“The essence of pleasure is spontaneity”

Germaine Greer needs no advertisement. Writer, commentator and public intellectual, Greer has something to say on everything from race relations to animal testing, from Shakespeare to Spray ‘n’ Wipe. She has become something of a staple on Australian stages and screens of late, appearing on ABC TV’s Q&A, headlining of the F-Word Feminist Forum in Sydney in March earlier this year, and visiting our friends over at the Perth Writers Festival in February. This August, she’s coming to the Melbourne Writers Festival to talk about, among other things, the Australian language, and what our speech tells us about our place in the world.

Something of a Melbourne Writers Festival veteran, this is Greer’s third stint on our festival’s stages. She’s given the opening keynote twice before, and – yes, it bears repeating, and I will keep repeating it because this is actually important – she is the only woman to have done so. She’s a force to be reckoned with, no doubt, although despite her habit of being almost reflexively contrarian, I would like to think even one of the most strident and forthright feminists of the twentieth century would see something problematic about her being the only woman to have stood in this particular spotlight. Then again, Greer has been known to surprise us before. Indeed, part of what makes her so fascinating is her willingness to say the ‘dangerous’ thing, no matter what that dangerous thing might be. The result is that it’s very difficult to get a handle on her actual agenda, but it’s also part of her continued appeal. One is never quite sure what she’s going to say next, the only constant being that there is no constant, and thus she holds our curiosity.

Perhaps her unpredictability is part of the reason there are just as many people who find her frustrating as there are those who love her, and in many ways the vitriol directed towards her is just as interesting as her own work. Still, she isn’t afraid to take a dig at revered institutions, she is relentless in an argument and she has an undeniably entertaining habit of dropping caustic one liners that burn into the brain of target and audience alike. Louis Nowra’s infamous ‘demented grandmother’ quip pales remarkably against the long line of shut-downs she’s delivered to various opponents over the years, and I look forward to seeing her display that firecracker-wit (although hopefully more in camaraderie than conflict!) in our lovely, wintry city a couple of weeks’ time.

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There are many opportunities to catch Greer at MWF 2012. She is giving the Queen Victoria Women’s Centre Keynote Address on Speaking Australian at the Athenaeum Theatre on Thursday 30 August. She will be In Conversation with the inimitable Benjamin Law on Friday 31 August and a guest on Friday Night Live the same evening. You final chance to see her is the following afternoon, Saturday 1 September, when she’ll be talking about poetry with Martha Nussbaum, Omar Musa, Melissa Cranenburgh, John Wolseley and Ellen Koshland.

Day 1: Get your Morning Fix

Chris Flynn is to be forgiven for his opening gambit. “It’s early for me. Is it early for you?” It is early (10 am), and it’s cold outside – hail was still treacherously lurking in my front yard, waiting to wrongfoot me on my way in to the first day of the Melbourne Writers Festival.

A good crowd is seated in and around the restaurant fixtures of Feddish, which has a view of the the Eiffel-like skirts of the Arts Centre. Some of us are perched on bar stools, and others sit in threes or fours around starched white tablecloths, like we’re in on some secret after-hours event run by the restauranteurs. But we’re not doing anything on the sly – we’re at The Morning Fix, the free event held every morning at Federation Square’s Feddish.  The titular ‘fixes’ are short readings from festival guests. It’s a good way to go if you haven’t yet cracked the voluminous festival program. Just turn up, and you’re guaranteed a mix of authors – international and local, non-fiction and fiction.

Other fixes are available too: “Are we open for coffees?” Chris, the session’s chair, asks Naomi, who works here, ponytailed and ensconced in the horseshoe-shaped bar. She confirms that coffee is on. I’m sitting opposite where the house spirits are lined up – Gordon’s Gin, Johnny Walker Red, Jack Daniel’s. If they’re not open for coffees, I could go a Moscow Mule.

Or perhaps a fifth of Jack’s would be a good companion for the first reader: Joe Bageant, an ‘expert on rednecks’, with a reading from his latest, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. He not only reads his piece, but also sings: ‘Where were you when they nailed him to the boards,’ in a deep rumble that would have no shame in shaking hands with Johnny Cash’s. Bageant’s reading is about ‘being saved’ across the heartland of America. He thinks everything his country does is ‘immoral or downright wicked’ – which you can hear more about at tomorrow’s USA Today session.

From the United States to Australia’s adopted British son, Jon Bauer, with an excerpt from his debut novel Rocks in the Belly. ‘I used to tell people I was a foster child, even though I was the only one who wasn’t fostered.’ He reads from a section where his unnamed narrator is remembering his childhood – particularly a fostered child named Robert, who died. It’s such a harrowing and meditative excerpt that previous listeners have told him they thought the character was in Guantanamo Bay.

Benjamin Law, native of Brisbane, has brought along an entourage – his publicist and his mother, who is a significant presence in his collection of personal essays, The Family Law. ‘I thought I’d bring some brutal warmth into the room,’ he says. I still have my gloves on, so I’m not complaining. He describes weather conditions up north in which you could ‘make pudding in sinks’. His mother is unimpressed with their lack of forbearance. ‘You think this is hot?’ she asks. She grew up in Malaysia, and went to a convent school, where the nuns would wear full habit, ‘their boobs poached in their own sweat like pork fillets’.

I’m not feeling so cold anymore.

Naomi comes out of the kitchen with a wagon wheel-sized plate of cookies. I think Law’s reading has influenced what I see, because at first I think they’re chicken schnitzels. No such luck. I suppose it’s too early for crumbed meat.

The last segment of this literary breakfast is Kim Cheng Boey, who is a Singaporean transplant. Kim travelled from Calcutta to Morocco, and intended to write a travel book. What emerged instead was a collection of essays, Between Stations. Entangled with this writing project were Boey’s attempts to salvage memories of his father, who had passed away. Boey tells movingly of taking his son on walks he used to do with his father: ‘I’ve become my father, and my son is me.’

The Morning Fix is on every day of the festival’s main program. See who will be giving you your your fix here.