White Beech

Starred review from March 31, 2014
Greer (The Female Eunuch) has written a love letter to a rainforest, one that she just happens to own. In her middle years, Greer set out to find a property in her native Australia that she could restore to its state before white colonists imposed clear-cutting and invasive species. After a long search, she settled upon a 60-hectare dairy farm in southeastern Queensland that had suffered all the depredations of human intrusion. Greer began the painstaking process of rehabilitation and found that while the work was difficult, it wasn’t quite Sisyphean. Greer is a scrupulous scholar with a deep interest in botany, and the level of detail in her research is impressive. One of the most interesting devices in the book is her exchanges with her sister, a professional botanist, who pushes her more famous sibling to precision and clarity. There’s a fair amount of tendentious proselytizing, and even worse, Greer lets the narrative focus disappear in endless debates over the minutiae of plant classification. Still, the range of Greer’s knowledge and interests provide fascinating insight into the thoughtless transformation of a continent.

June 15, 2014
A controversial scholar/journalist's quasi-academic account of how she helped transform Australian land dedicated to dairy farming back into rain forest.Though based for much of her career in England, Greer (Shakespeare's Wife, 2008, etc.) had always intended to return to her native Australia. For 20 years, she roved across the continent's desert interior "hunting for [her] own patch of ground." The land she would eventually buy was in southeast Queensland, not far from the Gold Coast and near areas overrun by tourists. Partly inspired by her botanist sister, Greer decided to rehabilitate the remains of a rain forest growing on her property, "[b]attered by clearing, by logging, by spraying and worse." Not only did she seek to heal a small piece of her beloved Australia; she also wanted to demonstrate that restoring the land to itself was the work of "dedicated individuals." Government efforts at environmental conservation had been a failure. The little money delegated to preservation had been used to "protect the tourists from themselves." None had been spent on restoring Australian flora threatened by plant species brought to the continent by early settlers with the "civilizing" aim of making their new home look more like Britain. With seemingly limitless vigor, Greer documents her rain forest finds-including Australian white beech trees nearly logged out of existence-and the indigenous and post-colonial histories of the land she would call the Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme. Her late-life foray into environmentalism and the establishment of a charity that would preserve the land on which she cheerfully spent her life savings are nothing short of extraordinary. At the same time, her enthusiasm for spreading the gospel of biodiversity is also a source of narrative weakness. The scholarly presentation of textual material and lack of more personal details regarding her Australian rain forest venture will strike readers as overly fastidious and tiresome.Passionate and well-intended but not especially accessible.

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February 15, 2014
An unexpected book from feminist Greer, this memoir celebrates the nature of her native Australia. At 62, Greer was in a despairing frame of mind when she became entranced by 60 hectares of dairy farmland in southeast Queensland. On the land, she spotted a few of the 120-foot-tall white beeches almost completely logged out by white settlers, and she was determined to bring the beeches back.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2014

Noted feminist writer Greer (The Female Eunuch) writes of a monumental task that she took on. The rain forest she refers to is on 60 hectares of land she purchased, formerly used as a dairy farm, in Queensland, Australia. The land, logged and abandoned, was classified as rain forest but was replete with invasive species, such as lantana and bamboo. Greer began to restore the property, enlisting the help of environmental allies to remove the unwanted classes and propagate and restore the native species, such as the white beech. Focusing primarily on plants and trees, she also documents the invertebrates and vertebrates that inhabit this ecosystem. Greer writes of attempting to trace who has legitimate rights to this territory. She documents the "whitefellas" who have historically laid claim to the area and the many destructive land use practices they employed. Work continues on this piece of the earth and is now supported in part by the Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, a nonprofit that aims to preserve subtropical and temperate rain forests across the world. VERDICT This is an engaging and erudite memoir rich with historical, cultural, and ecological explorations of Australia and, by extension, any part of the planet that has been influenced by humans. [See Prepub Alert, 1/26/14.]--Diana Hartle, Univ. of Georgia Science Lib., Athens

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 5, 2013
This wide-ranging book is Germaine Greer’s account of her search for a home in which to lodge her archive, taking over two frustrating years but ending serendipitously in the Numinbah Valley in South-east Queensland. Here she found an abandoned dairy farm, quite unsuitable for her primary purpose, but clad in degraded subtropical rainforest that cried out for rehabilitation. When a bower bird performed a mating dance in front of her entranced eyes she accepted the ritual as a sign that the property was her destiny. In telling this story, the author takes us on an exploration of the myriad indignities inflicted on Australia by white settlers, from indiscriminate land-clearing to the introduction of lantana and other unsuitable plant varieties, from the over-development of Twofold Bay in southern NSW to the banana glut in Queensland, from the poisoning of Indigenous tribes to the burning of native bush—the list of follies is endless and daunting. Towards the end of the book Greer devotes two charming chapters to the creatures of the rainforest, from microbes to animals, birds and reptiles, and tells us a little about her charity, Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, that will hopefully continue the work once she has, as she puts it, been ‘recycled’. This is an important, challenging book.

Max Oliver is a veteran Australian bookseller