Germaine Greer

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty eight, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a writer and an academic. Nearly twenty years ago she published a book in which she argued that women were repressed and reduced to stereotypes of male fantasy.

Presenter0:42

More recently she wrote another book in which some detected a mellowing of her views but she denies that her opinions have changed, and whichever side you take, she remains unarguably feminism's most assured apostle. She is, of course,

Presenter0:59

Germaine, feminism scares most men to death. Do you find men are terrified of you?

Presenter1:04

No, not at all. I find mostly they ignore me without very much difficulty. And they also patronise me, which amazes me still. I still can't get used to it. In what way? Well, this thing of assuming that um you're in you asking them for something, or or, for example, you can't change a tyre.

Presenter1:23

I change a tyre because I have a house in the country in Italy where we do a tyre a week. I can change a tyre in about four minutes flat. But men are always elbowing you out of the way and then taking twenty minutes, which is so irritating. What about women? How when you've introduced a sort of a strange woman at a party, how does uh she ac accept you or not? Well, it depends whether she's younger than me, older than me, uh whether she feels uh that she is more feminist than I am. There are many, many women in England who would consider themselves to be a lot more feminist than I am, even though they're married, I mean which I regard as a fairly non-feminist posture.

Presenter1:55

I don't think there's a stereotype reaction to me. Sometimes I'm aware when I go to dinner parties that people have made up a speech just for me, and they've been rehearsing it for years.

Germaine Greer2:03

Then being ready.

Presenter2:05

And that generally I've heard it many, many times before. An attacking speech. Oh, well, yes, s well, reductive speech or things like um

Presenter2:14

I consider myself to be a perfect feminist, this from men. Oh, and of course I've had twenty years to rehearse my answer. And what do you say?

Presenter2:22

Well, when they say things like, Do you know how much alimony I have to pay my ex-wife and how hard I have to work to run two families and so on, I generally say something like, Well, you know, it's it wasn't meant to be that way and the money doesn't make her suffering any better and you've got a chance to start again and she hasn't and all that kind of thing. But it doesn't matter really. I've searched for the perfect squelch for these argumentative men and I have never found it, I must say,'cause I think I've delivered it and they won't lie down.

Presenter2:49

But are they not then surprised to find that you're a perfectly warm human being who laughs and bleeds and cries like the rest of us?

Presenter2:57

Well, they don't always discover that, of course. They can be shown a fairly thorny exterior. They can also be shown THE door, it has been known.

Presenter3:05

I'm not always a pussycat. Well, you're going to get rid of them all,'cause we're gonna cast you away. What are you going to do with yourself all day on the island?

Presenter3:14

I imagine I'll be working terribly hard. I mean, first of all, it's quite hard to survive in those conditions, and you have to study what's edible, what's not edible, what grows beneath the tide line, what grows above it, and so on. I had a very good training for it.

Presenter3:27

because I was a very bored small child who was forced because my mother was very intent on getting a tan.

Presenter3:33

I was forced to spend long hours I mean eight or nine hours at a stretch on the beach. Let's have your first record.

Presenter3:40

Well, I've chosen a record which I think is typical of the sort of music I sang as a child.

Presenter3:47

Because we were very lucky at my convent school we sang some of the most wonderful music ever written, and we had no idea, of course, we just thought it was a chore.

Presenter3:54

but it was a chore that I particularly liked.

Presenter3:56

and so I've chosen Popolemais quid fecci tibi by Thomas Luis de Victoria.

Presenter4:02

Because it's my kind of anthem. It's actually about the sufferings of human beings rather than the sufferings of God about whom I've never been able to care very much.

Speaker 14:09

I've been able to kill.

Presenter4:33

I'll take one.

Germaine Greer4:35

Oh Christmas day.

Germaine Greer4:42

Praise God.

