The Best Australian Essays 2015

by Geordie Williamson

  But people, not just my granny, didn’t like my car. In St Kilda a man kept letting the tyres down, while in North Fitzroy, a neighbour tried to get the council to ban me from parking in front of her house. Unfortunately for her, my housemate was a town planner with the same municipality and wrote her a letter outlining that while she may have bought her house, she didn’t own the street. When I went to deliver the letter to the woman, she read it before looking me up and down and saying, ‘You’re rental scum, aren’t you? My husband and I worked hard to buy this house.’ From that evening on, I made a habit of parking in front of her house, as well as popping open the bonnet from time to time with a friend, a couple of bottles of beer open, tinkering an afternoon away. At another share house, someone left a note on my windscreen requesting I move my panel van, again for no good reason, but the handwriting was the exact same illegible cursive scrawl that my granny used to have, and I obeyed immediately.

  I often wonder if these haters would still be of the same opinion if they’d had a chance to experience what I’d experienced in my panel van. Six friends crammed in it at the Coburg Drive-in; parked on a beach in Kangaroo Island; sleeping with a mosquito net thrown over the back; a moody stereo that only played certain AM radio stations; playing Scrabble on a sandy mattress; snuggled on the bench seat next to your lover never feeling the need to get anywhere fast, meaning the panel van had never directly killed an animal (although I’m sure its carbon footprint has). I lost count, but for a while there I took note of the animals I’d stopped for: three wombats, a goanna, five echidnas, a dog, an emu and her three knock-kneed kids, and six kangaroos.

  One summer night in the car park at Half Moon Bay, a boyfriend and I were making out in the back, the swing-out window at the rear propped open with the mosquito net hanging over it. I heard the tiniest crunch of gravel and looked out to see a fox sniffing the flapping white gauze. We’d just had takeaway Hokkein noodles and, with chopsticks, I dangled out some leftover noodles. The fox daintily inspected them, tapping them onto the ground with its paw before eating them. Then it settled back on its paws, its flame of a tail wrapped neat around its front. We propped ourselves up on our elbows and gazed back at the fox before it padded into the night.

  Over time, she rusted. Underneath the pedals I could see the road, water sloshing up and the doors filling with rain, the van swishing like a boat as we turned a corner. My mechanic kept welding metal plates to cover the hole, but eventually no amount of metal plates could cover up the gaping holes that started to appear like a cancer, bits of sky and road flickering through like a super-8 film as we drove. It was my fault. The house paint. Her engine was as strong as it had always been, but the cocoon – it was coming off in flakes. I’d had her for eleven years. I sold her to a parts dealer for 200 bucks. At the car yard, the owner’s black-and-white dog greeted me in the driveway. ‘She just lies in the grease puddles,’ he said when I knelt down to give her a pat, her coat sticky with oil stains. ‘Nothing I can do about it, I’ve given up. Now I just let her mop up.’ I caught the train home with a plastic bag of spare parts I wanted to keep, and the number plates that were so baked and indecipherable that I never had to pay for tolls.

  When I was growing up, my parents had two Leyland P76s – one green and one orange – and I’m pretty sure our childhoods took about three times longer than usual with those long Malibuesque vehicles, especially when they overheated. My parents’ stress levels no doubt lowered when they eventually graduated to a Holden VP Commodore, a generic modern car that drove like a spaceship, but the memories stopped. An A to B car: the road in between was just a means to an end. We no longer had to smell the vegemite factory or the Werribee sewerage farm on our way down the coast; we could just seal ourselves inside, and soon those little markers of our childhood began to recede.

  At home, I tried not to think about my panel van being skinned for parts and crushed into a red rusty cube. I pushed away the image of her being lowered into a tip next to the jagged mouths of empty tins, bedsprings and squalling seagulls. Instead I hit car sales and found a 1982 WB Holden panel van. Light brown, roof racks, ran on gas, and meticulously looked after by an 82-year-old man called Rex in Geelong. You can tell a man by his shed, and Rex’s shed was organised: jam jars filled with screws and labelled; nothing new; his tools thirty-odd years old and in prime condition.

  He didn’t really want to sell the panel van. His children were on his back. They’d convinced him to buy a new ‘safe’ car, so he’d relented and bought one on the cheap after a hailstorm had dappled its body with welts.

