Book Club with Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer talks about her irresistible challenge: the rehabilitation of an ancient rainforest, with her Bloomsbury editor, Michael Fishwick. White Beech: The Rainforest Years charts Germaine’s life-changing and extraordinary decade-long journey of rebuilding a small corner of wild rainforest in her home country of Australia.

After a century of logging, clearing and downright devastation, the rainforest had been abandoned to its fate. She didn't think for a minute that by restoring the land she was saving the world. She was in search of heart’s ease. Beyond the acres of exotic pasture grass, soft weed and the impenetrable curtains of tangled Lantana canes there were Macadamias dangling their strings of unripe nuts, and Black Beans with red and yellow pea flowers growing on their branches … and the few remaining White Beeches: stupendous trees up to forty metres in height, logged out within forty years of the arrival of the first white settlers.

Once the process of rehabilitation had begun and the first replanting shot up to make a forest and rare caterpillars turned up to feed on the leaves of the new young trees, she knew beyond doubt that at least here biodepletion could be reversed. Read an extract in the Sunday Times here.

‘An eco-love letter about saving and reviving trees on her farm in Australia’
The Times

Germaine Greer is an Australian academic and journalist, and a major feminist voice of the mid-twentieth century. She is the author of many books including The Female Eunuch and Shakespeare's Wife. She describes herself as an old dog who succeeded in learning a load of new tricks, inspired and rejuvenated by her passionate love of Australia and of Earth, most exuberant of small planets.