Speaker 35:00

There was

Presenter5:12

Populae meos quid feci tibi, by Thomas Luista Vittoria, sung by the choir of the Priory Church of Saint Bartholomew's the Great, Smithfield, directed by Andrew Morris.

Presenter5:23

Now, Germaine, gardening is one of your great loves, isn't it? What sort of gardener are you? Are you a serried ranks lady or a wild weed woman? Well, I do, in fact, um use bedding plants, which is something one's often expected to be ashamed of.

Presenter5:38

But I've discovered that some things, for example, if you plant out a a packet of lobelias.

Presenter5:44

You can then produce this extraordinary backdrop for things, which is just a like a pale blue curtain, and all the other plants grow above it.

Presenter5:51

and I've just planted out several hundred forget me nots, because I just love the idea of that early spring.

Presenter5:58

Blue appearing. Are you creative indoors as well? Do you make beautiful flower arrangements, or do you hang great bunches of lavender from the kitchen ceiling? Well, I do arrange the flowers. We have we grow a lot of flowers in the vegetable garden.

Presenter6:10

Because uh I wouldn't have them in the garden, but I will have them in the house. And then I have to think of ways of using them and putting together things. So I become a flower arranger by default. And are you a cook? Are you a good cook?

Presenter6:22

I'm

Presenter6:23

I'm getting better.

Presenter6:24

all the time. I used to be a a coarse cook of of lavish dishes of game and jugged hairs and things of that sort.

Presenter6:32

But with the onset of menopause I've become vegetarian. It's nothing to do with animals being hurt by my ministrations, it's to do with me being hurt by eating animals.

Presenter6:41

And so we now have extraordinary vegetarian food at home.

Presenter6:46

It sounds as if you have all all the um the housewifely, if I can use that word to you, credentials, but um not the husband. Not the husband. No, I don't I'd quite like a husband, but I only want one sort of intermittently. I'd like someone who's rather good with the books and who could tell me w how to spend my money. You had one once.

Presenter7:04

For a minute, yes. Three weeks. Yes, but it wasn't really even three weeks. It was three weekends, and they were spent mostly fighting. He then went on and and married Maya Angelou and stayed put for seven years. She's obviously a much more stronger and more worthwhile person than I am. I just ran away, I'm afraid. We shall pause and have your second record.

Presenter7:23

Well, now my second record

Presenter7:25

It will be a blast from the past for me because it's Russell Oberlin singing the prologue to The Play of Noah.

Presenter7:32

in which I played the bass recorder and the triangle.

Presenter7:36

In nineteen sixty two, I think, in a performance in the crypt of St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney. In those days I sang five nights a week, in generally in churches and church choirs and magical choirs and things like that. And that was one of the happiest times of my life. And the thing I love about this voice is we later sang with Alfredella, and I believe that most countertenors are in fact singing falsetto, but Russell Obelin is the real Lusus Naturae, he is a real countertenor.

Presenter8:06

Yeah.

Speaker 38:06

Yeah.

Presenter8:07

Two.

Speaker 38:19

How do you do?

Speaker 38:27

Sequias priveno portu eras or vele dinico multicom.

Germaine Greer8:35

Uh

Speaker 38:35

Uh

Presenter8:42

The world is the same.

Speaker 38:49

The potter bands and the buttons of the ticketing older chopped.

Presenter9:07

Russell Oberlin singing the prologue to the play of Daniel with the New York Pro Musica directed by Noah Greenberg.

Presenter9:15

You were born then, Germaine, in in Melbourne, Australia, nearly half a century ago. What did your parents do?

Presenter9:22

My mother got a tan, mostly full time. My father sold advertising space, which has always struck me as quite the most meretritious occupation any human being could ever have.

Presenter9:32

I feel more merciful about it than I did when I was a kid. I remember going to see um Death of a Salesman and crying my eyes out because it seemed to me that Willie Lohman was my father. And was it a a very happy home? Was there lots of music going on for what? Nothing, nothing.