  His son, who had dropped in to oversee the transaction, rolled his eyes and muttered to me on the quiet, ‘Such a cheapskate.’

  But Rex was a man after my own heart. He had a caravan in his yard, its curtains drawn to reveal a neat little day bed and laminated card table. ‘They want me to sell this as well,’ Rex said, tossing his head in his son’s direction. ‘But I like to sit in there, just to think.’ His wife had died a year ago. It seemed cruel to be urging him to get rid of the things that were obviously imbued with stories of the life they’d shared. But Rex was now determined to sell his panel van. I bought it without getting a mechanic to check it over – as I said, you can tell a man by his shed. I named the panel van ‘Reginald’ after my grandpa, who was very much like Rex.

  My partner and I also bought a ‘family car’. A baby on the way, we thought it best we grow up, just a little. But a funny thing happened: our baby boy cried in the ‘family car’, his face red and twisted, his screams scratching our insides. One day we took the baby seat out and put it in the panel van, on the bench seat between us, and the crying stopped. When we started Reg, his engine purring and rolling out onto the road, our little boy was happy. He was sitting up front, the two people he loved on either side of him, and the open road was ours again.

  It Happened in a Holden

  L’état, C’est Charlie

  Guy Rundle

  The news started to come through late morning in London, grainy photos of a police car in a street on Twitter. London was an hour behind Paris, but pretty soon the whole of Europe felt like a single town. Then the news came all at once, and the sheer size of the event became clear. The staff of the Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo had been eviscerated in a terrorist raid on their offices in the boho eleventh arrondissement, a couple of police had been killed, and the killers were on the run.

  Garbled reports said the three black-dressed raiders had been speaking Russian. Others said they yelled ‘we have avenged Allah’ in native French as they ran out. News programs did not pass judgement, but no one who knew Hebdo – not many, outside Paris – believed it was anything other than an Islamist attack.

  The satirical magazine was often compared to Private Eye, but that was misleading. Hebdo was more like ‘The Chaser’ at its most outrageous, combining politics with juvenility, in a strategy of outrage. In the ’70s, a lot of that had been directed at the Catholic Church and its last-ditch attempts to maintain a hold on French social and cultural mores.

  By the 2000s, after a decade-long hiatus, the magazine had started to run cartoons taking the piss out of some of the more bumptious mullahs who had set themselves up among the French Muslim population, and the various accommodations being made within French culture, such as halal meat being available at schools. But it was only in 2006, with the Danish Mohammed cartoons affair, that they really swung their guns around.

  When the Jyllands-Posten ran Mohammed cartoons – solely to make a point that they could depict Mohammed if they liked – it turned Charlie Hebdo on to depicting Mohammed as a stand-by. Some of the jokes were satirical – Mohammed shaking his head after a terrorist outrage, asking ‘Why do I have such idiots as followers?’ – and others were simply funny but tasteless, such as an issue guest-edited by Mohammed (‘100 lashes if you don’t laugh’). All the anti-clerical fury that had been a staple of the French Left since the days of Ernest Renan and Anatole France had been turned
on a faith held by 6 per cent of the population, and a marginal group at that. The jokes had got the Hebdo office firebombed in 2011, and security had been increased. But there was also a curious fatalism in some of their comments, their editor, Charb, saying of the regular threats, ‘Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.’

  Better to get real security than either. A dozen of the cartoonists and writers were killed when the attackers, who it would later be revealed were the Kouachi brothers, Islamist from the rap/gangsta/jihadi subculture of the banlieues, heavied a woman into buzzing them through the door, got the wrong office, and then found the editorial team in the midst of their weekly planning meeting. They escaped – this was no suicide mission – in their own car, carjacked a woman north of Paris, let her go, and eventually holed up in a print shop, where they were killed shooting it out the next day. By then, France was in political hysteria, and much of the rest of Europe came down with the same affliction in sympathy.

