The Best Australian Essays 2015

by Geordie Williamson

  Another boy climbed into my bed while I was staying in a house in the country. I had never seen him before and never saw him again. I didn’t say no, but I didn’t want him to fuck me. There were other people in the room and I felt humiliated. I didn’t know how to say: Don’t fuck me. I felt … obliged. He was a man, and I wasn’t. There were a lot of men who fucked me because I felt … obliged.

  One man would have raped me because I went with him alone to his house, ahead of some friends. He chased me around the room. I kept the table between us, talking as fast as I could. This man was violent. He said I must have wanted it because I had come to the house alone with a man. The only reason I wasn’t raped was because my friends turned up in time.

  There have been men who raped me because I was drunk and couldn’t refuse consent. I didn’t know it was rape. I didn’t care. Sometimes I asked men to have sex with me. Men thought that because I liked sex, I was a whore. They thought that because I liked sex, they could have sex with me whenever they liked. Whether I wanted it or not was irrelevant. They could have sex whenever they liked and it made them more manly. But if I had sex whenever I liked, I was despicable.

  It’s very common. It happens to millions of women. It’s hard to talk about because you feel culpable. It must have been your fault – you are the slut those men said you were. Or you feel the shame of being made a victim. I never wanted to be made a victim. I am a victim. I am not a victim.

  It took me a long time to work out that I had agency in relation to men. I was raised to please a man. My mother told me I should take care never to appear more intelligent than a man. Men don’t like intelligent women, my mother said. Why aren’t you more feminine? she said. Never undermine a man’s authority, she said.

  My mother left my father. I remember the night she stabbed him. I remember her crying and crying, shouting at my father. You raped me, you bastard. You raped me.

  I rebelled against being feminine. Until I had kids, I refused to cook for any reason. I never wanted to be married. Sometimes I had nightmares that I was going to be married, that I would live forever in an ugly brick house with a chain link fence and no gate.

  I didn’t see why I should be a second-class citizen just because I was a woman. It took me a long time to work out that I was a second-class citizen all along.

  I worked as a professional journalist. I saw that if I wanted to be considered an equal, I had to be three times as good as any man. I had to work three times as hard. I had to be six times as placatory, in case I undermined the authority of a man.

  I began to understand how women’s writing is read as inferior; no matter what kind of writing it is, it will always be ‘women’s writing’. Women have specialness. Their specialness is that they exist only in relation to men, and anything that can’t be related to men is aberrant.

  I look at the history of women made invisible and sometimes I despair.

  In my mid-twenties I had babies. Being a mother meant I was stripped of the illusion of fraternity I was allowed because I was something that somebody could fuck. I began to understand that these things were part of a larger, structural pattern. I began to understand the emotional wasteland that was the damage at the centre of my being.

  I always had men who were friends, and who did not abuse that friendship. I like men. But not all men.

  It took me a long time to work it out.

  My kids worked it out quicker than I did. I’ve done something right. But they still have to live in this world where, all the time, men hurt women, dismiss women, marginalise women, silence women, kill women.

  Not long ago I was on a panel with a man who had written a book about criticism as a public act. In this book are six essays about six critics, from the eighteenth century to the present day. They’re all men. As I read this book I felt again, like a thick choking cloud, the privilege of the literary man. It’s the privilege of not even having to think about writing a survey about the critic as a public figure in which not one woman appears. It was reviewed under a headline that said: ‘The critics that really matter.’

  This man was taken aback when he was challenged on this point. He is a pleasant and intelligent man. He had perfectly justifiable reasons for only writing about men. The whole of literary history supports this privilege. It is invisible, like God. It proves itself, like God. It is the innate merit of men. Why should he ignore the merit of men for some footling political point about feminism? You could see, even as he attempted to explain himself, that he thought that he had nothing to apologise for.

