Whitefella Jump Up

Book excerpt: In the third Quarterly Essay of 2003, Germaine Greer suggests that embracing Aboriginality is the only way Australia can fully imagine itself as a nation. In a wide-ranging essay she looks at the interdependence of black and white and suggests not how the Aborigine question may be settled but how a sense of being Aboriginal might save the soul of Australia. In a sweeping and magisterial essay, touching on everything from Henry Lawson to multiculturalism, Germaine Greer argues that Australia must enter the Aboriginal web of dreams. "[Whitefella Jump Up] is an essay about sitting down and thinking where all the politics start and what kind of legend Australia wants to place at its heart." —Peter Craven "I'm not here offering yet a solution to the Aborigine problem ... Blackfellas are not and never were the problem. They were the solution, if only whitefellas had been able to see it." —Germaine Greer, Whitefella Jump Up