Greer was born in Melbourne in 1939 and grew up in Mentone, her father was a newspaper rep’ who served in the wartime Royal Australian Air Force. She went to a private convent school, Star of the Sea College, in Gardenvale. In 1956 Germaine Greer won a teaching scholarship and enrolled at the University of Melbourne. When Germaine Greer graduated from university with a degree in English and French language and literature, she moved to Sydney
While in Sydney she became a part the Sydney Push social milieu and the anarchists Sydney Liberations at its art centre. In 1972 Germaine Greer was identified as an anarchist communist, close to Marxism. In her unauthorised biography, Christine Wallace described Germaine Greer at this time:
“For Germaine, [the Push] provided a philosophy to underpin the attitude and lifestyle she had already acquired in Melbourne. She 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 '. The Push struck her as completely different from the Melbourne intelligentsia she had engaged with in the Drift, 'who always talked about art and truth and beauty and argument ad hominem; instead, these people talked about truth and only truth, 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. ' Her Damascus turned out to be the Royal George, and the Hume Highway was the road linking it. 'I was already an anarchist, ' she says. 'I just didn 't know why I was an anarchist. They put me in touch with
Bibliography: Wallace, C, 1998, Greer: Untamed Shrew, Pan Macmillan Australia Pty, Limited This book was very informative; it provided a great insight onto the life of Germaine Greer. It gave me a lot of my information Stephanie Merritt. Danger Mouth, The Guardian, 5 October 2003 I used this from article to get some opinions from people who were with Greer in her younger years when she was in college. Whitefella Jump Up, page 22 This was one of Greer’s aboriginal issues pamphlets, which gave me some idea about her work with the aboriginal community. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_Greer, Accessed on the 20th of June This website gave me a lot of information, but I did double check it with other websites and resources to make sure that it was reliable.