title: Anzac Day

text: In the early 1920s returned soldiers mostly commemorated Anzac Day informally, primarily as a means of keeping in contact with each other. But as time passed and they inevitably began to drift apart, the ex-soldiers perceived a need for an institutionalised reunion. During the late 1920s, Anzac Day became established as a National Day of Commemoration for the 60,000 Australians and 18,000 New Zealanders who died during the war. The first year in which all the Australian states observed some form of public holiday together on Anzac Day was 1927. By the mid-1930s, all the rituals now associated with the day—dawn vigils, marches, memorial services, reunions, two-up games—became part of Australian Anzac Day culture. New Zealand commemorations also adopted many of these rituals, with the dawn service being introduced from Australia in 1939.


title: Anzac Day

text: With the coming of the Second World War, Anzac Day became a day on which to commemorate the lives of Australians and New Zealanders which were lost in that war as well and in subsequent wars. The meaning of the day has been further broadened to include those killed in all the military operations in which the countries have been involved. Anzac Day was first commemorated at the Australian War Memorial in 1942, but, due to government orders preventing large public gatherings in case of Japanese air attack, it was a small affair and was neither a march nor a memorial service. Anzac Day has been annually commemorated at the Australian War Memorial ever since. In New Zealand, Anzac Day saw a surge in popularity immediately after World War II.


title: Anzac Day

text: By the 1950s, many New Zealanders had become antagonistic or indifferent towards the day. Much of this was linked to the legal ban on commerce on Anzac Day, and the banning by many local authorities of sports events and other entertainment on the day. Annoyance was particularly pronounced in 1953 and 1959, when Anzac Day fell on a Saturday. There was widespread public debate on the issue, with some people calling for the public holiday to be moved to the nearest Sunday or abolished altogether. In 1966, a new Anzac Day Act was passed, allowing sport and entertainment in the afternoon.


title: Anzac Day

text: During and after Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War (1962–1975), interest in Anzac Day reached its lowest point in Australia. On 26 April 1975, "The Australian" newspaper covered the passing of Anzac Day in a single story. In the 1960s and 1970s, anti-war protesters used Anzac Day events as a platform to voice opposition to conscription and Australia's military involvement in general; in the following 20 years, the relevance of Australia's war connection with the British Empire was brought into question. In 1967, two members of the left-wing Progressive Youth Movement in Christchurch staged a minor protest at the Anzac Day ceremony, laying a wreath protesting against the Vietnam War. They were subsequently convicted of disorderly conduct. In 1978, a women's group laid a wreath dedicated to all the women raped and killed during war, and movements for feminism, gay rights, and peace used the occasion to draw attention to their respective causes at various times during the 1980s. In 1981, the group Women Against Rape in War marched up Anzac Parade towards the Australian War Memorial to lay their wreath at the Stone of Remembrance. At the head of the procession, women held a banner which read, 'In memory of all women of all countries raped in all wars'. More than 60 women were arrested by police. Following this time, there were calls for a new type of comradeship that did not discriminate based on sex or race.


title: Anzac Day

text: However, since the late 1980s and especially the 1990s, interest in and attendance at Anzac Day has grown. On 25 April 1990, Bob Hawke became the first Australian politician to visit Gallipoli, and he also decided that government would pay to take Anzac veterans to Gallipoli for the 75th anniversary of the dawn landing. This is seen by historians as a major milestone in the recovery of Anzac Day.


title: Anzac Day

text: Prime Minister John Howard was also a huge proponent of Anzac Day commemorations, and visited Gallipoli on 25 April in both 2000 and 2005.


title: Anzac Day

text: An increasing number of attendees have been young Australians, many of whom attend ceremonies swathed in Australian flags, wearing green and gold T-shirts and beanies and with Australian flag tattoos imprinted on their skin. This phenomenon has been perceived by some as a reflection of the desire of younger generations of Australians to honour the sacrifices made by the previous generations.


title: Anzac Day

text: Australians and New Zealanders recognise 25 April as a ceremonial occasion to reflect on the cost of war and to remember those who fought and died in war. Commemorative services and marches are held at dawn, the time of the original landing, mainly at war memorials in cities and towns across both nations and the sites of some of Australia and New Zealand's more-recognised battles and greatest losses, such as Villers-Bretonneux in France and Gallipoli in Turkey.


title: Anzac Day

text: One of the traditions of Anzac Day is the "gunfire breakfast" (coffee with rum added) which occurs shortly after many dawn ceremonies, and recalls the "breakfast" taken by many soldiers before facing battle. Later in the day, ex-servicemen and ex-servicewomen meet and join in marches through the major cities and many smaller centres.


title: Anzac Day

text: In 2018, female veterans were encouraged to march at the front of their sections. The "By The Left" initiative was launched following a number of reported cases where servicewomen had been challenged that they were wearing their medals on the wrong side, as people should wear their own medals on the left side of their chest, but people marching in place of their parents or other ancestors should wear that person's medals on the right side.


title: Anzac Day

text: According to historian Dr Carolyn Holbrook of Deakin University, "We reached Peak Anzac in 2015 sure, and there has been some backing off since then, but in terms of the dawn services and Anzac Day commemoration, it will remain huge for a good while yet," says Carolyn. "There is nothing better to take its place in terms of a national mythology."


title: Anzac Day

text: In recent years, there has been greater recognition of the often overlooked role that women, immigrants and indigenous Australians played in the wars, in the news and in the arts. "Black Diggers", which premiered at the Sydney Festival, told the stories of the Aboriginal men who enlisted, whose sacrifices were ignored, and who were quickly forgotten upon their return. Country Arts SA's "Aboriginal Diggers Project" is a 3-year project (2017–2019) capturing the stories and experiences of Aboriginal servicemen and women who have served in Australia's Military from the Boer War to the present day through film, theatre and visual arts.


title: Anzac Day

text: In 2020, most Anzac Day marches in Australia and New Zealand were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Anzac Day

text: In 2021 major state marches occurred although under pandemic restriction settings such as in Queensland and the Northern Territory, others with ticketing and/or restrictions on numbers marching and watching, such as the national event in Canberra, Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania. Overseas services were not be held. Services did not happen in Perth as on 24 April Perth city and the Peel region entered a sudden 3 day COVID-19 lockdown and Anzac Day services in the affected areas were cancelled.


title: Anzac Day

text: ANZAC Day is a public holiday in Australia, New Zealand and Tonga (including in the dependencies of Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, the Cook Islands, Niue, Norfolk Island and Tokelau).


title: Anzac Day

text: A dawn service was held on the Western Front by an Australian battalion on the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1916, and historians agree that in Australia dawn services spontaneously popped up around the country to commemorate the fallen at Gallipoli in the years after this. The timing of the dawn service is based on the time that the ANZAC forces started the landing on the Gallipoli peninsula, but also has origins in a combination of military, symbolic and religious traditions. Various stories name different towns as having the first ever service in Australia, including Albany, Western Australia, but no definite proof has been found to corroborate any of them. In Rockhampton, Queensland on 26 April 1916, over 600 people attended an interdenominational service that started at 6.30 am. However, the dawn service held at the Sydney Cenotaph in 1928 can lay claim to being the first of a continuous tradition. The 1931 service at the Cenotaph was the first attended by the Governor and representatives of state and federal governments.


title: Anzac Day

text: Dawn services were originally very simple and in many cases they were restricted to veterans only, to remember and reflect among the comrades with whom they shared a special bond. Before dawn the gathered veterans would be ordered to "stand-to" and a lone bugler would play the "Last Post". Two minutes of silence would follow, concluded with the "Reveille". In more recent times the families of veterans and the general public have been encouraged to take part in dawn services. Some of the ceremonies have also become more elaborate, incorporating hymns, prayer readings, laying of wreaths, laments and the playing of the Australian national anthem, but others have retained the simple format of the dawn stand-to. The fourth stanza of Laurence Binyon's poem "" (known as the "Ode of Remembrance", or simply as "the Ode") is often recited.


title: Anzac Day

text: Despite federation being proclaimed in Australia in 1901, it is argued that the "national identity" of Australia was largely forged during the violent conflict of World War I, and the most iconic event in the war for most Australians was the landing at Gallipoli. Dr. Paul Skrebels of the University of South Australia has noted that Anzac Day has continued to grow in popularity; even the threat of a terrorist attack at the Gallipoli site in 2004 did not deter some 15,000 Australians from making the pilgrimage to Turkey to commemorate the fallen ANZAC troops.


title: Anzac Day

text: In cities and towns nationwide, marches by veterans from all past wars, as well as current serving members of the Australian Defence Force and Reserves, allied veterans, Australian Defence Force Cadets and Australian Air League, members of Scouts Australia, Guides Australia, and other service groups take place. The Anzac Day March from each state capital is televised live with commentary. These events are generally followed by social gatherings of veterans, hosted either in a public house or in an RSL club, often including a traditional Australian gambling game called two-up, which was an extremely popular pastime with ANZAC soldiers. (In most Australian states and territories, gambling is forbidden outside of licensed venues; however, due to the significance of this tradition, two-up is legal only on Anzac Day.)


title: Anzac Day

text: A National Ceremony is held at the Australian War Memorial, starting at 10:30 am, with the traditional order of service including the Commemorative Address, wreath laying, hymns, the sounding of the Last Post, observance of one minute's silence, and the national anthems of Australia and New Zealand. families often place artificial red poppies beside the names of relatives on the Memorial's Roll of Honour. Sprigs of rosemary or laurel are often worn on lapels.


title: Anzac Day

text: Although commemoration events are always held on 25 April, most states and territories currently observe a substitute public holiday on the following Monday when Anzac Day falls on a Sunday. When Anzac Day falls on Easter Monday, such as in 2011, the Easter Monday holiday is transferred to Tuesday. This followed a 2008 meeting of the Council for the Australian Federation in which the states and territories made an in-principle agreement to work towards making this a universal practice. However, in 2009, the Legislative Council of Tasmania rejected a bill amendment that would have enabled the substitute holiday in that state.