Speaker 19:45

Nothing.

Presenter9:49

deprivation. We had no records, no pictures, no good food, no parties, no books, nothing. We had the beach the dread beach. I agree with Larkin, you know, my childhood is a a long remembered boredom.

Presenter10:01

So where did you find it all, at school? From the nans the dippy old nuns.

Presenter10:06

who taught me to be immensely enthusiastic about painting, although they'd never seen any. In the best tradition of convents they they taught art without ever having seen a picture.

Presenter10:17

But the music was different, because we did have that, and we made that, and we made that all the time.

Presenter10:22

And you were determined to go to university and you were determined to leave Australia?

Presenter10:27

And I did both. But leaving Australia took a very long time. It was a tremendous struggle because I had absolutely no money and no prospects.

Presenter10:35

So I had to wait until I won a scholarship.

Presenter10:38

Which I finally did. I won a Commonwealth Scholarship in nineteen sixty four. But why why did you determine at such an early age to leave the place?

Presenter10:46

Because it was so

Presenter10:48

And I just couldn't bear it. I just longed for beauty, actually. The Australian ugliness is pretty pervasive.

Presenter10:56

And now that it's become kind of glossy American ugliness, it it's

Presenter10:59

Superficially more acceptable, but deeply more ugly.

Presenter11:03

Let's have another record.

Presenter11:05

Well, now this record is a piece of pure self indulgence for me. I happen to go soft inside whenever I hear the voice of Placido Domingo, who is a not just a great musician, he has one of the amazing, caressing

Presenter11:17

sensuous voices, totally Latin. And to hear him singing with the voices of of boys, to me the combination is just

Presenter11:27

Everything I've ever dreamt of in the way of lusciousness.

Germaine Greer11:31

All terrible gifts.

Germaine Greer11:41

Oh we women

Germaine Greer11:46

Do it for any other food.

Germaine Greer11:56

Well it

Presenter12:36

Pueri concinite by Johann Ritter von Herbeck, sung by Placido Domingo with the Vienna Boys' Choir.

Presenter12:43

So, Germain, you went off to Melbourne University, and then you ran away on to Sydney. What were you running away from?

Presenter12:50

I was running away to something in that case. I discovered this gang of people in Sydney who called themselves the Liberationists or the Libertarians, Liberationists even.

Presenter13:00

The Sydney Libertarian Push, they're sometimes called.

Presenter13:03

And I wanted to um

Presenter13:05

Learn more about them and more from them, really, because they took a very dim view of what they called ideology.

Presenter13:13

in other words, lying and received ideas and failure to get to the bottom of things.

Presenter13:19

They refused to be careerists, which was a bit unfortunate for me, because my career went through a big old check while I tried to learn to live the way they did, which was entirely by the proceeds of gambling.

Presenter13:31

I wasn't a good enough gambler, I'm afraid. I backed a horse in every race from the major race tracks.

Presenter13:37

for one whole year and broke even and I thought that was the worst paid several thousand hours of work I'd ever done. So you left all that behind and as you were saying earlier, um you came to England, I think nineteen sixty four, you won a scholarship to Cambridge. I resumed my career, yes. I left the man I was living with whom I was, you know, wildly in love with, deliberately sort of took my love for him with both hands and broke it over my knee because I wasn't ever going to get anywhere. I'd still be trying to win a fortune on the horses.

Presenter14:05

and went back to school, and won my scholarship and left the country.

Presenter14:10

And you came to Cambridge and you were in the footlights, weren't you? Yes, I was. What sort of thing did you do?

Presenter14:16

You had to do anything that came along, you know, seeing, dance, jump up and down, dress up, undress and so forth.

Presenter14:22

You in fact ended up doing some television in the late sixties, didn't you, with Kenny Everett?