  The city had seen plenty of terror in recent decades – the right-wing OAS in the ’60s, Mossad and Palestinians, Kurds and Turks, and a bombing campaign by ‘Carlos the Jackal’ Ramírez in the ’80s – and the Republic itself was founded on the idealisation of political terror. Perhaps that was what made the raid so chilling. Crackpot suicide bombers who believe they are blowing themselves straight into paradise may disconcert us, but perhaps they do not chill us; we do not believe they have our measure. These guys had a style and a demeanour more like the Red Brigades or the IRA: in and out quickly, deliberately refraining from killing those uninvolved (another raid on a kosher supermarket, by someone once in their jihadi circle, was chaotic and randomly brutal, killing four Jewish customers), completing a mission with clear objectives. This limited and targeted raid was taken as more disconcerting than the far more lethal London 7/7 attack or the deadly Madrid bombings.

  A strange event, but by comparison with what happened next, it was just another day in Paris. For this single raid prompted a reaction that began, in a mode familiar since 9/11, in a mode of contestation between assertions of Western triumph, by liberals and the Right, and Western hypocrisy, by what remains of the Left, but ended in a sort of final, chaotic implosion that seemed to merely expose the absurdity of these ragged debates. What happened to the Left is the main thrust of this article, but there was a symmetry at work, so it is worth examining what happened there.

  For the Right, across the Anglosphere, the Hebdo massacre ostensibly presented a political opportunity – but rapidly revealed the seriousness of its deepening crisis. For thirty-five years, since the dawn of the Thatcher–Reagan era, the Right has offered a combination of ‘traditional’ conservative values – often maintained by state regulation – and free-market liberalism. As the latter has transformed and ungrounded what remained of the traditional culture, the search for culture ‘wreckers’ – sheeted home to the ‘new class’ and the heritage of the ’60s – has become steadily more shrill and the contradictions within the formation more severe.

  The crisis of the Abbott government is a measure of this. Lying below their incidental incompetence is an inability to reconcile these two dimensions of their politics in a way that earlier governments have been able to manage. This was particularly evident in their attempts to abolish the ‘18C’ ban on offensive and insulting racial vilification. Conservatism recognises that a society has limits to speech that preserve a set of shared values and frame a harmonious public sphere: the movement to abolish 18C was a liberal/libertarian demand for a public sphere of open slather. The call for submissions on its abolition attracted 4000 overwhelmingly critical reactions, from all non-Anglo, Indigenous and Jewish community peak bodies, which based themselves on that inherently conservative notion. The Abbott government, having spruiked the liberal case, faced electoral disaster, and used the rise of Daesh (ISIS) to withdraw, saying that community cohesion was essential at a time like this. In the United Kingdom, the Cameron government had made similar gestures towards cohesion over the years. A light feint towards criticism of multiculturalism in Opposition had been soon abandoned.

  The Hebdo massacre, and the call for solidarity, thus put the Right in a difficult position. The magazine’s mode de vivre was to be a creature of the margins, tolerated but scurrilous. Satire and outrageous comedy is inherently supplementary and parasitic on the main business of a culture. To work, it must be part of a living and serious culture. But after the massacre this small publication, with sales of 50,000, 90 per cent of them within a kilometre of the Sorbonne, was put at the centre not merely of French but of Western culture. This was absurd, since Hebdo had never let up on the anti-clericalism either: a cover for an issue on same-sex marriage had Jesus fucking God the Father up the arse, while the Holy Spirit, in turn, erm, entered Jesus. And there was much more in that vein. President Hollande, at the time of his dalliances, was in the position of celebrating as at the core of the culture a magazine that had featured him with his dick out, the member in question saying ‘Moi, président’. His jilted partner, Valérie Trierweiler, on breaking up with him, was shown as a bare-breasted ‘Liberty leading the people’. And so on.

  To put such an anarchistic entity at the heart of your own culture is to create a regression effect. What does such a culture value? On what basis does it stand? The only answer that could be proffered was ‘free speech’. The idea of ‘free speech’ as a right may derive from a certain idea of the human, but it is a simple and content-free one. Free speech and other liberal rights are a metapolitical framework within which to manage debate around matters with greater political content: tradition, religion, equality, law and punishment, ways of life, the role of nature and the like. When all you can put on your banner is ‘free speech’ as indicative of your culture – a false assertion about Western tradition in any case – then you not only face immediate difficulties on your own side but reveal an obvious asymmetry.

