Author(s): Germaine Greer

General

In 2001 Germaine Greer bought 65 hectares of subtropical rainforest in southern Queensland with the aim of restoring it to its natural state. For several months a year she lives and works there, employing a team of people to assist her in propagating native species and removing weeds.

White Beech is a memoir of her decade at Cave Creek, and also a vivid account of its flora and fauna and history. Sitting on the northern lip of the beautiful Mt Warning caldera, Cave Creek is part of an ancient and complex Gondwana forest that suffered from misguided European efforts to make money from it. One of its key species was the magnificent white beech (Gmelina leichhardtii), which is now all but exhausted in the wild, being one of the first species to be plundered by the timber getters. But when Greer bought Cave Creek, some dozen or so old-growth white beech survived there, because they were either too crooked for their timber to be of use or grew in inaccessible places, and from these she set about propagating. The scope of White Beech is vast, from the ancient continent of Gondwanaland to the shape of a leaf. It's about the way in which the land and its usage have changed over time, and the way in which looking at and describing it have changed. It's a plea for the act of looking to change further still, so that the whole of the picture is included, snakes and all. It's also something of a call to arms. Greer puts the case for maintaining biodiversity, something which is under threat in all Australian ecosystems, with characteristic passion. The example she has set with Cave Creek is nothing short of inspirational. After spending a small fortune over the years and then realising that the enormity of the task exceeds her life span, she established a charitable trust and donated the land to it: the restoration project will therefore be ongoing. Yet Greer's arguments are also cogent at the smaller level, and you don't need 65 hectares in order to take them to heart. This wonderful book reveals a side of Germaine Greer that is little known. She is an extremely knowledgeable lay botanist, a subject she demystifies brilliantly, and her intense personal connection with the natural world at times approaches the poetic. But in other respects White Beech is vintage Greer: feisty, challenging, radical, witty, shocking, and above all, highly readable.