one is which.

Ackerman : While a majority of Labor supporters (80 per cent, according to Galaxy) believe the move is an election stunt pulled by Prime Minister John Howard, those most affected see it as an attempt to remedy a disaster long-neglected by governments. ...those who stupidly claim the Federal Government could have acted sooner are ignoring the tens of millions Canberra has given the states and the Northern Territory to deal with the inherent problems faced by those who have been kept subject to abuse in their isolated reserves by the appalling policies so warmly embraced by misty-eyed members of the kumbaya crowd.

Greer : Ever since white men set foot in Australia more than 200 years ago, they have persecuted, harassed, tormented and tyrannised the people they found there. The more cold-blooded decided that the most humane way of dealing with a galaxy of peoples who would never be able to adapt to the "whitefella" regime was to eliminate them as quickly as possible, so they shot and poisoned them. Others believed that they owed it to their God to rescue the benighted savage, strip him of his pagan culture, clothe his nakedness, and teach him the value of work. Leaving the original inhabitants alone was never an option; learning from them was beyond any notion of what was right and proper. As far as the pink people were concerned, black Australians were primitive peoples, survivors from the stone age in a land that time forgot.

Ackerman : Those most to blame for this horror are the promoters of the Aboriginal industry - from H.C. "Nugget" Coombs and his successors to the legislators who disenfranchised rural Aboriginals from the economy through the equal wage case 30 years ago, to the jurists who conspired to concoct the Mabo case and the authors of flawed reports on Aboriginal deaths in custody and the so-called "stolen generations".

Greer : As commander-in-chief of an army of police, the Australian Defence Force and hordes of doctors and nurses, (John Howard) will storm the 70 or so autonomous Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory.

Ackerman : It comes as no surprise that Labor's true believers - the dilettante North Shore doctors' wives - are loathe to support genuine action - because it focuses attention on the abject failure of the ill-conceived apartheid policies they marched for and in which they placed their deluded, emotive trust.

Greer : The name of the game, as usual, is bad faith. Everything Howard does is calculated to win him votes. The suffering of Aboriginal women and children at the hands of their deranged menfolk has been going on all Howard's life. For most of that time whitefellas made a joke of it. At this late hour, on the eve of a general election, he is suddenly taking it seriously. It is of no consequence that what he is doing is illegal. His treatment of asylum seekers and boat people is just as illegal, and it is widely admired by Australians and people who should know better.

Ackerman :The dewy-eyed media handwringers and academics who rarely miss an opportunity to bray their compassion for Aborigines are now silent....It's time these poseurs said sorry to the generations they have so tragically exploited.

They both need to take a cold shower. Together, to save water. But for God's sake, don't post the footage of it on YouTube. We might accidentally stumble across it and then have to gouge out our eyeballs and use the new memory flush pill to empty our minds of that horrific vision.

But in reality, Germaine Greer's article is one of the better, and more comprehensive, stories on the realities of the 'Intervention' you'll find online today. She's spent plenty of time in Aboriginal communities up north where the elders have already intervened and worked out most of the problems of their society and want to be treated with the respect they deserve. They're still waiting. Greer is harsh on the history of the whitefellas treatment of the blackfella, because that treatment has been appallingly bad, more often than not, for more than 200 years. And not much has changed in the 11 years John Howard has been running the country.

Ackerman, meanwhile, just provides another example of why he is one of the highest paid propagandists in the country. He is so good at it. Never has a failing, disconnected and inherently dishonest Australian government as John Howard's had such a master of The Big Lie so firmly on their side. In Australia, there are few, if any, more rehearsed proponents of the vile, insidious personal attack, and practitioners of The Big Lie than Ackerman.

Greer still has hope for the communities she spent time, and believes that most Aboriginals need less interference from the whitefella, not more, particularly from those whitefellas who sell them booze and drugs and buy sex from their children, or just rape them for nothing. Almost nowhere in the storm of media coverage about the appalling child abuse in some Aboriginal communities was it mentioned just how often whitefellas with a few cartons of booze, or a cheap bottle of scotch, were the perpetrators.

