DianaRobert Hughes bashes Australia, Greer
September 20th 2006 11:20
Like I say, Pom stories have been thin on the ground in recent days. Indeed, I was almost forced to make this post exclusively about The Observer picking up on the list of most-hated foreigners as voted on by Australians. Fabio Grosso, the Italian cretin who cheated Lucas Neill out of a penalty to knock Australia out of the World Cup, came top. Apparently one Italian paper said ‘It shows how much we hurt them’. I, for one, am looking forward to the next Wallabies-Italy match. Spill some blood, boys. The only other thing I came across was this review of Bernard Fanning’s new album by some dashing and insightful young man.
But this was before I came across a very juicy article in the Sunday Times. Robert Hughes, ‘Australia’s most opinionated aesthete’, writes an article about how much he hates the avant-garde, and next to it is a mini-portrait of Hughes by another journalist. It’s full of interesting things. He’s such an odd figure. Calling an Indian prosecutor at his trial for dangerous driving (the crash in 1999 that nearly killed him and leaves him in constant pain and with a limp to this day) is not going to endear him to the world, neither is calling the occupants of the car that he hit ‘lowlife scum’.
The crux of the article is about Hughes’ relationship with his homeland: ‘it seems odd that so distinguished an Australian intellectual, so admired by much of the English speaking world, should be regarded with such reserve by his countrymen.’ One Sydney columnist said ‘he thinks we are an uncultured and ungrateful bunch of yobs’ to which Hughes responds with ‘bullshit’, and says that the Oz Media has lumped himself, Clive James, Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer into a ‘cabal whose purpose is to denigrate Australia and piss on its fair name. Its total rubbish’.
He is angry bastard, but when it comes to Greer, he espouses opinions that are hard not to love: ‘Germaine I basically can’t stand. Oh, she’s never done me any harm, but her pretensions to being the grande dame of Aboriginehood and all that stuff are ludicrous’. I know exactly what he means. And of Greer’s attack on Steve Irwin in the wake of his death (see previous post): ‘I certainly didn’t know he was regarded as this Australian hero…then Germaine weighs in with all this stuff about the torturer of reptiles and a disturber of the natural order, and I mean, for Christ’s sake, who gives a flying fuck about that?’
Outspoken, angry, foulmouthed. As much as he’d like to, he just can’t purge himself of his Australianness.
But this was before I came across a very juicy article in the Sunday Times. Robert Hughes, ‘Australia’s most opinionated aesthete’, writes an article about how much he hates the avant-garde, and next to it is a mini-portrait of Hughes by another journalist. It’s full of interesting things. He’s such an odd figure. Calling an Indian prosecutor at his trial for dangerous driving (the crash in 1999 that nearly killed him and leaves him in constant pain and with a limp to this day) is not going to endear him to the world, neither is calling the occupants of the car that he hit ‘lowlife scum’.
The crux of the article is about Hughes’ relationship with his homeland: ‘it seems odd that so distinguished an Australian intellectual, so admired by much of the English speaking world, should be regarded with such reserve by his countrymen.’ One Sydney columnist said ‘he thinks we are an uncultured and ungrateful bunch of yobs’ to which Hughes responds with ‘bullshit’, and says that the Oz Media has lumped himself, Clive James, Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer into a ‘cabal whose purpose is to denigrate Australia and piss on its fair name. Its total rubbish’.
He is angry bastard, but when it comes to Greer, he espouses opinions that are hard not to love: ‘Germaine I basically can’t stand. Oh, she’s never done me any harm, but her pretensions to being the grande dame of Aboriginehood and all that stuff are ludicrous’. I know exactly what he means. And of Greer’s attack on Steve Irwin in the wake of his death (see previous post): ‘I certainly didn’t know he was regarded as this Australian hero…then Germaine weighs in with all this stuff about the torturer of reptiles and a disturber of the natural order, and I mean, for Christ’s sake, who gives a flying fuck about that?’
Outspoken, angry, foulmouthed. As much as he’d like to, he just can’t purge himself of his Australianness.
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