Fantasies under the river gums

Just as vulgarity can sometimes transcend itself and become something else (I am thinking of Gillray and Las Vegas), so silliness can sometimes transcend itself and attain sociological significance.

Germaine Greer has written a transcendently silly pamphlet about a proposed future for her homeland, Australia. She wants it to become what she calls an Aboriginal Republic, though the exact meaning of this term is unclear even to her, 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 clichés 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. No concrete suggestion is forthcoming 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.