Germaine Greer on her estate in the steamy rainforest in Australia Photograph: Rex
Germaine Greer is known for her outspoken, often combative views on gender politics and Australian identity. White Beech, a passionate account of her recent project to reclaim part of the continent's ancient rainforest, puts a new slant on her engagement with issues of self-individuation and belonging that is all the more compelling for being universal.
When Greer first stumbled across it in 2001, the forest in question consisted of "60 hectares of steep rocky country, most of it impenetrable scrub", part of a farm at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley in south-east Queensland. For years she had been shocked at the devastation visible in the landscape of her birth: "open-cut mines as big as cities, salt rivers, salt earth, abandoned townships, whole beaches made of beer cans".
Persuaded that the government had failed in its conservation aims, she was looking for a piece of land to buy, with a view to returning it to its natural state. On an impulse, she sank her savings of $500,000 (£268,000) into the property, which had previously been run as a dairy farm, banana plantation and a source of timber, and set about restoring it with the aid of a dedicated task force.
Greer writes about her new-found role as an eco-warrior with the same fierce grace that she once brought to the liberation of the female body. Working to rebuild her patch of land freed her from feminine self-consciousness and doubt: for the 10 years in which she owned the freehold, "my horizons flew away, my notion of time expanded and deepened, and my self disappeared". In the course of this freeing-up, the idea of ownership itself became irrelevant – at the end of the decade the Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme was "given back to itself" and turned into a charity (it now operates as Friends of Gondwana Rainforest).
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When Greer first stumbled across it in 2001, the forest in question consisted of "60 hectares of steep rocky country, most of it impenetrable scrub", part of a farm at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley in south-east Queensland. For years she had been shocked at the devastation visible in the landscape of her birth: "open-cut mines as big as cities, salt rivers, salt earth, abandoned townships, whole beaches made of beer cans". Persuaded that the government had failed in its conservation aims, she was looking for a piece of land to buy, with a view to returning it to its natural state. On an impulse, she sank her savings of $500,000 (£268,000) into the property, which had previously been run as a dairy farm, banana plantation and a source of timber, and set about restoring it with the aid of a dedicated task force.
Greer writes about her new-found role as an eco-warrior with the same fierce grace that she once brought to the liberation of the female body. Working to rebuild her patch of land freed her from feminine self-consciousness and doubt: for the 10 years in which she owned the freehold, "my horizons flew away, my notion of time expanded and deepened, and my self disappeared". In the course of this freeing-up, the idea of ownership itself became irrelevant – at the end of the decade the Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme was "given back to itself" and turned into a charity (it now operates as Friends of Gondwana Rainforest).
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