Presenter14:27

Yes, now that was really strange because I didn't want to do that. I thought I was completely miscast and wrong and shouldn't have done it because

Presenter14:34

I thought it should be somebody with a common touch and a much less complicated head than I've got, with a much more immediate, um, popular appeal. What sort of part was it? What sort of programme?

Presenter14:45

It was the first of the silly programmes as distinct from satirical or smart allegy or anything like that. We were just a lot of silly people doing silly things. And what was good about Nice Time when we did it is that

Presenter14:59

things just happened, and we didn't have to make them happen according to a shooting schedule or script or anything. But then as more money got put into it and more people got involved and we had more writers and researchers, the life went out of it and then we all got very bored.

Presenter15:13

Let's have your fourth record.

Presenter15:15

Now my fourth record relates to a period in my life when I wanted desperately to be Jewish, and looked in the mirror a lot and made Jewish faces, sort of pulled down the sides of my nose and so on.

Presenter15:26

Because I think like lots of children who who were reaching the age of reason in the late forties when we were discovering what had been done to the Jews, there was such a tremendous burden of guilt

Presenter15:37

that the only way to escape it was to become a Jew, and then you'd be join the victims rather than the perpetrators. So I became a Zionist for a while. I'm not a Zionist any more.

Presenter15:48

And one of the things that made a difference to me was uh a song called Chabaita, which means home.

Presenter15:55

Which was sung apparently by the displaced people in the holding camps in Israel.

Presenter16:01

And I remember hearing Shoshana Damari, who's an Israeli singer, sing it when I was sixteen or so, and it's a song that I've sung ever since.

Germaine Greer16:10

Il de fem lonu ham lon foga ha baita.

Germaine Greer16:18

I'm fine.

Presenter16:34

Oh.

Presenter16:37

Shoshana Damari singing Habaita. Now, Germaine, the female eunuch, your bestseller, how how did you come to write it? Was it commission?

Presenter16:46

Yes, it was.

Presenter16:48

Uh that story goes back to my relationship at Cambridge, my friendship at Cambridge with Sonny Mehta, the publisher.

Presenter16:55

who asked me to have lunch with him one day after nice time had come to an end.

Presenter17:01

And I told him in some

Presenter17:04

with some miffedness actually, that my agent then had suggested that I write a book on the failure of women's emancipation, and I'd said to him, I do think that's a bit over the top really, because I don't think women's emancipation has happened, so how can you talk about it being failed?

Presenter17:17

And he said, What do you mean? So I went on and on and beefed and whinged and carried on, and he said, That's the book I won.

Presenter17:24

I'll draw up the contract to day.

Presenter17:26

Can I try and sum it up for the purposes of those who and who you'll argue, of course, with the summary, but here we are. You said that woman had become a a stereotype sex object. She was a eunuch, she was weak and she was passive and she was debased, she was dependent on the male. And you were really calling on women to to throw off the chains of marriage and trust in her true self. Is that fair enough? Because I said do what thou wilt, i. e. want to do what you do, and don't always let things happen to you, which was the role that women were supposed to play.

Presenter18:00

It was taken as meaning that you should go out and and be sexually active, i. e. another duty was imposed upon women.

Presenter18:07

Which was not my idea at all.

Presenter18:09

It was your own personal quest, wasn't it, that you wanted to experience the the total female experience and everything it had to offer? Well, if I'd wanted to do that I should have made sure that I had a child. I didn't do that, so that's one whole angle. Also, I've never worked in a service ind well, I have, I've been a waitress, but I mean I don't know

Presenter18:27

the sheer, dreary slog that most women have.

Presenter18:30

you know, get up, get the house organized, run to work, be terrific at work, run out at lunch time and do the cook do the shopping, finish the day's work, run back home, get the kids organized, get the meal on and so on, and then be the perfect sexual partner with the candles lit.

