White beech

Melbourne historian Ian Britain has commented that Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) – her first and still best-known work – was ‘a book of outrage: an exposé, a jeremiad, a manifesto’. More than forty years after the Eunuch made Greer an instant international celebrity, her latest book is written in a different mood. Still spirited and sparring (could Greer ever be otherwise?), it is a sober, meditative, deeply moving account of her efforts to regenerate sixty hectares of scarred rainforest at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley in the Gold Coast hinterland not far from the northern border of New South Wales. It is a cry too, not just for one small patch of earth but for country, every bit as passionate and anguished as that of poet turned environmental campaigner Judith Wright before her.