title: Anzac Day

text: Australia Post has issued stamps over the years to commemorate Anzac Day, the first being in 1935 for the 20th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.


title: Anzac Day

text: During many wars, Australian rules football matches have been played overseas in places like northern Africa, Vietnam, and Iraq as a celebration of Australian culture and as a bonding exercise between soldiers.


title: Anzac Day

text: The modern-day tradition began in 1995 and is played every year between traditional AFL rivals Collingwood and Essendon at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This annual match is often considered the biggest of the AFL season outside of the finals, sometimes drawing bigger crowds than all but the Grand Final, and often selling out in advance. A record crowd of 94,825 people attended the inaugural match in 1995. The Anzac Medal is awarded to the player in the match who best exemplifies the Anzac spirit — skill, courage, self-sacrifice, teamwork and fair play. As of 2021, Collingwood hold the advantage 15 wins to 9, with one draw (in the inaugural year, 1995). The match was not played in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Anzac Day

text: In 2013, St Kilda and the Sydney Swans played an Anzac Day game in Wellington, New Zealand, the first AFL game played for premiership points outside of Australia. The winning team, Sydney, were presented with the inaugural Simpson–Henderson Trophy by the Prime Minister of New Zealand. The trophy was named after two notable Anzac soldiers: John Simpson Kirkpatrick and Richard Alexander Henderson.


title: Anzac Day

text: From 1997, the Anzac Test, a rugby league test match, has commemorated Anzac Day, though it is typically played prior to Anzac Day. The match is always played between the Australian and New Zealand national teams, and has drawn attendances of between 20,000 and 45,000 in the past. The final Anzac test occurred in 2017.


title: Anzac Day

text: Domestically, matches have been played on Anzac Day since 1927 (with occasional exceptions). Since 2002, the National Rugby League (NRL) has followed the lead of the Australian Football League, hosting a match between traditional rivals St. George Illawarra Dragons and the Sydney Roosters each year to commemorate Anzac Day in the ANZAC Day Cup, although these two sides had previously met on Anzac Day several times as early as the 1970s. Since 2009, an additional Anzac Day game has been played between the Melbourne Storm and New Zealand Warriors.


title: Anzac Day

text: New Zealand's Commemoration of Anzac Day is similar. The number of New Zealanders attending Anzac Day events in New Zealand, and at Gallipoli, is increasing. For some, the day adds weight to the idea that war is futile.


title: Anzac Day

text: Dawn Marches and other memorials nationwide are typically attended by the New Zealand Defence Force, the New Zealand Cadet Forces, members of the New Zealand Police, Fire and Emergency New Zealand, Order of St John Ambulance Service (Youth and Adult Volunteers) as well as Scouting New Zealand, GirlGuiding New Zealand and other uniformed community service groups including in most places the local Pipe Band to lead or accompany the March, and sometimes a Brass Band to accompany the hymns.


title: Anzac Day

text: Anzac Day now promotes a sense of unity, perhaps more effectively than any other day on the national calendar. People whose politics, beliefs and aspirations are widely different can nevertheless share a genuine sorrow at the loss of so many lives in war.


title: Anzac Day

text: Paper poppies are widely distributed by the Returned Services Association and worn as symbols of remembrance. This tradition follows that of the wearing of poppies on Remembrance Sunday in other Commonwealth countries.


title: Anzac Day

text: The day is a public holiday in New Zealand. Shops are prohibited from opening before 1 pm as per the Anzac Day Act 1966. A prior Act passed in 1949 prevented the holiday from being "Mondayised" (moved to the 26th or 27th should the 25th fall on a weekend), although this drew criticism from trade unionists and Labour Party politicians. In 2013, a member's bill introduced by Labour MP David Clark to Mondayise Anzac Day and Waitangi Day passed, despite opposition from the governing National Party.


title: Anzac Day

text: In Turkey the name "ANZAC Cove" was officially recognised by the Turkish government on Anzac Day in 1985. In 1934, Kemal Atatürk delivered the following words to the first Australians, New Zealanders and British to visit the Gallipoli battlefields. This was later inscribed on a monolith at Ari Burnu Cemetery (ANZAC Beach) which was unveiled in 1985. The words also appear on the Kemal Atatürk Memorial, Canberra, and the Atatürk Memorial in Wellington:


title: Anzac Day

text: In 1990, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Gallipoli landing, Government officials from Australia and New Zealand (including Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke and New Zealand Governor-General Paul Reeves) as well as most of the last surviving Gallipoli veterans, and many Australian and New Zealand tourists travelled to Turkey for a special Dawn Service at Gallipoli. The Gallipoli Dawn Service was held at the Ari Burnu War Cemetery at Anzac Cove, but the growing numbers of people attending resulted in the construction of a more spacious site on North Beach, known as the "Anzac Commemorative Site" in time for the year 2000 service.


title: Anzac Day

text: A ballot was held to allocate passes for Australians and New Zealanders wishing to attend Anzac Day commemorations at Gallipoli in 2015. Of the 10,500 people who could be safely, securely and comfortably accommodated at the Anzac Commemorative Site, in 2015 this comprised places for 8,000 Australians, 2,000 New Zealanders and 500 official representatives of all nations involved in the Gallipoli campaign. Only those who received an offer of attendance passes attended the commemorations in 2015.


title: Anzac Day

text: The Australian Borneo Exhibition Group organises annual trips for ANZAC veterans and students to commemorate World War II in the states of Sabah and Sarawak.


title: Anzac Day

text: From the beginning, there has been concern to protect the Anzac tradition from inappropriate use. In Australia, use of the word "Anzac" is regulated under the "Protection of Word "Anzac" Act 1920". The "Protection of Word 'Anzac' Regulations 1921" state that: "no person may use the word 'Anzac', or any word resembling it, in connection with any trade, business, calling or profession or in connection with any entertainment or any lottery or art union or as the name or part of a name of any private residence, boat, vehicle of charitable or other institution, or other institution, or any building without the authority of the Minister for Veterans' Affairs". The maximum penalty is 12 months imprisonment, or $10,200 for a person and $51,000 for a corporation.


title: Anzac Day

text: Over recent years, some historians and commentators have raised concerns over what they see as the increasing commercialisation of Anzac Day. In 2015, historian Dr Carolyn Holbrook stated that companies were seeking to associate themselves with Anzac Day as "Anzac is the most potent and popular brand going around in Australia today". Questionable Anzac marketing campaigns included Woolworths' notorious 'Fresh in Our Memories' campaign in 2015, which provoked a strong public backlash. According to Dr Holbrook, Anzac is more sacred than Easter or Christmas to many. Historian Professor Joan Beaumont, researcher Jo Hawkins and historical commentator Dr David Stephens have argued that the Federal Government has not been sufficiently enforcing regulations which limit the extent to which companies can refer to Anzac Day, or use the word "Anzac", in their marketing. There has been widespread public opposition to the more blatant attempts to commercialise Anzac Day, which has led to some products being withdrawn from sale. Many of the products associated with the centenary of the Gallipoli landings were also commercial failures.


title: Anzac Day

text: A notable exception is the manufacture and sale of the Anzac biscuit, originally home made to published recipes from about 1920, and for many decades manufactured commercially for retail sale in both Australia and New Zealand. Commercial manufacture and sale of the biscuits is explicitly exempted from restrictions on the use of the word "Anzac".


title: Anzac Day

text: For decades, there have been concerns that the participation of young people in Anzac Day events has injected a carnival element into what is traditionally a solemn occasion. The change was highlighted by a rock concert-style performance at the 2005 Anzac Cove commemoration during which attendees drank and slept between headstones. After the event the site was left strewn with rubbish. In 2013, historian Jonathan King said that "escalating commercial pressures threaten to turn the centenary [of the landing at Gallipoli] into a Big Day Out."


title: Anzac Day

text: Digital change has been the focus of recent concern. The centenary commemoration of Anzac and the First World War has coincided with the emergence of a mature internet and comprehensive use of social media. According to Tom Sear, a new era of 'digital commemoration' of Anzac Day has begun. Anzac Day selfies, memes, virtual reality Anzac avatars, Facebook posts and Tweeting are part of a new participative, and immersive experience of the day. Digital media have "personalised" the experience of Anzac Day, focusing on "sharing" the activities online. In a time when the line between being "online" and "offline" is increasingly blurred, there has been a turn towards commemorative activities that seek to generate empathy and connection between contemporary audiences and historical subjects through digital media. Leading news organisations such as the ABC and News Corp "live tweeted" and "Facebooked" the original Anzac landings in 2015. These online forums, and their capacity for personalised feedback, have disquieted some historians, who are concerned about the distance, solemnity and critical perspective of traditional Anzac Day commemorations being lost. Equally others emphasise how, particularly young people, using these technologies of the present, play a role in connecting wider communities of Anzac Day commemorators.


title: Anzac Day

text: At its inception, Anzac Day faced criticism from the Australian labour movement, and in the country at large, there has been opposition to political exploitation of what was seen as a day of mourning. One controversy occurred in 1960 with the publication of Alan Seymour's classic play, "The One Day of the Year", which dramatised the growing social divide in Australia and the questioning of old values. In the play, Anzac Day is critiqued by the central character, Hughie, as a day of drunken debauchery by returned soldiers and as a day when questions of what it means to be loyal to a nation or Empire must be raised. The play was scheduled to be performed at the inaugural Adelaide Festival of Arts, but after complaints from the Returned Services League, the governors of the Festival refused permission for this to occur.


title: Anzac Day

text: Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, related to Australia's involvement in the Vietnam war and other issues, Anzac Day not only sank in popularity but was the focus for the expression of much dissent. ("See ")


title: Anzac Day

text: Anzac Day has been criticised in recent years by a number of Australians and New Zealanders, as, for example, "a day that obscures the politics of war and discourages political dissent".