Presenter18:44

At eight o'clock when he comes in. But this was when you were about twenty-eight or thirty, wrote this. I mean, you might have been going to do all of those things. No, I knew I never would. Did you? I knew I just couldn't do it. Absolutely. I disqualified myself already. I mean, the the street hairdo and the stockbroker were light years away already. What about the other bit of female experience? What about lesbianism?

Presenter19:05

I think any sensible woman would be a lesbian. Women are so easy to love. They're so lovable. The only people who find them difficult to love are men.

Presenter19:13

who never seem to know what's required of them. It's as if we spoke different emotional languages.

Presenter19:18

And I really envy lesbians, but I I'm afraid um I can't get it together. I mean, I've done some of the bits you're supposed to do, I think. I'm not entirely sure what one is supposed to do, but of course it's not a question of gymnastics either.

Presenter19:31

Um but where women have wanted to make love to me and I've submitted to them, I've let it happen and even tried to be resourceful and imaginative and considerate and all of that and

Presenter19:40

Been bored to conniptions the whole time, so it's not for moi. It's not your thing.

Presenter19:46

No, but neither is the other now. I'm very happy to be free of both of it. It took such a lot of time, I seem to remember. I was always so concerned about it and him and how it was working and whether we were doing it the right way and often enough and

Presenter20:00

It's such bliss to suddenly think, oh, goodness, I don't have to do it any more. It hasn't left a gap in my life at all. Has the um.

Presenter20:08

The non-happening of motherhood left a gap in your life.

Presenter20:12

Undoubtedly. But the thing is that I I believe that if you can't reconcile yourself to childlessness, then there's something wrong, and you really not ought not to be able to hold the whole society to ransom to give you the child that you imagined that you want, because the fact is you don't know what a child is, and a child has a right to invent itself.

Presenter20:32

So if you haven't had a child, and if it hasn't been vouchsafed,

Presenter20:36

Then

Presenter20:38

You accept it?

Presenter20:39

Your fifth record, please.

Presenter20:41

Now my fifth record is as abstract as my last record was concrete. I really love

Presenter20:48

the harpsichord music of of Francois Couprin, because it is so extremely cerebral and perfect. And especially when it's played by someone like Gustave Leonard, who doesn't try to make it expressive, who just lets the music build its structure in time.

Presenter22:07

One of François Couprin's Pies de Clavaucin, played by Gustave Leonhardt, that was the one from the fifteenth book, called L'Evapore, the Evaporated One. We have not evaporated, we are here. Germaine, um, some fourteen years later it was said there was a radical shift in your position after writing the female eunuch. You put your hair in a bun and you started saying you were bored with sex, and you um advocated t chastity. But that was not quite accurate, was it? I never advocated chastity, actually. I don't see the point of chastity.

Speaker 122:35

I never advocated to

Presenter22:40

However,

Presenter22:42

I do watch young women trying to find their way through the minefield at the moment, and I s I still wish, as I always wished, I'd go on my knees and pray to Heaven that women would stop being so.

Presenter22:53

vulnerable and so obviously up for grabs, you know.

Presenter22:57

Because women still depend more upon a relationship, to having a relationship than men do. Perhaps that is simply the female role. Perhaps you can't change it. Perhaps you can't do that. But there are other roles. I mean, I think Carmen is a great role model to take. Carmen has men when she wants, and only when she wants. There's that side to it as well, you see. Most

Speaker 123:06

But there are other roles.

Presenter23:16

Most of the sex that women are getting is not sex that they've actually wanted. It's a condition of another situation which they want to maintain.

Presenter23:24

But Carmen gets bored and says no, you know. But you'd have to be quite tough to be like that. You don't want women to be tough, do you? Strong and dignified.

Speaker 123:28

You don't want women to be taught.

Presenter23:33

And dangerous, difficult. Be difficult, exciting, dangerous is what I say to my goddaughters. But those who analyse these things say that that that new woman, um if you like, who's come through the revolution that that that you helped to put in train, new woman has achieved everything that people like you were advocating, but in fact uh she's still not happy because now she has the added tyranny of independence and strength and career.

