14 September

Many people are not sure what to think about indigenous issues. Even if they mean well, they don't know where to start. Germaine Greer's essay on this from years ago now is brilliant. As with all things Germaine, most people dismissed it without even reading it. But she makes the very powerful point that we don't even properly understand what being a European Australian is, that from the day the Brits set up a settlement here, we've been drinking ourselves into oblivion, without really understanding why. So she approaches this topic from that direction - that if we understood what drives so many of us to drink so much, we might actually start to understand indigenous issues much better as well - that there's a common void at the heart of both of our lives.