KEY POINTS:
No one could accuse Germaine Greer of growing old gracefully.
Now 64, the angular Aussie entered the feminist pantheon in 1970 with the publication of The Female Eunuch. Even in her women's lib heyday she refused to be pigeon-holed, posing nude for an erotic magazine and extolling the
virtues of rough trade liaisons with strapping working-class dimwits.
In later life this contrariness has been yoked to a compulsive desire to outrage, simultaneously if possible, low-brow sentimentalists and the liberal intelligentsia.
She got her compatriots in a froth by saying of Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin's death that "the animal world has finally taken its revenge", and offended right-thinking people everywhere by putting on record her drooling appreciation of pictures of semi-naked boys.
Her status as the wicked witch of Anglo-Australian letters was confirmed by her recent essay marking the impending 10th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in which she labels the Queen of Hearts as, among other things, thick, neurotic, and manipulative.
Much of the criticism which followed was on the well-worn theme that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But how valid is this injunction? What is history, in the academic sense, if not the systematic trashing of the reputations of people no longer around to give their side of the story?
And if we're so offended by uncharitable portrayals of dead people, why is the hatchet-job biography of deceased celebrities now a publishing staple?
For that matter one might well ask why the law explicitly condones speaking ill of the dead. The law of defamation holds that our reputations, so precious during our lifetimes, aren't worth one thin dime when we're dead.
If we really believe that one shouldn't speak ill of the dead, surely it should be the other way around.
When one looks a little closer it seems that what we actually believe is that one shouldn't speak ill of glamorous celebrities who die prematurely. Leaving a good-looking corpse is the way to guarantee that the air-brushed PR version of your life and times survives, perhaps as a form of consolation prize.
Consider the cases of Hollywood idols Rudolph Valentino, James Dean, and Rock Hudson. Valentino died of peritonitis, aged 31; Dean died in a car crash, aged 24; Hudson shrivelled up and died of Aids, aged 60.
All three were homosexual yet Valentino, the great screen lover, remains an icon of heterosexual romance, and Dean is the eternal rebel without a cause, the personification of edgy cool.
Hudson, however, is remembered as proof of what had long been suspected: that in Hollywood the make-believe continues long after the final credits have rolled.
Sydney's Daily Telegraph sneered that Greer now makes a living "penning spiteful eulogies from her grab-bag of invective" but surely the first consideration should be whether or not what she wrote is true.
To say the animal world took revenge on the Crocodile Hunter may be melodramatic, not to mention far-fetched, but this - "There was no habitat, no matter how fragile or finely balanced, that Irwin hesitated to barge into, trumpeting his wonder and amazement to the skies" - strikes me as pretty much hitting the nail on the head.
If Greer's claim that Diana's siblings nicknamed her Brian after "the dopey snail on The Magic Roundabout" is an invention or an unsubstantiated rumour recycled then she would be guilty of malicious deceit, but in all the furious condemnation I haven't heard anyone assert that it's simply not true.
None of which is to deny that Diana and Irwin didn't have a wide appeal or to suggest that they weren't fundamentally decent human beings.
But why should their memories be sacred, given what is self-evident as a result of their obsessive pursuit of celebrity and the rewards thereof? Irwin's look-at-me larrikinism was a commercial winner but I suspect nauseated as many viewers as it beguiled.
Nor is it being excessively cynical to raise an eyebrow at the environmental credentials of a TV personality who made a fortune out of grappling creatures that didn't appear to have much choice in the matter.
Diana was a luminous presence who radiated empathy for the suffering and the deprived, but not even the most starry-eyed devotee could deny that her love-life was an undignified shambles marked by a taste in men that would cause the merriest of widows to blush.
If it's any consolation to Greer's critics, they can rest assured someone will be preparing to give her the same cold-eyed treatment even before her ashes have ceased to glow. And let me tell you: she won't feel a thing.