Presenter24:01

As well as vulnerability and motherhood and marriage. Well, I think we have to get one thing quite clear. There's been no revolution.

Presenter24:07

What actually happened in historical terms was that

Presenter24:11

Most women who went out to work went out to work to service the family debt, and most of them are not doing anything that's worth doing. Most of them are not facing any likelihood of promotion. Most of them are still working in the service industries.

Presenter24:24

I think that um

Presenter24:25

It has now become harder, really harder, because women are now expected to be f active in all these spheres. They're supposed to be superwomen, and they never get any rest, and they're perfectionists the whole time. Women didn't necessarily take in what I was talking about.

Presenter24:44

'Cause I was talking about undoing all that, undoing the tyranny of the house, opening the house out into the community, sharing parenting with other people and so on. I mean, we still talk we render lip service to these ideas. So if there's been no revolution

Presenter25:00

What have you achieved? What's it all been about?

Presenter25:03

Well, I've never said I've achieved anything, because if women have changed their lives, they changed them. I didn't change them. And when women write to me saying you changed my life, I write back immediately saying I did not. And don't force that responsibility on me. If your life was changed, you changed it, not I.

Presenter25:18

And I've never

Presenter25:20

done wanted to do anything except what writers always want to do, which is to raise consciousness, to put ideas forward, to ma to give them a life and let them go and see what people do with them.

Presenter25:31

Let us have your sixth record.

Presenter25:34

Now my sixth record.

Presenter25:37

Is for me one of the valid images of female power. I'm very interested in female power.

Presenter25:42

And Jesse Norman, apart from looking like a wonderful bronze lion,

Presenter25:47

has a voice of the most astonishing power.

Presenter25:52

And I've chosen Beim Schlaffengen by Riha Strauss because

Presenter25:57

It's a song about dying, and I'm very interested in the art of dying well. Anyone who's been to Ethiopia knows that there is something very important about the way you approach your death, and that's what this song is actually about.

Speaker 326:18

Fish watch grammar swamps.

Speaker 126:31

Uh

Speaker 326:45

We are

Presenter26:57

Jesse Norman singing one of Richard Strauss's four last songs Beim Schlafengen

Presenter27:03

Germaine, you will undoubtedly be extremely adept at living the simple, chaste life on this desert island. Will you be able to build something to live in or under? Well, it depends what the island's made of. If it's made of coral, it shouldn't be too difficult. I'll just have to find something to cut the coral with. Will you be desperate to escape?

Presenter27:21

I don't think I would. My notion of utter luxury is to be quite alone.

Presenter27:26

And when you um lie there on the island in your lonely state, dreaming, what will you dream of, do you think? What everybody dreams of.

Presenter27:34

One's childhood and I know I dream a lot about Australia because I do.

Presenter27:39

I think I'd probably dream about my animals. And one always dreams about one's mother.

Presenter27:44

And would you dream about any of your lovers? Would you dream of romantic love? Have you ever been in love in that sense? I don't know the answer to the question, because I've always I've thought I was, and I've certainly been fairly infatuated, demented, obsessed and, you know, hanging by a thread and waiting for the phone to ring and finding every hour a month when the loved one is away. But I've been told by so many people that I don't know what love is about that I'm beginning to think perhaps I don't.

Presenter28:10

Would you like to fall in love again in the way that you just described?

Speaker 128:11

Yeah, you just

Presenter28:14

To do before the curtain falls. I would just like to go completely potty about somebody again.

Presenter28:22

be ni uh and not even have it requite it because it's much more fun.

Presenter28:26

being in love than being beloved. I'm not very good at being beloved, I get terribly impatient with sort of mawkishness and clingingness and jealousy and all of that. But to actually be in that state, that adult state is quite terrific.

Presenter28:38

Let's have another record.

