Muriel Gray on reaction to the death of Steve Irwin

In terms of the prolific posthumous commentating that goes on when a public figure has died, it has always struck me as exceedingly mean, not to mention pointless, to speak ill of people. It goes without saying that the exception to this is when the deceased is a public figure through notoriety rather than popularity. It would hardly be sensible, for instance, to discuss the death of Adolf Hitler by mentioning only his oratorical skills and how punctual he was. But the peculiar fashion that newspaper editors have for digging around to find a writer who has another "angle" on some unfortunate, dead celebrity is growing increasingly unpleasant.

The sudden and tragic death of the entertaining Australian wildlife presenter Steve Irwin illustrates this in casebook fashion. While fans across the globe, largely children, reacted to the news of his bizarre death by way of a stingray's barb by pouring out their distress, someone at The Guardian was on the phone trying to find writers who might have something else to say other than what a nice man he was and how many people would miss his endearing programmes. They didn't have to go very far to find fellow Australian Germaine Greer, who sneered her way through a thousand words of schadenfreude that can be loosely summarised as "serves the clichd little show-off right".

According to Greer, the animal kingdom got its own back on him for manhandling snakes and wrestling crocodiles, and that all he really leaves behind is a generation of children rendered ignorant about the sensitivity of animals because of Irwin's undignified and exploitative example.

Normally Greer's deliberate literary provocations entertain me, but for some reason this one got under my skin. The unpleasantness of the article needs no detailed rebuffing, since this was done quite adequately by many outraged Guardian readers in the letters page, but my peculiarly personal response, to a woman I've only met half a dozen times being nasty about the death of a man I have never met at all, surprised me.

Confusing me further was my lack of outrage on receipt of an outrageously sick e-mail gag that circulated almost immediately after Irwin's death, which many of you also doubtless found in your inbox, mocking up a BBC news programme featuring the stingray in custody and on suicide watch. Sick and black it is indeed, but if you've seen it you'd be hard pressed not to admit that it's very funny. Why was this not offensive, yet Greer's piece was? It distils down to the plain fact that a person taking satisfaction in another's demise or distress is always repugnant. The Sun newspaper is usually the acknowledged master of this. Its infamous "Gotcha!" headline cheerfully and triumphantly referred to the sinking of the Argentinian warship Belgrano, when 16-year-old conscripts died screaming in flaming oil. And only last week, the presumable inspiration for the stingray e-mail - Soham murderer Ian Huntley's failed attempt to take his own life - was headlined "Better luck next time".

We expect this kind of nauseating, barbaric gloating from the trolls at The Sun, but it was a shock to read something not altogether dissimilar from a woman as intelligent as Ms Greer. It's understandable to be repelled by outpourings of mass hysteria and sentimentality, as in the death of Princess Diana, but the grievance in that instance lay not with the dead woman but with the Mills & Boon reportage and the downright silliness of some of the "bereaved" outside Kensington palace. That hideous pantomime was fair game for commentators' scorn, but gloating on the irony that a rich woman whose only real job was being in the papers as often as possible had died after driving away from paparazzi, and that hence, thus and therefore she blooming well had it coming to her, would not have been acceptable at all. Indeed, one imagines that any writer who might have suggested such a thing in gleeful tones would have swiftly been pinned to the office wall with the stapler.

I bring this up because I recall Greer writing critically at the time about the hysteria surrounding Diana's death, but being careful to ring-fence her respect for the dead mother of two boys lying broken in the crashed car.

So why does Greer think that Irwin's death is different from Diana's, and that unlike her, his untimely death presents a perfect opportunity to sabotage his motives and his integrity? After all, just like the princess, the core of the issue is that here is a young man tragically leaving behind two small children who will miss out on their father's love.

The only obvious answer must lie in Greer's cultural vanity. She thinks of herself as a naturalist and an environmentalist, as she often talks of her bit of Queensland rainforest, and, of course, as an Australian intellectual. The fact that Irwin was perceived by children as Australia's most famous environmentalist, and by the rest of the world as the hilarious, life-affirming, unashamedly non-intellectual Australian stereotype that it's impossible not to adore, has obviously rankled deep with her. It's truly ghastly when someone you admire - and I have long admired Germaine Greer - displays such spiteful behaviour, but all the more horrid that she chose such an unlikely subject for her target.

Perhaps I'm being over-sensitive, since Steve Irwin's family will never bother to read Greer's attack, and children all over the world, exactly like my own, care little what a feminist intellectual thinks of the over-enthusiastic, cheery man who was never afraid of snakes.

But just like an incident a few weeks ago, when I so very nearly hit a total stranger in a bookshop who was making fun of darling Tom Weir's death, you can never predict when your defence against bitter-spirited people will crumble. Mine is now safely back in place, but how curious that it took the death of a crocodile wrestler to make me reassess the character of one of our finest female authors.