Author's note

The Germaine Greer Archive is a puzzle made up of tens of thousands of pieces stored in about 500 boxes. For the past two years, I’ve been working with a team of archivists at University of Melbourne Archives to put the puzzle pieces together. We’re nearly done. But even now, we’re still being surprised by what these records reveal.

Last month, I read a letter Greer wrote to a fellow academic in 1985, in between trips to Ethiopia. In the letter, Greer says she is broke. I suddenly realised how hard Greer has struggled to make a living as a self-employed writer of journalism, academic articles, speeches, books and scripts. She had tenure at Warwick University from 1967-1973, a few more years at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma (1979-83) and was at Warwick again from 1998 until 2003 but mostly she’s had to do without the security of holiday pay or super. There’s been no wealthy partner or family either. Two of her three trips to Ethiopia were self-funded.

Greer was deeply affected by what she saw there and between 1985 and 2010, she wrote dozens of pieces of journalism about it. Records relating to Greer’s work in Ethiopia infect every corner of the archive; the famine was an experience that refused to be classified. A little bundle of negatives in the archive, unprocessed and unpublished until now, reveal how committed Greer was to documenting the famine through Ethiopian eyes. Greer’s brilliant photographs invite us to witness the famine too. These archival records are a plea for social justice.

Rachel Buchanan

Curator, Germaine Greer Archive, University of Melbourne Archives

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Happy Christmas Ethiopia: this photo was part of a Christmas card sent to Germaine Greer from the Diverse Productions film crew who worked with Greer on her 1985 documentary Diverse Reports: Ethiopia. Photograph: Colin Skinner, reproduced with permission. University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0054.00156. Copyright: Colin Skinner.

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