Greer also believes the Aboriginal people still have a lot to teach white Australia about this massive country where we all mostly cling and congregate near the coastlines.

As Greer points out, on behalf of the female Aboriginal elders she calls friends, it doesn't seem to occur to the Howard government that the whitefella might actually have something to learn from the people who lived in these lands for more than 50,000 years.

Ackerman, meanwhile, is just dripping with his trademark rancid snobbery and dealing from the same tattered deck of tired old cliches he was already wearing out back when he was still even remotely relevant. And that was a long time ago. His bile and bitterness is so toxic, you might need to eat a big spoonful of honey after reading this to get back your sense of taste.

"The Animal World Has Finally Taken Its Revenge On Steve Irwin"

Germaine Greer Hammers Steve Irwin in Life, And Death

By Darryl Mason

The UK media is ripping into the issue of whether or not Australians were divided on their feelings about Australia's most famous man, Steve Irwin. Did we love Irwin more than we hated him? What did he contribute to the image of Australians across the world?

Was he a hero of Australian conservation? Or just a loundmouth nest raider? Protector of rare fauna? Or exploiter of defenceless animals for fame and profit?

It doesn't seem to be an issue in the minds of most Australians right now, he died a tragic, way too early death and his kids and wife are crushed. There's been little outright hate on display in the majority of Australians' reactions, not that you would expect there to be.

But there have been plenty of comments amongst the tens of thousands of comments listed on Oz sites that meander around : "I never liked his show, but..." and "I couldn't stand him, but my kids loved him".

Writer Germaine Greer decided some time last night that she wasn't going to wait even a few days before she put the boot into Irwin's still warm corpse.

She lets rip today in the UK Guardian :

"The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin..."

Ahh, yeah, right.

Greer has taken the Gaia concept to a frightening new level of Nature collectively fighting back against those who dare intrude upon its sacred spaces.

According to Greer, all the world's animals apparently shared a blood-thirsty dislike of Steve Irwin and finally decided they couldn't tolerate his presence in their habitats any longer.

The unified world animal mind issued the call for Irwin to be X-ed and a 2.5 metre long stingray off Port Douglas carried out the hit, efficiently and effectively.

As the Chaser sang on the ABC last year, after she wrote of her visual admiration for the bodies of young boys : "What will that crazy old Germ say next?"

This :

What Irwin never seemed to understand was that animals need space. The one lesson any conservationist must labour to drive home is that habitat loss is the principal cause of species loss.

There was no habitat, no matter how fragile or finely balanced, that Irwin hesitated to barge into, trumpeting his wonder and amazement to the skies. There was not an animal he was not prepared to manhandle. Every creature he brandished at the camera was in distress.

Greer seems to miss the point, by obviously never having given his shows more than a grimaced glance, that Irwin well understood that to get his message of conservationism over to the next generation, and to ram home just how spectacular and wonderful the creatures of Australia really were, he would have to be more entertaining, more vivid, more over-the-top than everything else on television, or in the video game console.

David Attenborough's kept a whispering distance from his televisual prey, most of the time, and it worked for the kids of the 60s and 70s.

Irwin reached hundreds of millions of people, mostly children, and instilled in them a love and respect for the wild world which will reap huge rewards for their generation and the animal world.

Greer seems to think that Irwin has inspired children to tromp into unexplored jungles and wrench animals out of the trees and shake them around for fun, or that they will put themselves in dangerous proximity to lethal creatures trying to be like their hero.

But the number of children getting bitten by snakes and spiders, particularly in Australia, has plunged in recent years, and some of that must surely be attributed to what usually followed a classic Irwin wild-eyed rant - a quiet, stern warning that kids must keep their distance from dangerous animals and respect them and their habitat.

If she'd actually watched his shows, no doubt Greer would be aware of this.