Backstage, in the Royal Festival Hall's Sunley Pavilion, everyone was talking about Germaine Greer. Not since Gwyneth Paltrow's tears at last year's Academy Awards has the sincerity or otherwise of an emotional response been so hotly debated. It was what everyone was talking about when a group of Australian writers (including Frank Moorhouse and Phillip Knightley) shared supper after Greer had brought the house down earlier in the evening by speaking movingly about the plight of Aborigines. Audience response was overwhelming: thundering applause from the usually undemonstrative Brits. Greer stole the show from fellow speakers Moorhouse and Knightley by highjacking the discussion at a panel called Home and Away, advertised as a discussion on the pros and cons of living abroad. Disarming the audience completely by breaking down in tears, Greer told a spellbound, capacity audience in the Purcell Room that she did not want to die in England, but could not go home until white Australia's relationship to Aboriginal Australia had been 'fixed'.

At the supper following the speech, most of the writers (like most of the audience) thought Greer's public breakdown was moving and sincere but, as with everything Greer does, controversy erupted almost immediately. Several listeners were more cynical and regarded it as a kind of sophisticated publicity stunt. Indeed, one of the organisers of the Aussie Rules: Australian Writing Comes To London weekend (part of Head: Australian Arts 100, a celebration of Australian arts marking the centenary of Australian Federation) who, unsurprisingly, did not want to be named, said she had seen it all before: claimed they had been having a drink with Greer only weeks before, and that she had said that the reason she couldn't return to Australia was that no one had yet offered her a high enough paying job. Apparently she hadn't mentioned Aborigines once. And then Germaine Greer herself walked in. She was wearing an elegant, satiny-grey pants-suit, except that the top was long, almost to her knees, like a kind of sheath. She was all shine and ease, and sat next to Frank Moorhouse who did not look very comfortable. Everyone was trying to listen in to the conversation because Moorhouse had appeared to have been having an unpleasant experience sharing the stage with Greer: at one point he was hissed when he tried to say that some good things were also being done in Australia regarding the Aboriginal question. (Moorhouse told me afterwards that Greer had been very pleasant and they had chatted about inconsequential things, and did not mention her speech at all).

I was busy noticing whether Greer carried a handbag (she has made some pointed comments about women and their silly handbags, referring to them as a sort of external womb). Suddenly, Greer stood to go, and I rushed out after her (I am embarrassed to say that I gushed, telling her that it was a great honor to meet her). ``My dear,'' she said to me kindly, please, there is no need to say that''. I was wondering if she might think I was wearing f--- me shoes, whether my handbag was a mistake (she once famously dismissed a London journalist because of her big hair and slut's shoes). I wanted to ask how she carried her money, or her house keys if she didn't carry a handbag (leaving entirely aside the question of lipstick). But she was already turning away (I guessed she had endured enough from starstruck younger women - the same week a crazed fan had appeared in court charged with breaking into her home, seeking a kind of spiritual adoption). I noticed a young man hovering in the foyer. "Are you right?" she asked him, and was gone. I went back inside to the Sunley Pavilion (a rather grand-sounding name for a plain 1960s room in the Royal Festival Hall's fading concrete). "Who was that?'' I asked Judith Palmer, press relations manager for literature at the South Bank Centre. ``Oh, that's Paul, her chauffeur,'' she replied. It occurred to me that you probably didn't need a handbag if you had a chauffeur, ready with the car. I sat down next to Ruth Borthwick, head of literature at the South Bank, and asked whether she thought the Greer session had gone well.

"We've had several complaints," she replied," that Greer did not address the topic.'' But Borthwick thought the whole thing had gone off rather well, considering. Originally, the Australian expatriate journalist John Pilger had been supposed to take part in the Greer session but a last-minute family emergency back in Australia had prevented him. ANOTHER expatriate publisher, and one-time Booker Prize judge, Carmen Callil, was supposed to chair the session but had also dropped out at the last minute. Borthwick pulled a face: "She was offended because I described her in the program as 'co-founder of Virago Press' instead of 'founder' ... then she told me I wasn't a feminist.''