title: Anzac Day

text: In October 2008, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating stated that he believes it is misguided for people to gather each year at Anzac Cove to commemorate the landing at Gallipoli, because it is "utter and complete nonsense" to suggest that the nation was "born again or even, redeemed there." Kevin Rudd, the Australian Prime Minister at the time rejected Keating's views, saying the Gallipoli campaign is "part of our national consciousness, it's part of our national psyche, it's part of our national identity, and I, for one, as Prime Minister of the country, am absolutely proud of it."


title: Anzac Day

text: Some critics have suggested that the revival in public interest in Anzac Day amongst the young results from the fact that younger Australians have not themselves experienced war. Critics see the revival as part of a rise of unreflective nationalism in Australia which was particularly fostered by the then Australian Prime Minister John Howard.


title: Anzac Day

text: Some historians believe Anzac Day events are now on the decline, although it's likely there will continue to be smaller dawn services and official events in the future. Dr Martin Crotty thought that perhaps it was now a ritual for older, traditional Australians, with old values of mateship and loyalty and even as a "reaction against globalisation"; however, Dr Carolyn Holbrook disagrees, arguing that young people are responsible for the resurgence, and among older people there is a big group of sceptics, Baby Boomers who were influenced by Vietnam War protests.


title: Anzac Day

text: Other criticisms have revolved around a perceived overzealousness in Australian attachment to the event, either from participants unaware of the loss or when the focus is at the expense of remembrance of the contribution of New Zealand. In 2005, John Howard was criticised for shunning the New Zealand Anzac ceremony at Gallipoli, preferring instead to spend his morning at a barbecue on the beach with Australian soldiers. In 2009, New Zealand historians noted that some Australian children were unaware that New Zealand was a part of ANZAC. In 2012 a New Zealand journalist caused controversy following comments that Australian World War I soldiers were bludgers and thieves.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: In the mathematical field of geometric topology, the Poincaré conjecture (, , ) is a theorem about the characterization of the 3-sphere, which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Originally conjectured by Henri Poincaré in 1904, the Grigori Perelman's theorem concerns spaces that locally look like ordinary three-dimensional space but which are finite in extent. Poincaré hypothesized that if such a space has the additional property that each loop in the space can be continuously tightened to a point, then it is necessarily a three-dimensional sphere. Attempts to resolve the conjecture drove much progress in the field of geometric topology during the 20th century.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: The Perelman's proof built upon Richard S. Hamilton's ideas of using the Ricci flow to solve the problem. By developing a number of breakthrough new techniques and results in the theory of Ricci flow, Grigori Perelman was able to prove the Conjecture, and more than just the Conjecture. In papers posted to the arXiv repository in 2002 and 2003, Perelman presented his work proving the Poincaré conjecture (and the more powerful geometrization conjecture of William Thurston). Over the next several years, several mathematicians studied his papers and produced detailed formulations of his work.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Hamilton and Perelman's work on the conjecture is widely recognized as a milestone of mathematical research. Hamilton was recognized with the Shaw Prize and the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research. The journal "Science" marked Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture as the scientific Breakthrough of the Year in 2006. The Clay Mathematics Institute, having included the Poincaré conjecture in their well-known Millennium Prize Problem list, offered Perelman their prize of US$1 million for the conjecture's resolution. He declined the award, saying modestly that Hamilton's contribution had been equal to his own.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Henri Poincaré was working on the foundations of topology—what would later be called combinatorial topology and then algebraic topology. He was particularly interested in what topological properties characterized a sphere.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Poincaré claimed in 1900 that homology, a tool he had devised based on prior work by Enrico Betti, was sufficient to tell if a 3-manifold was a 3-sphere. However, in a 1904 paper, he described a counterexample to this claim, a space now called the Poincaré homology sphere. The Poincaré sphere was the first example of a homology sphere, a manifold that had the same homology as a sphere, of which many others have since been constructed. To establish that the Poincaré sphere was different from the 3-sphere, Poincaré introduced a new topological invariant, the fundamental group, and showed that the Poincaré sphere had a fundamental group of order 120, while the 3-sphere had a trivial fundamental group. In this way, he was able to conclude that these two spaces were, indeed, different.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: In the same paper, Poincaré wondered whether a 3-manifold with the homology of a 3-sphere and also trivial fundamental group had to be a 3-sphere. Poincaré's new condition—i.e., "trivial fundamental group"—can be restated as "every loop can be shrunk to a point."


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Poincaré never declared whether he believed this additional condition would characterize the 3-sphere, but nonetheless, the statement that it does is known as the Poincaré conjecture. Here is the standard form of the conjecture:


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Note that "closed" here means, as customary in this area, the condition of being compact in terms of set topology, and also without boundary (3-dimensional Euclidean space is an example of a simply connected 3-manifold not homeomorphic to the 3-sphere; but it is not compact and therefore not a counter-example).


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: In the 1930s, J. H. C. Whitehead claimed a proof but then retracted it. In the process, he discovered some examples of simply-connected (indeed contractible, i.e. homotopically equivalent to a point) non-compact 3-manifolds not homeomorphic to formula_1, the prototype of which is now called the Whitehead manifold.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: In the 1950s and 1960s, other mathematicians attempted proofs of the conjecture only to discover that they contained flaws. Influential mathematicians such as Georges de Rham, R. H. Bing, Wolfgang Haken, Edwin E. Moise, and Christos Papakyriakopoulos attempted to prove the conjecture. In 1958, Bing proved a weak version of the Poincaré conjecture: if every simple closed curve of a compact 3-manifold is contained in a 3-ball, then the manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere. Bing also described some of the pitfalls in trying to prove the Poincaré conjecture.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Włodzimierz Jakobsche showed in 1978 that, if the Bing–Borsuk conjecture is true in dimension 3, then the Poincaré conjecture must also be true.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Over time, the conjecture gained the reputation of being particularly tricky to tackle. John Milnor commented that sometimes the errors in false proofs can be "rather subtle and difficult to detect." Work on the conjecture improved understanding of 3-manifolds. Experts in the field were often reluctant to announce proofs and tended to view any such announcement with skepticism. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed some well-publicized fallacious proofs (which were not actually published in peer-reviewed form).


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: An exposition of attempts to prove this conjecture can be found in the non-technical book "Poincaré's Prize" by George Szpiro.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: The classification of closed surfaces gives an affirmative answer to the analogous question in two dimensions. For dimensions greater than three, one can pose the Generalized Poincaré conjecture: is a homotopy "n"-sphere homeomorphic to the "n"-sphere? A stronger assumption is necessary; in dimensions four and higher there are simply-connected, closed manifolds which are not homotopy equivalent to an "n"-sphere.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Historically, while the conjecture in dimension three seemed plausible, the generalized conjecture was thought to be false. In 1961, Stephen Smale shocked mathematicians by proving the Generalized Poincaré conjecture for dimensions greater than four and extended his techniques to prove the fundamental h-cobordism theorem. In 1982, Michael Freedman proved the Poincaré conjecture in four dimensions. Freedman's work left open the possibility that there is a smooth four-manifold homeomorphic to the four-sphere which is not diffeomorphic to the four-sphere. This so-called smooth Poincaré conjecture, in dimension four, remains open and is thought to be very difficult. Milnor's exotic spheres show that the smooth Poincaré conjecture is false in dimension seven, for example.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: These earlier successes in higher dimensions left the case of three dimensions in limbo. The Poincaré conjecture was essentially true in both dimension four and all higher dimensions for substantially different reasons. In dimension three, the conjecture had an uncertain reputation until the geometrization conjecture put it into a framework governing all 3-manifolds. John Morgan wrote:


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Hamilton's program was started in his 1982 paper in which he introduced the Ricci flow on a manifold and showed how to use it to prove some special cases of the Poincaré conjecture. In the following years, he extended this work but was unable to prove the conjecture. The actual solution was not found until Grigori Perelman published his papers.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: In late 2002 and 2003, Perelman posted three papers on the arXiv. In these papers, he sketched a proof of the Poincaré conjecture and a more general conjecture, Thurston's geometrization conjecture, completing the Ricci flow program outlined earlier by Richard S. Hamilton.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: From May to July 2006, several groups presented papers that filled in the details of Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture, as follows:


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: All three groups found that the gaps in Perelman's papers were minor and could be filled in using his own techniques.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: On August 22, 2006, the ICM awarded Perelman the Fields Medal for his work on the Ricci flow, but Perelman refused the medal. John Morgan spoke at the ICM on the Poincaré conjecture on August 24, 2006, declaring that "in 2003, Perelman solved the Poincaré Conjecture."


