Greer maintains rage of racists

What the children who have been victims of violence and abuse will make of all this in the future, we cannot know. But they will surely wonder why a feminist of such fame as Greer has come to the defence of those who destroyed their innocence and damaged their sense of self.

Whereas Greer has relied largely on newspaper reports of this suffering, men at the first national Aboriginal men's health conference in Alice Springs recently addressed the experience with which we live and struggle: they apologised in writing to Aboriginal women and children. This was an act of courage and leadership. This apology is the most sincere acknowledgement of the suffering of Aboriginal men and women.

The remainder of Greer's thesis touches on issues that have been much better explained by historians, anthropologists and social scientists in a growing and critical body of literature. Intergenerational poverty, economic exclusion, lack of social capital and dysfunctional behaviours have been explored in a number of important studies.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were conflicts in which most of the Aboriginal victims of frontier violence were males, for obvious reasons, but this was not always the case. Moreover, there was no gender differentiation in the demographic impact of pandemics. Along with widespread starvation, diseases such as measles and the so-called Spanish flu reduced the population as much as the frontier conflicts. Greer should read more history. The most recent works by authors such as Brian McCoy offer rigorous explanations of male anger and ill health. McCoy explores the male-specific Aboriginal tradition of "holding" among men at Balgo Hills in Western Australia and the vulnerabilities of men living in a remote former mission where social bonds are broken by many different types of events.

Greer's panoply of protest slogans deployed as social theory was dismissed long ago by the research and policy community as incapable of explaining the present levels of disparities in life expectancy, morbidity and mortality rates and other socioeconomic indicators. Although the burden of history is acknowledged in much of this work, the everyday suffering in communities at risk is caused by a multiplicity of factors, some originating in customary life and some in the transition to modernity, but all more complicated than Greer would have us understand.

The conclusions she wants us to draw from her essay and her many media appearances are threefold: the Aboriginal population and the many Indigenous societies from which the rapidly growing Australian Indigenous population is drawn (now about 500,000 people) is not viable; Aboriginal males are so crippled by what she calls rage, they cannot recover; Aboriginal women, notably myself, have contributed to their downfall that further belittles them.

Taken as a whole, her arguments are racist.

They are also just plain wrong.