Presenter28:41

When I was in Cuba I discovered that there's a whole other culture on the other side of the world, and there are two singers, called Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanese, who travel all over South America, singing to enormous audiences of kids, to whom they are the new Dylan.

Presenter28:58

And this boiling movement of popular ferment and optimism about the future.

Presenter29:05

is lead from this tiny island of 10 million people who are telling El Continente to go jump in the lake.

Presenter29:11

And uh that's the song that I've chosen.

Speaker 129:14

Holy

Speaker 129:33

Well, sancudirce el continente, tormía, yades verto.

Speaker 129:39

Coming now

Presenter29:42

Pablo Milanes and Silvio Rodriguez singing Vuelve asacur dirce el continente, was that right? Yes, I think so.

Presenter29:51

Germaine, you seem to me to be at least two people. Um certainly the the academic, the intellectual who enjoys nothing better than sitting in a university library researching seventeenth century female poets or whatever. And then, on the other hand, you are this outspoken, sometimes brash person who will turn up on a on a chat show or knock off a quick article for a tabloid newspaper on something topical. I mean, w which which Germaine Grey do you prefer?

Presenter30:18

I don't think about her at all. I think she's a crashing bore. You know that diagram that used to be called Foo, which is just two eyes and a nose over a fence. I mean I see myself like that. But you must know, really, whether you would rather be seen, if you like, as the sage or the clown.

Presenter30:37

I don't see the difference. And that's an important part of being who I am, I suppose. I think folly is a wise state to be in. And I used to say to my students at school, always, at the university, what I'm trying to do is confuse you. When you are confused, you'll have begun to understand. As long as you are not confused, you haven't begun to think. And that's how I think of my mental activity. Let's have your last record.

Presenter31:01

Now my last record is a really bittersweet thing, because when I was in Ethiopia

Presenter31:08

having my life completely changed and my lens completely adjusted. So I now see life in a very different way and take a different yardstick to absolutely everything.

Presenter31:19

which has a good side and a bad side. It fills me with great tenderness for the vulnerability of things, as well as great grief for the massive amounts of human suffering that we really can't even begin to comprehend.

Presenter31:31

This song that I'd chosen was Top of the Pops in Ethiopia when I was travelling around the resettlement areas. So looking at people who'd lost everything, who were dressed in a a rag,

Presenter31:42

who knew that they had to start all over again in a hostile land full of new diseases and new parasites of all kinds. This ridiculously jolly sound would come booming out in the

Presenter31:55

estamine of the of the filthy little towns without sewage.

Presenter31:59

And it means something to me about the indomitability of the human spirit, this and always.

Germaine Greer32:04

Yagalinesha Gayen Yaloka, Yagalineshenga Yen Yadoka, I Shamun Wana Puna Yagalinesha Gayen Yadoka, Yagalinesha Gayen Yaloka, I Shamoon Wanna Puna, Neshamon Wana, I Shamoon Wana, Nashamon Wana, I Shamoon Wana

Germaine Greer32:33

Yeah.

Presenter32:33

An Ethiopian pop song sung by Noe de Bebe. So, Germaine, the moments of choice. First of all, which one of those eight records is the most special for you? I can sing the others.

Presenter32:47

The one I can't sing is Gustave Leonhardt playing the the couprin. And because it's so concentrated, that musical experience, and the actual shape of each note and the positioning of each phrase, that's the one I would have. It would be it would sustain me the longest. And your book, I think you know that you you have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. But I don't have the Oxford English Dictionary, and that's the book that I would take.

Presenter33:13

And your luxury.

Presenter33:17

My big spice box with all my spices in, but you're going to say, No, no, that's too many things. So I shall just have my garam masala.

Presenter33:24

What's that? My hot spices, so that I can vary my diet a trifle on this island and give my shellfish a bit of a tingle from time to time.

Presenter33:34

Joe Maine Grier, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 333:45

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Germaine Greer34:33

Uh