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: In December 2006, the journal "Science" honored the proof of Poincaré conjecture as the Breakthrough of the Year and featured it on its cover.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Hamilton's program for proving the Poincaré conjecture involves first putting a Riemannian metric on the unknown simply connected closed 3-manifold. The basic idea is to try to "improve" this metric; for example, if the metric can be improved enough so that it has constant positive curvature, then according to classical results in Riemannian geometry, it must be the 3-sphere. Hamilton prescribed the "Ricci flow equations" for improving the metric;


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: where "g" is the metric and "R" its Ricci curvature, and one hopes that, as the time "t" increases, the manifold becomes easier to understand. Ricci flow expands the negative curvature part of the manifold and contracts the positive curvature part.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: In some cases, Hamilton was able to show that this works; for example, his original breakthrough was to show that if the Riemannian manifold has positive Ricci curvature everywhere, then the above procedure can only be followed for a bounded interval of parameter values, formula_3 with formula_4, and more significantly, that there are numbers formula_5 such that as formula_6, the Riemannian metrics formula_7 smoothly converge to one of constant positive curvature. According to classical Riemannian geometry, the only simply-connected compact manifold which can support a Riemannian metric of constant positive curvature is the sphere. So, in effect, Hamilton showed a special case of the Poincaré conjecture: "if" a compact simply-connected 3-manifold supports a Riemannian metric of positive Ricci curvature, then it must be diffeomorphic to the 3-sphere.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: If, instead, one only has an arbitrary Riemannian metric, the Ricci flow equations must lead to more complicated singularities. Perelman's major achievement was to show that, if one takes a certain perspective, if they appear in finite time, these singularities can only look like shrinking spheres or cylinders. With a quantitative understanding of this phenomenon, he cuts the manifold along the singularities, splitting the manifold into several pieces and then continues with the Ricci flow on each of these pieces. This procedure is known as Ricci flow with surgery.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Perelman provided a separate argument based on curve shortening flow to show that, on a simply-connected compact 3-manifold, any solution of the Ricci flow with surgery becomes extinct in finite time. An alternative argument, based on the min-max theory of minimal surfaces and geometric measure theory, was provided by Tobias Colding and William Minicozzi. Hence, in the simply-connected context, the above finite-time phenomena of Ricci flow with surgery is all that is relevant. In fact, this is even true if the fundamental group is a free product of finite groups and cyclic groups.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: This condition on the fundamental group turns out to be necessary and sufficient for finite time extinction. It is equivalent to saying that the prime decomposition of the manifold has no acyclic components and turns out to be equivalent to the condition that all geometric pieces of the manifold have geometries based on the two Thurston geometries "S"×R and "S". In the context that one makes no assumption about the fundamental group whatsoever, Perelman made a further technical study of the limit of the manifold for infinitely large times, and in so doing, proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture: at large times, the manifold has a thick-thin decomposition, whose thick piece has a hyperbolic structure, and whose thin piece is a graph manifold. Due to Perelman's and Colding and Minicozzi's results, however, these further results are unnecessary in order to prove the Poincaré conjecture.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: On November 13, 2002, Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted the first of a series of three eprints on arXiv outlining a solution of the Poincaré conjecture. Perelman's proof uses a modified version of a Ricci flow program developed by Richard S. Hamilton. In August 2006, Perelman was awarded, but declined, the Fields Medal (worth $15,000 CAD) for his work on the Ricci flow. On March 18, 2010, the Clay Mathematics Institute awarded Perelman the $1 million Millennium Prize in recognition of his proof. Perelman rejected that prize as well.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Perelman proved the conjecture by deforming the manifold using the Ricci flow (which behaves similarly to the heat equation that describes the diffusion of heat through an object). The Ricci flow usually deforms the manifold towards a rounder shape, except for some cases where it stretches the manifold apart from itself towards what are known as singularities. Perelman and Hamilton then chop the manifold at the singularities (a process called "surgery"), causing the separate pieces to form into ball-like shapes. Major steps in the proof involve showing how manifolds behave when they are deformed by the Ricci flow, examining what sort of singularities develop, determining whether this surgery process can be completed, and establishing that the surgery need not be repeated infinitely many times.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: The first step is to deform the manifold using the Ricci flow. The Ricci flow was defined by Richard S. Hamilton as a way to deform manifolds. The formula for the Ricci flow is an imitation of the heat equation, which describes the way heat flows in a solid. Like the heat flow, Ricci flow tends towards uniform behavior. Unlike the heat flow, the Ricci flow could run into singularities and stop functioning. A singularity in a manifold is a place where it is not differentiable: like a corner or a cusp or a pinching. The Ricci flow was only defined for smooth differentiable manifolds. Hamilton used the Ricci flow to prove that some compact manifolds were diffeomorphic to spheres, and he hoped to apply it to prove the Poincaré Conjecture. He needed to understand the singularities.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Hamilton created a list of possible singularities that could form, but he was concerned that some singularities might lead to difficulties. He wanted to cut the manifold at the singularities and paste in caps and then run the Ricci flow again, so he needed to understand the singularities and show that certain kinds of singularities do not occur. Perelman discovered the singularities were all very simple: essentially three-dimensional cylinders made out of spheres stretched out along a line. An ordinary cylinder is made by taking circles stretched along a line. Perelman proved this using something called the "Reduced Volume," which is closely related to an eigenvalue of a certain elliptic equation.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Sometimes, an otherwise complicated operation reduces to multiplication by a scalar (a number). Such numbers are called eigenvalues of that operation. Eigenvalues are closely related to vibration frequencies and are used in analyzing a famous problem: can you hear the shape of a drum? Essentially, an eigenvalue is like a note being played by the manifold. Perelman proved this note goes up as the manifold is deformed by the Ricci flow. This helped him eliminate some of the more troublesome singularities that had concerned Hamilton, particularly the cigar soliton solution, which looked like a strand sticking out of a manifold with nothing on the other side. In essence, Perelman showed that all the strands that form can be cut and capped and none stick out on one side only.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: Completing the proof, Perelman takes any compact, simply connected, three-dimensional manifold without boundary and starts to run the Ricci flow. This deforms the manifold into round pieces with strands running between them. He cuts the strands and continues deforming the manifold until, eventually, he is left with a collection of round three-dimensional spheres. Then, he rebuilds the original manifold by connecting the spheres together with three-dimensional cylinders, morphs them into a round shape, and sees that, despite all the initial confusion, the manifold was, in fact, homeomorphic to a sphere.


title: Poincaré conjecture

text: One immediate question posed was how one could be sure that infinitely many cuts are not necessary. This was raised due to the cutting potentially progressing forever. Perelman proved this cannot happen by using minimal surfaces on the manifold. A minimal surface is essentially a soap film. Hamilton had shown that the area of a minimal surface decreases as the manifold undergoes Ricci flow. Perelman verified what happened to the area of the minimal surface when the manifold was sliced. He proved that, eventually, the area is so small that any cut after the area is that small can only be chopping off three-dimensional spheres and not more complicated pieces. This is described as a battle with a Hydra by Sormani in Szpiro's book cited below. This last part of the proof appeared in Perelman's third and final paper on the subject.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Germaine Greer (; born 29 January 1939) is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the radical feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in the United Kingdom since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Queensland, Australia, and her home in Essex, England.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer's ideas have created controversy ever since her first book, "The Female Eunuch" (1970), made her a household name. An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement, it offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women were forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfil male fantasies of what being a woman entailed.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer's subsequent work has focused on literature, feminism and the environment. She has written over 20 books, including "Sex and Destiny" (1984), "The Change" (1991), "The Whole Woman" (1999), and "The Boy" (2003). Her 2013 book, "", describes her efforts to restore an area of rainforest in the Numinbah Valley in Australia. In addition to her academic work and activism, she has been a prolific columnist for "The Sunday Times", "The Guardian", "The Daily Telegraph", "The Spectator", "The Independent", and "The Oldie", among others.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer is a liberation (or radical) rather than equality feminist. Her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and "agreeing to live the lives of unfree men". "Women's liberation", she wrote in "The Whole Woman" (1999), "did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual." She argues instead that liberation is about asserting difference and "insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination". It is a struggle for the freedom of women to "define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate".


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer was born in Melbourne to a Catholic family, the elder of two girls followed by a boy. Her father, Eric Reginald ("Reg") Greer, told her he had been born in South Africa, but she learned after his death that he was born Robert Hamilton King in Launceston, Tasmania. He and her mother, Margaret ("Peggy") May Lafrank, had married in March 1937; Reg converted to Catholicism before the wedding. Peggy was a milliner and Reg a newspaper-advertising salesman. Despite her Catholic upbringing and her father's open antisemitism, Greer became convinced that her father was secretly of Jewish heritage. She believed her grandmother had been a Jewish woman named Rachel Weiss, but admits that she probably made this up out of an "intense longing to be Jewish." Despite not knowing whether she had any Jewish ancestry, Greer "felt Jewish" and began to involve herself in the Jewish community. She learned Yiddish, joined a Jewish theatre group, and dated Jewish men. In addition to English, Greer had learnt three European languages by the age of 12.


title: Germaine Greer

text: The family lived in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood, at first in a rented flat in Docker Street, near the beach, then in another rented flat on the Esplanade. In January 1942 Greer's father joined the Second Australian Imperial Force; after training with the Royal Australian Air Force, he worked on ciphers for the British Royal Air Force in Egypt and Malta. Greer attended St Columba's Catholic Primary School in Elwood from February 1943—the family was by then living at 57 Ormond Road, Elwood—followed by Sacred Heart Parish School, Sandringham, and Holy Redeemer School, Ripponlea.


title: Germaine Greer

text: In 1952 Greer won a scholarship to Star of the Sea College in Gardenvale, a convent school run by the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary; a school report called her "a bit of a mad-cap and somewhat erratic in her studies and in her personal responses". Greer described her childhood as a "long remembered boredom", and has said it was her Catholic school that introduced her to art and music. That year, artwork by her was included in the under-14 section of the Children's Art Exhibition at Tye's Gallery, opened by Archbishop Mannix. Greer achieved the second highest exam results in the state. A year after leaving school, Greer left the Catholic faith, having found the nuns' arguments for the existence of God unconvincing. She left home when she was 18. She had a difficult relationship with her mother who, according to Greer, probably had Asperger syndrome. In 2012 she said that her brother might have forgiven her for "abandoning" them, but she was not so sure about her sister, "whom I love more than anyone else on earth".