Besides these minor hiccoughs, the full program ran surprisingly well. Most sessions had capacity audiences, and press and radio coverage in London was thorough. The event featured 22 Australian writers (including Kate Grenville, David Malouf and Peter Carey, who came with his wife, Alison, and nine-year old son, Charlie, from New York to stay with Alison's friend Kathy Lette. Tim Winton travelled from Western Australia with his 10-year-old daughter, Alice). Other Australian writers included Julia Leigh (named by The Observer's Robert McCrum as one of 21 writers to watch in the new millennium) and Elliot Perlman, Age Book of the Year winner for 1998 (who spent much of his time affectionately hectoring South Bank's Sasha Hoare about the dangers of smoking). Two Aboriginal writers, Melissa Lucashenko (whose novel Hard Yards was shortlisted for this year's NSW Premier's Awards) and Alexis Wright (shortlisted for the 1998 Commonwealth Writer's Prize) did not attend the Greer session. (Lucashenko was actually more chuffed at meeting Peter Carey: "I'm still glowing from shaking his hand,'' she said.) Granta has devoted its latest issue to Australia, and hosted a party to kick off the weekend. Filmmaker Jane Campion was there, former Age editor Michael Davie and his wife, biographer Anne Chisholm, as well as various writers who are coming out to this year's Melbourne Writers' Festival (including Zadie Smith and Alain de Botton, who was worrying about Melbourne's notoriously fickle weather and wondering what to wear).

The magazine was stacked high on a central table, and more than one literary type remarked on the usual scarcity of woman writers (although, coincidentally, it also contains more Greer - an essay by writer Georgia Blain on the younger Greer's penchant for disarming serial interviewers by sporting menstrual blood on her clothes. She was the only one, too, who appeared naked for photographer Polly Borland's exhibition, Australians, at the National Portrait Gallery). THE introductory essay by editor Ian Jack also attracted criticism for its failure to include (or address) Aboriginal writing. The Aboriginal writer Melissa Lucashenko made the comment later that ``given the whole week is about the centenary of Australian federation, I think Granta is a great representation of Australia in 1900''. There was much discussion among the writers about chairpersons, and who was and who was not good to share a podium with: everyone agreed that Linda Jaivin, Kathy Lette and Germaine Greer should be avoided wherever possible. "When I did a reading with Linda Jaivin,'' said Alexis Wright, laughing, "she had these stockings with the word 'slut' written all over them and she kind of brought her leg up to the microphone to show everyone." Since I was sharing a podium with Kathy Lette the following day it was not good news to hear she was capable of the same thing (the only reason we were sharing a stage was that we both have books in which motherhood features, but there the comparison ends - Lette's is a comic novel, and mine is a sometimes gruelling memoir about the physical and emotional consequences of birth).

True to form, Lette appeared at the Royal Festival Hall's Voice Box in nine-inch stillettos and a witty outfit featuring a dressmaker's version of a dress before it's a dress (it had cutter's pencil marks on it). At the panel discussion following our respective readings, chair Joan Smith asked us a question about motherhood, work and housework. Lette is married to human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robinson, and admitted that sometimes when she asked him for domestic help he would lay the back of his hand to his brow, pleading that he was working on a case featuring 20 people in Chile on death row. "Listen, I'll go over there and kill them myself,'' she confessed she had replied. After that, I knew talking seriously about being a writer and a mother was useless. By then, Lette was confiding to the audience ("Don't tell Geoff I told you, will you?") that the only way she could get him to do housework was by offering him blowjobs. And she had some advice for me, too: I had just told the audience that everyone in London who talked to me about my book, ended up muttering, "Very brave, very brave". I said I took this to mean that I had done something shameful in revealing my private life. "Oh, the English,'' said Lette, "Let me translate. They kept saying to me when I first came, 'Oh, you're so refreshing!' Actually, it means they hate you!'' I can only say I am glad she was not Germaine Greer.

Susan's participation was sponsored by her British publisher, Aurum Press, and the Adelaide Festival Corporation. The Age 15-7-2000.