  The Hebdo killers and the world they came from had a simple but powerful idea of Godhead, which flowed into everything they did, and grounded their world. It was a reminder of the world of grounded Christian culture, lost in the progress of the secular enlightenment. To go up against the cosmic and transcendental idea of Islam and Allah with a funny magazine as at your core was to expose the very wobbly basis of your culture.

  By the time this was beginning to be apparent a march for ‘unity’ in Paris had already been announced, to be led by the president. But Hollande quickly faced a problem: a call to unity would have to involve the presence of Marine Le Pen, head of the Front National. So the march was quickly internationalised, with world leaders invited. This led to the ultimate absurdity, in which a million people marched for freedom of speech behind the Saudi ambassador to France, Putin’s foreign minister, and Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government had jailed numerous Palestinian journalists. Simultaneously, an issue of Hebdo was planned with a print run of first one million, then three, then five. It was part-funded by Google, only recently revealed as having co-operated with the NSA to spy on its own users.

  The day after the march, fifty-five people were arrested in France for various speech crimes, including ‘voicing support for terrorism’ and anti-Semitism. French-Arab comedian Dieudonné, whose shows were banned last year for becoming rallies of anti-Semitic bilge, replete with a downward-facing fascist salute called a ‘quennelle’, was arrested for making a Facebook post saying ‘jesuischarliecoulibaly’, adding the name of the kosher-supermarket killer to the hashtag phrase. The next day David Cameron, fresh from the march, announced his intention to ban all private cryptography, such as can be used to send untappable messages on the internet. The unity march had become farcical, a post-political staged event to legitimate the extension of the state.

  But if the event had made clear the disarray of the Right, and allowed for the extension of the state by a unified political-technocratic elite, it made still clearer the absolute bankruptcy of the Left, and its inability to say anything of content. Caught between an u
nenviable role as a warning voice about Islamophobia, and the utter absence of any grassroots radical humanist politics, Left commentators abandoned all that they should have known about how societies work in order to try to jerry-build a new historical subject from ‘angry and alienated’ Muslims in the West, especially those in republican-secular France, of which the Hebdo attack was a distorted and mistaken expression. That there was an utter inadequacy of response from both of the traditional political camps made the Hebdo killings a clear moment in the decomposition of existing politics. At the time, it was important to point out how much in disarray the Right were. In cool repose, it seems as urgent, if not more so, to understand the nature of the Left’s collapse.

  In both Australia and the United Kingdom, the Hebdo killings immediately became the occasion for a set of demands by a self-appointed set of commentators who portrayed themselves as ragged defenders of liberal rights. The insistence – from writers such as Nick Cohen and David Aaronovitch in the United Kingdom, Bernard-Henri Lévy in France, David Brooks in the United States – was to equate any sort of reflection on the full context of the event with sympathy for the killers. This was discourse in a ‘recruiting sergeant’ mode, public intellectuals identifying themselves and ‘free speech’ with a defence of the West.

  There was a curious asymmetry to this too. Following the killings, there might have been calls for people to practise restraint in expression of race or religion, or even a call for an 18C-like law. There wasn’t, from any quarter, and so those insisting that one voice one’s commitment to free speech appeared to be demanding that one make clear one’s opposition to the violent assassination of people who said things one found offensive. It also suggested that such demonstrations would also communicate to violent Islamists that people in the West were uncowed, and that the men of violence had not won. From this followed an enormous amount of political kitsch, with hokey cartoons about pencils defeating terrorists becoming a thing. Though there was no record of what the Kouachi brothers thought they were doing, and every indication that they were rational agents with limited aims, it became important to caricature them as medievalists who had some magical belief that they would cower the entire West into not taking the Prophet’s name in vain. Partly, this was a response to the very modern, indeed very ’70s sort of terror operation that the Hebdo killings were, but it was partly also an expression of fear, a warding-off of the possibility that Islamist terror was evolving, developing an idea of those parts of Western culture that could be hit hard, for multiplied effect. The ‘free speech’ movement was an assertion asking for dialogue, with no opposition who recognised dialogue – they had simply killed people who had insulted their Prophet, and any attempt to bring the act within the sphere of dialogue was bound to look foolish.