title: Germaine Greer

text: From 1956 Greer studied English and French language and literature at the University of Melbourne on a Teacher's College Scholarship, living at home for the first two years on an allowance of £8 a week.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Six feet tall by the age of 16, she was a striking figure. "Tall, loose-limbed and good-humoured, she strode around the campus, aware that she was much talked about", according to the journalist Peter Blazey, a contemporary at Melbourne. During her first year she had some kind of breakdown as a result of depression and was briefly treated in hospital. She told "Playboy" magazine, in an interview published in 1972, that she had been raped during her second year at Melbourne, an experience she described in detail in "The Guardian" in March 1995.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Just before she graduated from Melbourne in 1959 with an upper second, she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push and the anarchist Sydney Libertarians. "[T]hese people talked about truth and only truth", she said, "insisting that most of what we were exposed to during the day was ideology, which was a synonym for lies—or bullshit, as they called it." They would meet in a back room of the Royal George Hotel on Sussex Street. Clive James was involved with the group at the time. One of Greer's biographers, Christine Wallace, wrote that Greer "walked into the Royal George Hotel, into the throng talking themselves hoarse in a room stinking of stale beer and thick with cigarette smoke, and set out to follow the Push way of life, 'an intolerably difficult discipline which I forced myself to learn'". Greer already thought of herself as an anarchist without knowing why she was drawn to it; through the Push, she became familiar with anarchist literature. She had significant relationships in the group with Harry Hooton and Roelof Smilde, both prominent members. She shared an apartment with Smilde on Glebe Point Road, but the relationship did not last; according to Wallace, the Push ideology of "free love" involved the rejection of possessiveness and jealousy, which naturally worked in the men's favour.


title: Germaine Greer

text: When the relationship with Smilde ended, Greer enrolled at the University of Sydney to study Byron, where, Clive James wrote, she became "famous for her brilliantly foul tongue". One of her friends there, Arthur Dignam, said that she "was the only woman we had met at that stage who could confidently, easily and amusingly put men down". She became involved in acting at Sydney and played Mother Courage in "Mother Courage and Her Children" in August 1963. That year she was awarded a first-class MA for a thesis entitled "The Development of Byron's Satiric Mode", and took up an appointment at Sydney as senior tutor in English, with an office next door to Stephen Knight in the university's Carslaw Building. "She was undoubtedly an excellent teacher", he said. "And one of the best lecturers—one of the few who could command the Wallace Lecture Theatre, with its 600 students. She had a kind of histrionic quality which was quite remarkable, added to her real scholarship."


title: Germaine Greer

text: The MA won Greer a Commonwealth Scholarship, with which she funded further studies at the University of Cambridge, arriving in October 1964 at Newnham College, a women-only college. She had been encouraged to move from Sydney by Sam Goldberg, a Leavisite, who had been Challis Chair of English Literature at Sydney since 1963. Initially joining a BA course at Cambridge—her scholarship would have allowed her to complete it in two years—Greer managed to switch after the first term ("by force of argument", according to Clive James) to the PhD programme to study Shakespeare, supervised by Anne Barton, then known as Anne Righter. She said she switched because she "realized they were not going to teach [her] anything". It was Muriel Bradbrook, Cambridge's first female Professor of English, who persuaded Greer to study Shakespeare; Bradbrook had supervised Barton's PhD.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Cambridge was a difficult environment for women. As Christine Wallace notes, one Newnham student described her husband receiving a dinner invitation in 1966 from Christ's College that allowed "Wives in for sherry only". Lisa Jardine first encountered Greer at a formal dinner in Newnham. The principal had asked for silence for speeches. "As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice":


title: Germaine Greer

text: At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining with passion that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses, two stitched, white, cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression.


title: Germaine Greer

text: As soon as she arrived, Greer auditioned (with Clive James, whom she knew from the Sydney Push) for the student acting company, the Footlights, in its club room in Falcon Yard above a Mac Fisheries shop. They performed a sketch in which he was Noël Coward and she was Gertrude Lawrence. Joining on the same day as James and Russell Davies, Greer was one of the first women to be admitted as a full member, along with Sheila Buhr and Hilary Walston. The "Cambridge News" carried a news item about it in November 1964, referring to the women as "three girls". Greer's response to being accepted was reportedly: "This place is jumping with freckle-punchers. You can have it on your own." She did take part in its 1965 revue, "My Girl Herbert", alongside Eric Idle (the Footlights president), John Cameron, Christie Davies and John Grillo. A critic noticed "an Australian girl who had a natural ability to project her voice". Other members of the Footlights when she was there included Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Peter Cook and David Frost.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer lived for a time in the room next to Clive James at Friar House on Bene't Street, opposite The Eagle. Referring to her as "Romaine Rand", James described her room in his memoir of Cambridge, "May Week Was In June" (1991):


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer, who speaks fluent Italian, finished her PhD in Calabria, Italy, where she stayed for three months in a village with no running water and no electricity. The trip had begun as a visit with a boyfriend, Emilio, but he ended the relationship so Greer had changed her plans. Rising before dawn, she would wash herself at a well, drink black coffee and start typing. She was awarded her PhD in May 1968 for a thesis entitled "The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare's Early Comedies". Her family did not fly over for the ceremony. "I had worked all my life for love, done my best to please everybody, kept going till I reached the top, looked about and found I was all alone."


title: Germaine Greer

text: "The Female Eunuch" relies extensively on Greer's Shakespearean scholarship, particularly when discussing the history of marriage and courtship. In 1986 Oxford University Press published her book "Shakespeare" as part of its Past Masters series, and in 2007 Bloomsbury published her study of Anne Hathaway, "Shakespeare's Wife".


title: Germaine Greer

text: From 1968 to 1972, Greer worked as an assistant lecturer at the University of Warwick in Coventry, living at first in a rented bedsit in Leamington Spa with two cats and 300 tadpoles. In 1968 she was married for the first and only time, a marriage that ended in divorce in 1973. She met Paul du Feu, a King's College London English graduate who was working as a builder, outside a pub in Portobello Road, London, and after a brief courtship they married at Paddington Register Office, using a ring from a pawn shop. Du Feu had already been divorced and had two sons, aged 14 and 16, with his first wife.


title: Germaine Greer

text: The relationship lasted only a few weeks. Apparently unfaithful to du Feu seven times in three weeks of marriage, Greer wrote that she had spent their wedding night in an armchair, because her husband, drunk, would not allow her in bed. Eventually, during a party near Ladbroke Grove, "'[h]e turned to me and sneered (drunk as usual): 'I could have any woman in this room.' 'Except me,' I said, and walked away for ever.'"


title: Germaine Greer

text: In addition to teaching, Greer was trying to make a name for herself in television. In 1967 she appeared in the BBC shows "Good Old Nocker" and "Twice a Fortnight" and had a starring role in a short film, "Darling, Do You Love Me" (1968), by Martin Sharp (the Australian artist and co-editor of "Oz" magazine) and Bob Whitaker. From 1968 to 1969 she featured in a Granada Television slapstick show, "Nice Time", with Kenny Everett, Sandra Gough and Jonathan Routh. One set of outtakes found in Greer's archive at the University of Melbourne features her as a housewife bathing in milk delivered by Everett the milkman.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer began writing columns as "Dr. G" for "Oz" magazine, owned by Richard Neville, whom she had met at a party in Sydney. The Australian "Oz" had been shut down in 1963 after three months and the editors convicted of obscenity, later overturned. Neville and his co-editor, Martin Sharp, moved to London and set up "Oz" there. When Neville met Greer again, he suggested she write for it, which led to her article in the first edition in 1967, "In Bed with the English". Keith Morris photographed her ("Dr G, the only groupie with a PhD in captivity") for issue 19 in early 1969; the black-and-white images include one of her posing for the cover with Vivian Stanshall and another in which she pretends to play the guitar. The July 1970 edition, "OZ 29", featured "Germaine Greer knits private parts", an article from "Oz"s Needlework Correspondent on the hand-knitted Keep it Warm Cock Sock, "a snug corner for a chilly prick". As "Rose Blight", she also wrote a gardening column for "Private Eye".


title: Germaine Greer

text: In 1969 Greer was co-founder of an Amsterdam-based pornography magazine, "" (1969–1974), along with Bill Daley, Jim Haynes, William Levy, Heathcote Williams and Jean Shrimpton, the stated purpose of which was to create "a new pornography which would demystify male and female bodies". The first issue was reportedly so offensive that Special Branch raided its London office in the Arts Lab in Drury Lane and closed its postbox address.


title: Germaine Greer

text: According to Beatrice Faust, "Suck" published "high misogynist SM content", including a cover illustration, for issue 7, of a man holding a "screaming woman with her legs in the air while another rapes her anally". One of Greer's biographers, Elizabeth Kleinhenz, wrote that almost nothing was off limits for "Suck", including descriptions of child abuse, incest and bestiality. Greer's column, "Sucky Fucky" by "Earth Rose", included advice to women about how to look after their genitals and how they ought to taste their vaginal secretions. She published the name of a friend, someone she knew from her time with the Sydney Push and to whom she later dedicated "The Female Eunuch": "Anyone who wants group sex in New York and likes fat girls, contact Lillian Roxon." During a 1970 Amsterdam film festival organized by "Suck", the judging panel, which included Greer, gave first prize to Bodil Joensen for a film in which a woman has sex with animals. "Suck" reproduced one interview with Greer (first published in "Screw", another pornographic magazine), entitled "I Am a Whore".


title: Germaine Greer

text: In parallel with her involvement in "Suck", Greer told Robert Greenfield of "Rolling Stone" in January 1971 that she was an admirer of the Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded in New York in January 1969 by Ellen Willis and Shulamith Firestone. Criticized by feminists for her involvement with "Suck", in May 1971 she told an interviewer for "Screw":


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer parted company with "Suck" in 1972 when it published a naked photograph of her lying down with her legs over her shoulders and her face peering between her thighs. The photograph had been submitted on the understanding that nude photographs of all the editors would be published in a book about a film festival. She resigned, accusing the other editors of being "counter-revolutionary". Greer said later that her aim in joining the editorial board had been to try to steer "Suck" away from exploitative, sadistic pornography.