  Overland

  Malcolm Fraser: Obituary

  Mungo MacCallum

  Twenty years after he lost power in the federal election of 1983, Malcolm Fraser was asked by a young interviewer how he thought history would remember his time in government. The ageing but still impressive figure drew himself to his full height. ‘Well,’ he said, with more than a touch of his old arrogance, ‘a great deal better than the Liberal Party does.’

  It was a telling riposte. In 2003 the Liberals – turned neoconservative under Fraser’s one-time protégé John Howard – regarded the Fraser years as at best wasted and at worst something close to treason to the party.

  The belief in treachery was compounded by Fraser’s frequent attacks on Howard’s policies, particularly his treatment of refugees and his involvement in the war on Iraq. And unforgivably, Fraser frequently made common cause with his old antagonist Gough Whitlam against the Coalition.

  Many Liberals would have liked to write him out of their history altogether. Since this was impossible, they took every opportunity to denigrate him in his absence and snub him if he chanced to cross their paths. Of the ten leaders of the modern Liberal Party, perhaps only the ludicrous Billy McMahon and the ephemeral John Hewson (another critic of Howard) were held in less regard. Even his great enemy John Gorton, long derided as a figure of fun, had been restored to the Liberal pantheon from which Fraser was now exiled.

  And yet, while the party which had once hailed him as its saviour now ostracised him, his standing with the general public had never been higher.

  Since leaving parliament, the aloof Western districts squatter had remade himself as a classic small-l liberal: a humanitarian, a zealous opponent of economic rationalism, a vigorous and emotional champion of the underdog, a harsh critic of mandatory detention and a loud voice to call out racism where he saw it.

  His efforts on behalf of international aid through Care Australia – an organisation for which his daughter Phoebe also worked – had earned him the respect and admiration of those who had previously seen him as the personification of uncaring haughtiness, a façade which was compared to that of an Easter Island statue.

  It would be too much to say that he had become loved – his prickly personality precluded that kind of intimacy. But even those who had been his most passionate detractors during his time in politics raised no objection when the erstwhile Squire of Nareen was included in a list of Australia’s living treasures.

  On one level it was an extraordinary transformation: the beast had suddenly become a prince among men, without even the intervention of a maiden’s kiss. But a closer look at history reveals that there were always two Malcolm Frasers. One was the moody, spoiled rich kid with an unquestioning belief in his own righteousness and an unscrupulous determination to put it into practice. But there was another more complex character as well: a lonely and driven individual with an acute sense of social justice which transcended class, creed and most particularly race.

  From time to time the two could co-exist, albeit somewhat uncomfortably. But usually one has been dominant, and the one we saw during Fraser’s spectacular, acrimonious and hugely divisive twenty-seven years in parliament was almost invariably the first.

  John Malcolm Fraser was elected to the division of Wannon as the youngest member of the House of representatives in 1956, at the election following the Labor split, which bequeathed Robert Menzies another ten years of government before thi
ngs started to fall apart after his eventual retirement.

  After a privileged but isolated childhood on the family property, Fraser was educated at Melbourne Grammar, one of Australia’s most expensive and exclusive establishment schools, and then at Magdalene College, Oxford, where one of his tutors remembered him as ‘a colonial drongo’. When he entered parliament at the age of twenty-six, he had never had a job.

  Even within the Liberals, then a much more class-based party than they are now, this was not a promising start, and Robert Menzies left the impatient young neophyte on the backbench until his retirement in 1966. Fraser spent his time cultivating those who might prove useful to him, especially fellow social conservatives within the Country Party; it was in this period that he became close to Doug Anthony, Ian Sinclair and Peter Nixon, the formidable troika who were to become his personal enforcers during his period as prime minister.

  Through his continuing acquaintanceship with B.A. Santamaria, the sinister nemesis of the ALP, he also made useful contacts within the democratic Labor Party, the predominantly roman Catholic rump which had split from the main body and was now dedicated to keeping Labor out of office at all costs. It is interesting that he apparently felt more at ease with the two right-wing fringe groups than he did with his own mainstream Liberals.

