Academic, social commentator and feminist life force Germaine Greer opened the Perth Writer's Festival in strident and entertaining style last night with a call to environmental arms to women everywhere.
In her address, Eco-Feminism Then and Now, Professor Greer's targets ranged from mining magnate Gina Rinehart to physicist Stephen Hawking as she demanded urgent action to protect Earth's threatened biodiversity.
Starting with the environmental and social damage from the mining industry, she told a full house at the University of WA's Winthrop Hall that modern eco-feminists must "stem the tide of eco-side".
Professor Greer said she had been asked recently to write a piece for The West Australian about whether, as the mining capital of Australia, WA was too male-dominated.
"Do I not know that the most rapacious miner of all is a woman?" she told a laughing audience.
Mrs Rinehart's very existence was "all the proof you need that Australia needs to rethink the system that has condemned the Lucky Country to a dangerous and agonising cycle of boom and bust", she said.
"For every Gina Rinehart figure there are hundreds of thousands of hard working Australians condemned to penury."
The results were an absurdly inflated currency, exorbitant food prices, unaffordable housing and ecological degradation, she said.
"What will be kept when the mineral wealth has all been shipped away? The answer is nothing. Mining doesn’t bring development unless governments make it bring development."
"All mining brings is holes in the ground."
The West Australian
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