title: Germaine Greer

text: When she began writing for "Oz" and "Suck", Greer was spending three days a week in her flat in Leamington Spa while she taught at Warwick, two days in Manchester filming, and two days in London in a white-washed bedsit in The Pheasantry on King's Road. When she first moved to London, she had stayed in John Peel's spare room before being invited to take the bedsit in The Pheasantry, a room just under Martin Sharp's; accommodation there was by invitation only.


title: Germaine Greer

text: She was also writing "The Female Eunuch". On 17 March 1969 she had had lunch in Golden Square, Soho, with a Cambridge acquaintance, Sonny Mehta of MacGibbon & Kee. When he asked for ideas for new books, she repeated a suggestion of her agent, Diana Crawford, which she had dismissed, that she write about female suffrage. Crawford had suggested that Greer write a book for the 50th anniversary of women (or a portion of them) being given the vote in the UK in 1918. The very idea of it made her angry and she began "raging" about it. "That's the book I want", he said. He advanced her £750 and another £250 when she signed the contract. In a three-page synopsis for Mehta, she wrote: "If Eldridge Cleaver can write a book about the frozen soul of the negro, as part of the progress towards a correct statement of the coloured man’s problem, a woman must eventually take steps towards delineating the female condition as she finds it scored upon her sensibility."


title: Germaine Greer

text: Explaining why she wanted to write the book, the synopsis continued: "Firstly I suppose it is to expiate my guilt at being an uncle Tom to my sex. I don't like women. I probably share in all the effortless and unconscious contempt that men pour on women." In a note at the time, she described 21 April 1969 as "the day on which my book begins itself, and Janis Joplin sings at Albert Hall. Yesterday the title was Strumpet Voluntary—what shall it be today?" She told the "Sydney Morning Herald" in July 1969 that the book was nearly finished and would explore, in the reporter's words, "the myth of the ultra-feminine woman which both sexes are fed and which both end up believing". In February 1970, she published an article in "Oz", "The Slag-Heap Erupts", which gave a taste of her views to come, namely that women were to blame for their own oppression. "Men don't really like women", she wrote, "and that is really why they don't employ them. Women don't really like women either, and they too can usually be relied on to employ men in preference to women." Several British feminists, including Angela Carter, Sheila Rowbotham and Michelene Wandor, responded angrily. Wandor wrote a rejoinder in "Oz", "On the end of Servile Penitude: A reply to Germaine's cunt power", arguing that Greer was writing about a feminist movement in which she had played no role and about which she knew nothing.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Launched at a party attended by editors from "Oz", "The Female Eunuch" was published in the UK by MacGibbon & Kee on 12 October 1970, dedicated to Lillian Roxon and four other women. The first print run of thousand copies sold out on the first day. Arguing that the suburban, consumerist, nuclear family represses and devitalizes women, the book became an international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement. According to Greer, McGraw-Hill paid $29,000 for the American rights and Bantam $135,000 for the paperback. The Bantam edition called Greer the "Saucy feminist that even men like", quoting "Life" magazine, and the book "#1: the ultimate word on sexual freedom". Demand was such when it was first published that it had to be reprinted monthly, and it has never been out of print. Wallace writes about one woman who wrapped it in brown paper and kept it hidden under her shoes, because her husband would not let her read it. By 1998 it had sold over one million copies in the UK alone.


title: Germaine Greer

text: The year 1970 was an important one for second-wave feminism. In February 400 women met in Ruskin College, Oxford, for Britain's first Women's Liberation Conference. In August Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" was published in New York; on 26 August the Women's Strike for Equality was held throughout the United States; and on 31 August Millett's portrait by Alice Neel was on the cover of "Time" magazine, by which time her book had sold 15,000 copies (although in December "Time" deemed her disclosure that she was a lesbian as likely to discourage people from embracing feminism). September and October saw the publication of "Sisterhood Is Powerful", edited by Robin Morgan, and Shulamith Firestone's "The Dialectic of Sex". On 6 March 1971, dressed in a monk's habit, Greer marched through central London with 2,500 women in a Women's Liberation March. By that month "The Female Eunuch" had been translated into eight languages and had nearly sold out its second printing. McGraw-Hill published it in the United States on 16 April 1971. The toast of New York, Greer insisted on staying at the Hotel Chelsea, a haunt of writers and artists, rather than at the Algonquin Hotel where her publisher had booked her; her book launch had to be rescheduled because so many people wanted to attend. A "New York Times" book review described her as "[s]ix feet tall, restlessly attractive, with blue-gray eyes and a profile reminiscent of Garbo". Her publishers called her "the most lovable creature to come out of Australia since the koala bear".


title: Germaine Greer

text: A Paladin paperback followed, with cover art by British artist John Holmes, influenced by René Magritte, showing a female torso as a suit hanging from a rail, a handle on each hip. Clive Hamilton regarded it as "perhaps the most memorable and unnerving book cover ever created". Likening the torso to "some fibreglass cast on an industrial production line", Christine Wallace wrote that Holmes's first version was a faceless, breastless, naked woman, "unmistakably Germaine ... hair fashionably afro-frizzed, waist-deep in a pile of stylised breasts, presumably amputated in the creation of a 'female eunuch' based on an assumed equivalence of testicles and mammary glands". The book was reissued in 2001 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux at the instigation of Jennifer Baumgardner, a leading third-wave feminist and editor of the publisher's Feminist Classics series. According to Justyna Wlodarczyk, Greer emerged as "the third wave's favorite second-wave feminist".


title: Germaine Greer

text: "The Female Eunuch" explores how a male-dominated world affects a female's sense of self, and how sexist stereotypes undermine female rationality, autonomy, power and sexuality. Its message is that women have to look within themselves for personal liberation before trying to change the world. In a series of chapters in five sections—Body, Soul, Love, Hate and Revolution—Greer describes the stereotypes, myths and misunderstandings that combine to produce the oppression. She summarized the book's position in 2018 as "Do what you want and want what you do ... Don't take it up the arse if you don't want to take it up the arse." Wallace argues that this is a libertarian message, with its background in the Sydney Push, rather than one that rose out of the feminism of the day. The first paragraph stakes out the book's place in feminist historiography (in an earlier draft, the first sentence read: "So far the female liberation movement is tiny, privileged and overrated"):


title: Germaine Greer

text: The "Eunuch" ends with: "Privileged women will pluck at your sleeve and seek to enlist you in the 'fight' for reforms, but reforms are retrogressive. The old process must be broken, not made new. Bitter women will call you to rebellion, but you have too much to do. What "will" you do?"


title: Germaine Greer

text: Two of the book's themes already pointed the way to "Sex and Destiny" 14 years later, namely that the nuclear family is a bad environment for women and for the raising of children, and that the manufacture of women's sexuality by Western society is demeaning and confining. Girls are feminised from childhood by being taught rules that subjugate them. Later, when women embrace the stereotypical version of adult femininity, they develop a sense of shame about their own bodies, and lose their natural and political autonomy. The result is powerlessness, isolation, a diminished sexuality, and a lack of joy. "Like beasts", she told "The New York Times" in March 1971, "who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives—to be fattened or made docile—women have been cut off from their capacity for action." The book argues that "[w]omen have very little idea of how much men hate them", while "[m]en do not themselves know the depth of their hatred." First-wave feminism had failed in its revolutionary aims. "Reaction is not revolution", she wrote. "It is not a sign of revolution where the oppressed adopt the manners of the oppressors and practice oppression on their own behalf. Neither is it a sign of revolution when women ape men ..." The American feminist Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique" (1963), wants for women "equality of opportunity within the status quo, free admission to the world of the ulcer and the coronary", she argued.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Although Greer's book made no use of autobiographical material, unlike other feminist works at the time. Mary Evans, writing in 2002, viewed Greer's "entire "oeuvre"" as autobiographical, a struggle for female agency in the face of the powerlessness of the feminine (her mother) against the backdrop of the missing male hero (her father). Reviewing the book for "The Massachusetts Review" in 1972, feminist scholar Arlyn Diamond wrote that, while flawed, it was also "intuitively and brilliantly right", but she criticized Greer for her attitude toward women:


title: Germaine Greer

text: In the UK Greer was voted "Woman of the Year" in 1971, and in the US the following year, she was "Playboy Journalist of the Year". Much in demand, she embraced the celebrity life. On 30 April 1971, in "Dialogue on Women's Liberation" at the Town Hall in New York, she famously debated Norman Mailer, whose book "The Prisoner of Sex" had just been published in response to Kate Millett. Greer presented it as an evening of sexual conquest. She had always wanted to fuck Mailer, she said, and wrote in "The Listener" that she "half expected him to blow his head off in 'one last killer come' like Ernest Hemingway." Betty Friedan, Sargent Shriver, Susan Sontag and Stephen Spender sat in the audience, where tickets were $25 a head (c. $155 in 2018), while Greer and Mailer shared the stage with Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos. Several feminists declined to attend, including Ti-Grace Atkinson, Kate Millett, Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem. Filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the event in the documentary "Town Bloody Hall" (1979).


title: Germaine Greer

text: Wearing a paisley coat she had cut from a shawl and sewn herself, and sitting with her feet on a park bench, Greer appeared on the cover of "Life" magazine on 7 May 1971, under the title "Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like"; there were five more photographs of her inside. Also in May, she was featured in "Vogue" magazine, photographed by Lord Snowdon, on the floor in knee-length boots and wearing the same paisley coat. (In 2016 the coat, now in the National Museum of Australia, got its own scholarly article, and the photograph by Lord Snowdon is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.) On 18 May Greer addressed the National Press Club in Washington, the first woman to do so; she was introduced as "an attractive, intelligent, sexually liberated woman". She also appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show", and on 14 and 15 June guest-presented two episodes, discussing birth control, abortion and rape.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer was in a relationship at the time with Tony Gourvish, manager of the British rock band Family, one that began while she was writing "The Female Eunuch". Kleinhenz writes that they lived together for a time, but Greer ended up feeling that he was exploiting her celebrity, a sense she developed increasingly with her friends, according to Kleinhenz. In June 1971 she became a columnist for the London "Sunday Times". Later that year her journalism took her to Vietnam, where she wrote about "bargirls" made pregnant by American soldiers, and to Bangladesh, where she interviewed women raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War.


title: Germaine Greer

text: In the summer of 1971, Greer moved to Cortona, Tuscany, where she rented "Il Palazzone", a cottage near the town, then bought a house, "Pianelli". She told Richard Neville that she had to spend time away from England because of its tax laws .She spent part of that summer in Porto Cervo, a seaside resort, with Kenneth Tynan, artistic director of the Royal National Theatre, as guests of Michael White, the impresario. The group had dinner one evening with Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon and Karim Aga Khan. Greer had arrived with little luggage, and before dinner found her hair had been blown about by the wind on the ferry. Princess Margaret sat Greer down at her dressing table and spent five minutes brushing out her hair. The point of the visit for Greer was to discuss Tynan's commission of a translation of Aristophanes's "Lysistrata". First performed in 411 BCE, the play explores an attempt by women to force the end of the Peloponnesian War by going on sex strike. The project was not produced; Greer and Tynan fell out during the trip, and Greer left Porto Cervo in tears. Her adaptation of the play found belated appreciation in 1999, when the script was re-worked and produced by Phil Willmott as "Germaine Greer's Lysistrata: The Sex Strike".