  He also developed his own philosophical stand; he became an avid fan of Ayn Rand, the ultra-rightist American, which confirmed his own prejudices against any form of collectivism, especially as practised in the trade union movement. (Interestingly, Rand herself, when asked for her views during a visit to Australia, was unsure of the depth of Fraser’s commitment: ‘I don’t think he’s quite selfish enough,’ she said percipiently.)

  But his attempts to become one of the boys at the members’ bar invariably fell flat; he simply lacked the social touch. His idea of a joke, which was to slip pickled onions into the coat pockets of his fellow drinkers, probably didn’t help either.

  Harold Holt finally plucked Fraser from the backbench and installed him in the army portfolio, which, while in keeping with Fraser’s increasing interest in the defence area, was not nearly senior enough for the ambitious Victorian, who was now worried that generational rivals such as Billy Snedden, Peter Howson and Don Chipp – and even newcomers like Andrew Peacock and Phillip Lynch – might be stealing a march on him.

  As Holt began to falter against the new opposition leader Whitlam in 1967, Fraser repaid his patronage by becoming a leading figure in the conspiracy to have him dumped, preferably in favour of one of Fraser’s few genuine allies in the party, the Senate leader John Gorton. In the normal course of events the plot would probably have come to a head in the first half of 1968; as it happened, Holt was drowned at Cheviot Beach before the conspirators could act, and the battle for succession took over from that for replacement.

  With Holt’s deputy McMahon vetoed by the Country Party, Allen Fairhall out of the race through ill health and Paul Hasluck loftily refusing to campaign on the grounds that his qualities were too obvious to need advertisement, the push for Gorton became irresistible. No one knew all that much about him, but he was a proven performer on the floor of the Senate and had the kind of public appeal that could counter the momentum Whitlam was starting to build. By the time his weaknesses became apparent, it was too late.

  Gorton promptly rewarded his supporters: he gave Fraser his own former ministry of education, and after the 1969 election promoted him to defence. But before long the two men started to fall out. Unlike many of his more straitlaced colleagues, Fraser was not overly concerned about Gorton’s drinking and womanising, but he was worried by his style of one-man-band government. In particular, he didn’t like what he saw as interference in his own portfolio.

  In July 1970 there was a serious clash over whether, and if so how, the Pacific Island regiment should be called out in the event of rioting in Papua New Guinea; it was apparently resolved, but Fraser was to make much of it in his resignation speech nine months later.

  Then some of Fraser’s more ambitious ideas were vetoed by Gorton and McMahon, now minister for foreign affairs. The relationship was now at breaking point; in March 1971 a dispute over plans for civic action in Vietnam provided the trigger. With the enthusiastic aid of the New South Wales press run by McMahon’s patron, Frank Packer, Fraser pulled it.

  His resignation precipitated the downfall of Gorton and the ascension of McMahon, who nonetheless failed to invite the hangman to the victory feast; Fraser remained on the backbench for five months before being restored to his old portfolio of education, which he held until the Coalition finally lost office in 1972.

  In opposition under Snedden, Fraser was given the non-job of primary industry spokesman; his full-time job, however, was to undermine his leader. At his own, expense he engaged a public relations firm to improve his image; it failed to convince most of his colleagues, especially the moderates, now led by Peacock. But with Whitlam as prime minister effortlessly demolishing Snedden in parliament, although his inexperienced government was clearly cracking under both economic and personal stress, Fraser established himself as the tough alternative – the only one who had Whitlam’s measure.

  Fraser pretended to remain detached from the campaign to overthrow Snedden, a sham which fooled no one, but by the start of 1975 a majority of Liberals were desperate enough to overcome their dislike and distrust of him. It had taken nearly twenty years, but he finally assumed the leadership for which he had always believed he was destined.

