‘Steve is twice the Aussie icon you will ever be’: Germaine Greer, the Crocodile Hunter’s death, and nationalistic misogyny

Abstract

In September 2006, Australia’s most iconic feminist, Germaine Greer, wrote a controversial article in response to the death of celebrity wildlife presenter Steve Irwin. In the Guardian piece, entitled ‘That sort of self-delusion is what it takes to be a real Aussie larrikin’, Greer concluded, ‘The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin’. For hundreds of Australian readers, Greer’s public response to the untimely demise of a purported national ‘hero’ represented a symbolic assault not just on the ’Crocodile Hunter’s’ grieving family but on the nation itself. Following the article’s appearance, Greer’s agents – Gillon Aitken Associates, based in the United Kingdom – received copious amounts of hate mail directed towards the controversial celebrity feminist; these emails are contained in the recently acquired Greer archive at the University of Melbourne and provide important insights into affective responses to this polarising figure. Tightly policing the boundaries of what constitutes ‘Australian-ness’ as well as mobilising problematic assumptions about the correct way of publicly doing femininity, these emails call into question Greer’s authority to speak publicly not just about this matter but about any issue at all. In so doing, these emails – which include threats of violence – work to contest the ‘newness’ of the vitriolic, misogynistic hate speech commonly directed towards vocal women in the contemporary mediasphere (especially via platforms such as Twitter). Against the representation of Irwin as model Australian, Greer is dismissed not just as a ‘bad’ woman but as a ‘bad’ citizen. Accordingly, this article considers both the kind of ‘Greer’ and the kind of ‘Irwin’ being discursively constructed in these emails, and how the mutually constitutive discourses of misogyny and nationalism were deployed in these attempts to marginalise and silence Greer and to mourn and celebrate Irwin.