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer has described the freedom she felt at her home in Italy, which had no electricity when she first moved there. While living in Italy, Greer interviewed Primo Levi, Luciano Pavarotti and Federico Fellini (with whom she was romantically involved) in Italian. (Greer is a polyglot, and can write or speak German, French, Spanish and Latin, in addition to English and Italian).


title: Germaine Greer

text: In or around July 1971 Greer was interviewed by Nat Lehrman, a member of "Playboy"s editorial board, who flew from the United States to Italy to conduct the interview in her home. "Playboy" published the article in January 1972: "Germaine Greer – a Candid Conversation with the Ballsy Author of "The Female Eunuch"". It was during this interview that she first discussed publicly that she had been raped in her second year at the University of Melbourne. Busy with her journalism and publicity tours, she resigned her teaching position at Warwick that year. In March 1972, she was arrested in New Zealand for saying "bullshit" and "fuck" in a speech during a tour, which she had done deliberately because Tim Shadbolt, who was elected mayor of Invercargill in 1993, had recently been arrested for the same thing. Six hundred people gathered outside the court, throwing jelly beans and eggs at the police. After defending herself, she was "acquitted on 'bullshit' but convicted for 'fuck'", Kleinhenz writes. Given a jail sentence, she offered to pay a fine instead, then left the country without paying it.


title: Germaine Greer

text: In August 1973 Greer debated William F. Buckley Jr. at the Cambridge Union on the motion "This House Supports the Women's Liberation Movement". "Nothing I said", Buckley wrote in 1989, "and memory reproaches me for having performed miserably, made any impression or any dent in the argument. She carried the house overwhelmingly."


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer, then 37, had an affair in 1976 with the novelist Martin Amis, then 26, which was discussed publicly in 2015 after she sold her archives to the University of Melbourne. In them Margaret Simons discovered a 30,000-word letter to Amis which Greer had begun writing on 1 March 1976 while in the British Airways Monarch lounge at Heathrow Airport, and continued during a lecture tour in the United States, though apparently never sent: "As the miles add up, I find this letter harder and harder to write. My style falters and whole paragraphs emerge as dry as powder. Yesterday I left this book in a taxi cab and would have lost it if the driver hadn’t driven back ... with it. As for you, my darling, I see you very rarely. Even in my dreams you send me only your handmaidens."


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer's second book, "The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work" (1979), covered its subject until the end of the 19th century, and speculated on the existence of female artists whose careers were not recorded. That year Greer was appointed director of the Center of the Study of Women's Literature at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in 1982 she founded the "Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature", an academic journal that highlights unknown or little-known women writers. In the first issue Greer wrote that she wanted the journal to focus on the "rehabilitation of women's literary history". She would spend five months a year in Tulsa and the rest in the UK.


title: Germaine Greer

text: She continued working as a journalist. In 1984 she travelled to Ethiopia to report on the 1983–1985 famine for the "Daily Mail" and again in April 1985 for "The Observer". For the latter, she took photographs with an Olympus automatic camera and drove 700 km to Asosa, a city to which the Ethiopian government was moving people from the famine areas. The "Observer" did not publish the two 5,000-word articles she submitted; in her view, the editors did not agree with her pro Mengistu government perspective. "The New Worker" published them instead. In September 1985 she travelled again to Ethiopia, this time to present a documentary for Channel 4 in the UK.


title: Germaine Greer

text: "Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human Fertility" (1984) continued Greer's critique of Western attitudes toward sexuality, fertility, and family, and the imposition of those attitudes on the rest of the world. Her targets again include the nuclear family, government intervention in sexual behaviour, and the commercialisation of sexuality and women's bodies. She argued that the Western promotion of birth control in the Third World was in large part driven not by concern for human welfare but by the traditional fear and envy of the rich towards the fertility of the poor. The birth control movement had been tainted by such attitudes from its beginning, she wrote, citing Marie Stopes and others. She cautioned against condemning life styles and family values in the developing world.


title: Germaine Greer

text: In 1984 Greer bought The Mills, a Georgian farmhouse on three acres of land in Great Chesterford, Essex, where she planted a one-acre wood, which she said made her prouder than anything else she had done, and tried to keep "as a refuge for as many other earthlings" as she could. The Mills was still Greer's home for part of the year when she put it up for sale in 2018; as of 2016 she was spending four months a year in Australia and the rest in the UK.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Her book "Shakespeare" (her PhD topic) was published in 1986 by Oxford University Press as part of its Past Masters series. "The Madwoman's Underclothes: Essays and Occasional Writings", a collection of her articles written between 1968 and 1985, also appeared that year. In June 1988, along with Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser, Ian McEwan, Margaret Drabble, Salman Rushdie, David Hare and others, she became part of the "20th of June Group", which supported civil liberties in England that the group felt were being eroded; this was shortly after Section 28 was introduced, which prevented schools from teaching homosexuality as a normal part of family life.


title: Germaine Greer

text: In 1989 she wrote "Daddy, We Hardly Knew You", a diary and travelogue about her father, whom Greer portrayed as distant, weak and unaffectionate, which led to the criticism that in her writing she was projecting her relationship with him onto all other men. She became a special lecturer and bye-fellow that year of Newnham College, Cambridge, a position she held until 1998. Greer founded Stump Cross Books, based at The Mills, which published the work of 17th- and 18th-century female poets. She returned to the University of Warwick, accepting a personal Chair as Professor in the English and Comparative Studies department.


title: Germaine Greer

text: She was appearing regularly on television in the UK and Australia during this period, including on the BBC's "Have I Got News for You" several times from 1990. On 22 July 1995 she was interviewed at length by Andrew Neil on his one-on-one interview show "Is This Your Life?" In 1998 she wrote an episode, "Make Love not War", for the television documentary series "Cold War", and the following year sat for a nude photograph by the Australian photographer Polly Borland. A 1994 interview with Greer in "The Big Issue", in which she said she would share her home with anyone willing to follow her rules, was interpreted as an open invitation to the homeless, and led to her being swamped by reporters and low-flying aircraft. One of the journalists, an undercover "Mail on Sunday" reporter, managed to gain entry and avail himself of her hospitality for two days, which included Greer washing his clothes and teaching him how to bake bread. After the newspaper published a three-page spread, the Press Complaints Commission found it guilty of subterfuge not in the public interest.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Natalie Angier, writing in "The New York Times", called "The Change: Women, Ageing, and the Menopause" (1991) a "brilliant, gutsy, exhilarating, exasperating fury of a book ... tantalizingly close to being a potential feminist classic on a par with "The Female Eunuch"." In it, Greer writes of the myths about menopause—or as she prefers to call it the "climacteric", or critical period. "Frightening females is fun", she wrote in "The Age" in 2002. "Women were frightened into using hormone replacement therapy by dire predictions of crumbling bones, heart disease, loss of libido, depression, despair, disease and death if they let nature take its course." She argues that scaring women is "big business and hugely profitable". The book, including the medical information, was updated and reissued in 2018.


title: Germaine Greer

text: "Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet" (1995) is an account of women who wrote poetry in English before 1900, and an examination of why so few have been admitted to the literary canon. Her conclusion is that women were held to lower standards than men (hence the "slip-shod" sibyls of the title, quoting Alexander Pope), and the poetic tradition discouraged good poetry from women. The book includes a critique of the concept of woman as Muse, associated with Robert Graves and others; a chapter on Sappho and her use as a symbol of female poetry; a chapter on the 17th-century poet Katherine Philips; two chapters on Aphra Behn and one on Anne Wharton; and material on Anne Finch, Letitia Landon and Christina Rossetti. It includes an epilogue on 20th-century female poets and their propensity for suicide: "Too many of the most conspicuous figures in women's poetry of the 20th century not only destroyed themselves in a variety of ways but are valued for poetry that documents that process."


title: Germaine Greer

text: A sequel to "The Female Eunuch", "The Whole Woman" was published in 1999 by Doubleday, one of seven publishers who bid for the book; Greer was paid an advance of £500,000. In the book Greer argued that feminism had lost its way. Women still faced the same physical realities as before, but because of changing views about gender identity and post-modernism, there is a "new silence about [women's] visceral experiences [that] is the same old rapist's hand clamped across their mouths". She wrote: "Real women are being phased out; the first step, persuading them to deny their own existence, is almost complete."


title: Germaine Greer

text: Her comments on female genital mutilation (FGM) proved controversial, particularly that opposition to it is an "attack on cultural identity", just as outlawing male circumcision would be viewed as an attack on Jews and Muslims. Greer wrote that feminists fighting to eliminate FGM in their own countries should be supported, but she explored the complexities of the issue and the double standards of the West regarding other forms of bodily mutilation, including that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended surgery at that time on baby girls with clitorises over three-eighths of an inch long. She questioned the view that FGM is imposed by men on women, rather than by women on women, or even freely chosen.


title: Germaine Greer

text: In "The Whole Woman", Greer argued that, while sex is a biological given, gender roles are cultural constructs. Femininity is not femaleness. "Genuine femaleness remains grotesque to the point of obscenity", she wrote. Girls and women are taught femininity—learning to speak softly, wear certain clothes, remove body hair to please men, and so on—a process of conditioning that begins at birth and continues throughout the entire life span. "There is nothing feminine about being pregnant", she told Krishnan Guru-Murthy in 2018. "It's almost the antithesis of that. There's nothing feminine about giving birth. It's a bloody struggle, and you've got to be strong and brave. There's nothing feminine about breastfeeding. God knows it drives everybody mad; they want to see nice big pumped-up tits, but they don't want to see them doing their job."