  The Labor government was by now in such disarray that Fraser could simply have waited for power to fall into his hands at the next election. But once again impatience got the better of him. Having constantly denied any intention to use his numbers in the Senate, acquired through unprecedented breaches of convention by the conservative premiers of New South Wales and Queensland, to block supply, he proceeded to do so after what he described as ‘extraordinary and reprehensible circumstances’. In a similar position in 1974, Whitlam had gone straight to an election; this time he held out.

  Throughout the crisis that followed, Fraser appeared perfectly confident; almost alone among the seething masses in Parliament House he believed Whitlam’s own governor-general, John Kerr, would end the dispute in his favour. Whether this was foreknowledge or simply amazing prescience, 11 November proved him right. Kerr sacked the government and installed him as caretaker prime minister, enabling him to win the subsequent election in a landslide.

  His first biographer, John Edwards, wrote at the time: ‘No Australian prime minister came to power in such extraordinary circumstances, after such a perilous career, with so few friends, so many enemies or so large a majority, as Malcolm Fraser.’ Given this style of ascension, it might have been supposed that Fraser would have unleashed a conservative revolution; indeed, in the wide-ranging speeches he had made the previous year he had given notice of nation-shaking changes, and as leader of the first government in twenty years to have control of both houses, he was in an unrivalled position to bring them about. But to the relief of those already reeling from three years of seismic change, including many in his own party, the Fraser regime was largely uneventful.

  Critics from both sides of politics suggested that, deep down, Fraser himself knew that his grab for power was tainted. But even after he won another thumping majority in 1977, the pace did not quicken. There were desultory attempts to dismantle some of the more radical changes Whitlam had made, although many were left intact; and there were a series of occasionally ugly confrontations with the trade unions, although nothing permanent was achieved.

  On the whole, it was a time of recovery, though definitely not of reconciliation. For nearly half of the population Fraser remained a figure from hell, and few of the rest gave him more than grudging respect.

  And he even managed to alienate his right-wing supporters: to their bewilderment and fury, he supported Aboriginal land rights, took on the racist regimes of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, opened the door to Vietn
amese refugees and forced the Queensland government to end sand mining on Fraser Island, presaging the other Malcolm Fraser who would emerge with retirement.

  He was tough on his ministers, sacking even confidants like Reg Withers, who had delivered to him the numbers in the Senate, for what others saw as trivial offences – perhaps another attempt to establish his political legitimacy. In the end he was reduced to a core of genuine supporters, mainly from the Country Party. Few mourned when the absurdly popular Bob Hawke knocked him off in 1983 and he went on to make a new life.

  He was, of course, famous for saying: ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy.’ He later justified this gloomy conclusion by pointing to the full quotation from Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw: ‘Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.’

  But while there was great excitement and some success in the life of John Malcolm Fraser, it is hard to point to much that was glorious. It is more likely that his secret credo was summed up in an interview at the height of his prime ministership:

  Question: ‘Rightly or wrongly, the “life wasn’t meant to be easy” tag has been attached to you.’

  Answer: ‘Well, it isn’t, is it?’

  Perhaps therein lay the real Malcolm Fraser.

  The Australian

  Staying With the Trouble

  Sophie Cunningham

  Percy Grainger walked to avoid self-flagellation. David Sedaris walked to placate his Fitbit. Virginia Woolf walked the streets of London, and later the South Downs, endlessly: because she loved it, because she was walking her dogs, because she needed to think clearly. For Henry Thoreau, every walk was a sort of ‘crusade’. Sarah Marquis, who walked 16,000 kilometres over three years, sought a return to an essential self. ‘You become what nature needs you to be: this wild thing.’1 Will Self began walking after he gave up heroin, though in his novel Walking to Hollywood (2010) the protagonist walks not to escape addiction but because he fears he has Alzheimer’s. This feels familiar. My brother jokes about starting a group called Running Away from Dementia. Sometimes, catching sight of my reflected posture on a walk, I wonder if I am doing the same thing, walking away from fate. If so, could one ever walk fast enough?