REPORTER, MAN: Have you read Germaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch?
WOMAN 1: No.
WOMAN 2: No.
WOMAN 3: No, I haven't, I'm sorry.
WOMAN 4: Is it available in the shops, can you buy it?
WOMAN 5: No.
REPORTER, MAN: Do you want to read it?
WOMAN 6: No.
WOMAN 7: I wouldn't mind reading it.
WOMAN 8: Oh, I think so. What's it about?
WOMAN 9: Oh, yes, yes.
WOMAN 10: I would, yes, but I just haven't got around to doing it.
REPORTER, WOMAN : Germaine Greer's book may be a bestseller overseas, but it's obviously not going to incite many Australian women to sexual revolution. If they haven't read the book and don't want to, then Germaine Greer is just another flamboyant, way-out superstar in the newspapers. She herself feels that that's the way she's been treated by the Australian media, sensationalised personally and censored politically.
GERMAINE GREER: It's more that they're only interested in the kind of news that could discredit me. They're much more interested in, you know, my going to bed with someone or my having VD or my getting a divorce than they are in the actual issues which I've come here to promote.
REPORTER, WOMAN : If the media's been no help in wanting to talking about the sort of issues that you think are important and that you were prepared to talk about, then… what has your visit done for women's liberation, do you think, the time that you've spent here?
GERMAINE GREER: Well, I just don't know. All I have to sort of go on is what people tell me about reactions that I don't have a chance to see, you know, like someone saying that her cleaning lady has been talking about it or the barmaid in the pub was talking about the issue, because after all, they are interested in the issue, they are women and the issues touch them. Um, everybody now knows that there's something called women's liberation. A lot of people think they know what it is and they don't. But a great many more people think that they perhaps better find out.
REPORTER, WOMAN : A lot of young women are very conscious of women's liberation as an issue. At Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School, these senior girls have read The Female Eunuch, it's in their school library, and the inferior role of women in society is an important topic of their conversation.
GIRL1: They are conditioning us to take the place of, say, the average housewife. I mean, as we're brought up, we play with the dolls. It's all a type of bringing the idea that a woman's place is to rear children, to be a housewife, she's not going to really have a career of her own or anything like that.
REPORTER, WOMAN : Does Germaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch offer YOU a way of life that would appeal to YOU.
GIRLS: Yes.
GIRL2: I think she does. She seems to point out some things that I knew and other things that I'm stumbling towards but probably wouldn't have thought of.
GIRL1: She offers new ideas and different choices, but I think these have all got to be considered in relation to what you could say we've already been brainwashed with.
GIRL2: And I think there are gonna be some women that can't be liberated because they sometimes haven't got enough intelligence and they're quite content to be this stereotype and be inferior to men and be hanging on.
REPORTER, WOMAN : Have you all been talking and thinking a lot more about the ideas of women's liberation or simply about the way that women might live slightly differently since Germaine Greer came here?
GIRLS: Yes.
GIRL3: Not since she's been here. I saw a couple of interviews on television, and that sort of set things going, but usually they kept to one track. That one was on ABC… the minister… about two weeks ago. They kept to abortion, and that's not really what it's all about, and they wouldn't get off that track.
GIRL4: Yes, everybody's being prompted to really sort of decide what their stand is, whether they're for it or against it. And they've really been, I don't know, stimulated, they've had to think about it since she was here.
GIRL5: My father has voiced many opinions that he didn't think it was a good thing and that it made women dissatisfied with the life they had without sort of… ..and when they couldn't really improve it or that they themselves would be frustrated in their efforts. And so that they were really just going to be making them unhappy, a lot of women who were previously happy.
GERMAINE GREER: Well, I think what men mistake for happiness was, in fact, resignation and patience. And now women are beginning to feel that patience is not the answer. It would be… Perhaps it would be the answer if things ran well otherwise. But when you look at the government and the social services and so on, that this country has, then women have got to start getting annoyed about it because there's got to be a new kind of pressure group for justice.
REPORTER, WOMAN : Are there any women do you think in public life in Australia who understand women's liberation and who demonstrate women's liberation, people that the rest of us can look at and say 'Ah-ha, liberated'?
GERMAINE GREER: In public life? Well, there are certainly good women's liberationists here but they're hardly in public life.
REPORTER, WOMAN : It would seem there are also a lot of women in private life who just don't want to be liberated or even to find out what liberation might mean.
REPORTER, MAN: Do you think you need liberating?
WOMAN 1: Oh, from certain things — not like they're preaching, though.
REPORTER, MAN: What sort of things?
WOMAN 1: (Chuckles) I don't know what to say. I don't know much about this.
WOMAN 2: No, I don't either.
WOMAN 3: I don't — I think women should be feminine.
WOMAN 4: No.
WOMAN 5: What's it about?
WOMAN 6: No.
WOMAN 7: I'd rather be under the thumb.
WOMAN 8: No, I'm perfectly satisfied as we are.
WOMAN 9: No, I think it's a man's place to be head and that's all there is about it.
WOMAN 10: I think it's a lot of nonsense, really.
WOMAN 11: I'm old-fashioned and he's old-fashioned, but we just believe in the same things like I believe a woman's place is in the home.
REPORTER, WOMAN : It will be a shame if Australia remembers only Benier's version of Germaine Greer in The Sun, wearing pants — which she never does — and claiming that constant use of the magic four-letter word has earned her equality with men. Women journalists in Sydney have welcomed her presence here and her provocative outspokenness on social issues. Editor Suzanne Baker.
SUZANNE BAKER: Well, I think she's been a catalyst — let's explain her that way — I don't think she's been entirely responsible for the enormous response. Let's take a particular example — the women's march a couple of Saturdays ago. The organisers only expected 1,000 to turn up at the most, and there were nearly 3,000. That's one concrete example. But the issues have been thought about for a long period of time, before a lot of people had even heard of women's liberation. The same thing happened in America and in the UK — she's just been a catalyst.
GERMAINE GREER: I think I've outlived my usefulness here anyway, seeing as they will only treat me like a superstar, they're only interested in my sex life or, you know, whether I take drugs or something. So I'll go back to England where they accept me as just another person, a sort of political person who's reasonably articulate, who has things to say. I'll go back there for a while and see how the indigenous movement here develops, see if Australians begin to listen to their own women as a result of my having been here. If they don't listen to their own women, if they don't lend ear to what's being said, then Australia, goddamn.