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer's writing on gender brought her into opposition with the transgender community. In a chapter in "The Whole Woman" entitled "Pantomime Dames", she wrote: "Governments that consist of very few women have hurried to recognise as women, men who believe that they are women and have had themselves castrated to prove it, because they see women not as another sex but as a non-sex." Her position first attracted controversy in 1997, when she unsuccessfully opposed the offer of a Newnham College fellowship to physicist Rachael Padman, a trans woman, arguing that, because Padman had been "born male", she should not be admitted to a women-only college. She reiterated her views several times over the following years, including in 2015 when students at Cardiff University tried unsuccessfully to "no platform" her to stop her from speaking on "Women & Power: The Lessons of the 20th Century". Greer responded by reaffirming, during an interview with Kirsty Wark for BBC "Newsnight", that she did not regard transgender women as women; she argued that the nomination of Caitlyn Jenner for Glamour Woman of the Year had been misogynist. Over 130 academics and others signed a letter to "The Observer" in 2015 objecting to the use of no-platform policies against Greer and feminists with similar views; signatories included Beatrix Campbell, Mary Beard, Deborah Cameron, Catherine Hall, Liz Kelly, Ruth Lister, and the Southall Black Sisters.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer wrote in "The Female Eunuch" (1970) that rape is not the "expression of uncontrollable desire" but an act of "murderous aggression, spawned in self-loathing and enacted upon the hated other". She has argued since at least the 1990s that the criminal justice system's approach to rape is male-centred, treating female victims as evidence rather than complainants, and reflecting that women were once regarded as male property. "Historically, the crime of rape was committed not against the woman but against the man with an interest in her, her father or her husband", she wrote in 1995. "What had to be established beyond doubt was that she had not collaborated with the man who usurped another's right. If she had, the penalty, which might have been stoning or pressing to death, was paid by her."


title: Germaine Greer

text: Rape is not the worst thing that can happen to a woman, she writes; if a woman allows a man to have sex with her to avoid a beating, then arguably she fears the beating more. A woman who has been raped has no reason to feel shame (and therefore no need for anonymity), and a female-centred view of rape will not fashion it as something that can "ruin" a woman. "She may be outraged and humiliated", Greer writes, "but she cannot be damaged in any essential way by the simple fact of the presence of an unwelcome penis in her vagina." If a woman feels she has been destroyed by such an attack, "it is because you've been told lies about who and what you are", she argued in 2018. She suggested in 1995 that the crime of rape be replaced by one of sexual assault with varying degrees of seriousness and swifter outcomes. In 2018 she said she had changed her mind about calling rape "sexual assault", because most rape (in particular, sex without consent within marriage) is not accompanied by physical violence. "There is no way that the law of rape fits the reality of women's lives", she said in 2018. Her book, "On Rape", was published by Melbourne University Press in September 2018.


title: Germaine Greer

text: During an interview with "Playboy" in 1971, and again during an interview with Clyde Packer in the 1980s, Greer discussed how she had been raped as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne. Two weeks after her March 1995 "Guardian" column about rape provoked controversy, she again recalled her own experience, which took place in January 1958 when she was 19. A rugby player she had met at a barbecue dragged her into a car, punched her several times in the head, forced her to repeat what he wanted her to say, then raped her. Afterwards, he walked back to the party as though nothing had happened. Her male flatmates found her at home hours later, bruised, swollen and semi-conscious. She believed that reporting it would be pointless; she had danced with him at the party, had left with him voluntarily, and he was a pillar of the community. The flatmates brought the man to the flat days later and warned him in front of her that they would break his legs if they saw him at any of the places they frequented.


title: Germaine Greer

text: She argued, in two "Guardian" columns, that it was not the rapist's penis that had hurt her, but his fists and "vicious mind", and the loss of control, invasion of self, and "being made to speak the rapist's script". "To insist", she wrote, "that outrage by penis is worse than outrage by any other means is to glorify and magnify that tag of flesh beyond reason." She suggested that perhaps women should "out" their rapists rather than take a chance with a legal system that does not work for them. Her views were strongly criticized by Women Against Rape, which at the time was campaigning for more prosecutions.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer has commented several times on the Me Too movement. In November 2017, she called for women to show solidarity when other women are sexually harassed. Just before she was named Australian of the Year in Britain in January 2018, she said she had always wanted to see women react immediately to sexual harassment, as it occurs. "What makes it different is when the man has economic power, as Harvey Weinstein has. But if you spread your legs because he said 'be nice to me and I'll give you a job in a movie' then I'm afraid that's tantamount to consent, and it's too late now to start whingeing about that." In May that year, she argued—of the high-profile cases—that disclosure was "dishonourable" because women who "claim to have been outraged 20 years ago" had been paid to sign non-disclosure agreements, but then had spoken out once the statute of limitations had lapsed and they had nothing to lose.


title: Germaine Greer

text: A book of art history, "The Boy" (2003)—published in the United States as "The Beautiful Boy"—was illustrated with 200 photographs of what "The Observer" called "succulent teenage male beauty". Greer described the book as an attempt to address modern women's apparent indifference to the teenage boy as a sexual object and to "advance women's reclamation of their capacity for, and right to, visual pleasure".


title: Germaine Greer

text: The cover photograph, by David Bailey, was of 15-year-old Björn Andrésen in his character of Tadzio in the film "Death in Venice" (1971). The actor complained about Greer's use of the photograph. Some writers characterised the book's nature as paedophilic.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer has published several essays on Aboriginal issues, including "Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood", first published in "Quarterly Essay" in August 2003, and later as a book in the UK. In the essay she wrote that she had understood little about Aboriginal issues in her early years, but in England she saw from the perspective of distance that "what was operating in Australia was apartheid". On returning to Australia in late 1971 she made an effort "to see as much as I could of what had been hidden from me", travelling through the Northern Territory with activist Bobbi Sykes.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer argued that Australians should re-imagine the country as an Aboriginal nation. "Jump up" in Australian creole can, she wrote, mean "to be resurrected or reborn"; the title refers to occasions when Aborigines apparently accepted whites as reincarnated relatives. Suggesting that whites were mistaken in understanding this literally, she argued that Aborigines were offering whites terms on which they could be accepted into the Aboriginal kinship system. The essay argues that it may not be too late for Australia as a nation to root itself in Aboriginal history and culture. She wrote:


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer's essay "On Rage" (2008) dealt with the widespread rage of Indigenous men. Aboriginal academic Marcia Langton argued that she was making excuses for bad behaviour. Greer returned that year to Newnham College, Cambridge, as a special supervisor.


title: Germaine Greer

text: In 2001 Greer bought of land in Australia for $500,000 at Cave Creek in the Numinbah Valley, near the Natural Bridge section of Springbrook National Park in South East Queensland. Formerly rainforest, the land had been used as a dairy farm, banana plantation and timber source. In 2013 she published "White Beech: The Rainforest Years" about her Cave Creek Rainforest Rehabilitation Scheme, her effort to restore the land to its pre-European-settler state. Friends of Gondwana Rainforest, a charity Greer registered in England in 2011, funds and oversees the project.


title: Germaine Greer

text: The book describes about how she discovered an uncommon White Beech tree ("Gmelina leichhardtii"), and that the chemical 2,4,5-T (an Agent Orange ingredient) had been sprayed in the area for years to thin the hardwood and control the weeds. She wrote that "entering fully into the multifarious life that is Earthling's environment, while giving up delusions of controlling it, is a transcendental experience". Her sense of space, time and self changed: "My horizons flew away, my notion of time expanded and deepened, and my self disappeared." Although she divides time between Australia and England annually, she will not settle permanently in Australia until the country has a treaty with its indigenous people.


title: Germaine Greer

text: Greer has received several honorary doctorates: a Doctor of Letters from York University in 1999, a Doctor of Laws from the University of Melbourne in 2003, and a Doctor of Letters from the University of Sydney in 2005.


title: Germaine Greer

text: The National Portrait Gallery in London has purchased eight photographs of Greer, including by Bryan Wharton, Lord Snowdon and Polly Borland, and one painting by Paula Rego. She was selected as an Australian National Living Treasure in 1997, and in 2001 was inducted into the Victorian Honour Roll of Women. In 2011 she was one of four feminist "Australian legends" (along with Eva Cox, Elizabeth Evatt and Anne Summers) represented on Australian postage stamps. In the UK she was voted "Woman of the Year" in 1971, and in 2016 BBC Radio 4's "Woman's Hour" placed her fourth on its annual "Power List" of seven women who had the biggest impact on women's lives over the previous 70 years, alongside (in order) Margaret Thatcher, Helen Brook, Barbara Castle, Jayaben Desai, Bridget Jones, and Beyoncé.