Life’s a beech

Life’s a beech

Germaine Greer’s passion for nature sent her on a relentless quest for a patch of Australia to call her own. Yet she never imagined she’d be seduced by 60 hectares of devastated rainforest. This is her story

Germaine Greer Published: 19 January 2014

Germaine Greer (Lyndon Mechielsen)

This is the story of an extraordinary stroke of luck. You could call it “life-changing”, if only every woman’s life were not an inexorable series of changes to which she has to adapt as well as she can. What happened at Cave Creek, Queensland, in December 2001 is that life grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. I went there as a lamb to the slaughter, without the faintest inkling that my life was about to be taken over by a forest.

Some of my friends tell me now that they saw it coming. Had I not quit London in 1984 and removed to rural Essex? Was not the first thing I did there to plant a wood? Was I not prouder of my English wood than anything else I had ever done? They may not have been surprised when I bought land at Cave Creek, but I was.