‘I don’t want to explain myself’

There is an African bird called the ox-pecker with which Germaine Greer, conversant as she is with the natural world, will doubtless be familiar. Oxpeckers ride on the backs of large mammals — giraffes, buffalo, wildebeest and the like — feeding off their lice. Once thought an example of mutualism, the relationship between diner and host is now understood to be more complex than this. On the one hand oxpeckers reduce the larvae, and on the other they jab their beaks into any open wounds on the hide in order to keep the blood fresh.

Elizabeth Kleinhenz is Germaine Greer’s ox- (or rather Oz-) pecker. A few years younger than Greer, who is now 79, and raised in the same Melbourne neighbourhood, Kleinhenz has been pecking away in the archives of the University of Melbourne where, in 2013, Greer deposited 82 metres of letters, manuscripts, clippings, contracts, commissions, drafts, diaries, photographs and research files (the $3 million fee received for her papers was donated by Greer to her Rainforest charity).