The Best Australian Essays 2015

by Geordie Williamson

  This unity of the literary and the political in Orwell’s work is central also to his other well-known essay ‘Why I Write’, where he explicitly states: ‘What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.’ The essay includes an often cited passage, used to supposedly highlight his political writing at the expense of his literary writing: ‘looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.’ But this ignores a previous, qualifying statement from the same essay: ‘But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant.’

  The context for these passages is created by the main argument of his essay. Here Orwell examines four motivations for why writers, in general – and himself in particular – write: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. ‘I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth [the political],’ he adds. It is worth noting that one aspect for which Orwell is renowned – his focus on ‘things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity’ – is, for him, the definition of the historical impulse, and not, as may be assumed, his political purpose.

  It was, indeed, the historical context that Orwell found himself in that forced him, albeit against his nature, to become political. But it was his literary thinking – from which his intellectual honesty evolved – that forced him to consider his historical context so clearly, so as to become political. It is for this reason that Orwell, on occasion, referred to himself as a ‘literary intellectual’.

  This self-description, and the argument behind it, aptly applies also to Camus. In a 1951 interview, for example, he said:

  What, in fact, is the aim of every creative artist? To depict the passions of his day. In the seventeenth century, the passions of love were at the forefront of people’s minds. But today, the passions of our century are collective passions, because society is in disorder. Artistic creation, instead of removing us from the drama of our time, is one of the means we are given of bringing it closer. Totalitarian regimes are well aware of this, since they consider us their first enemies. Isn’t it obvious that everything which destroys art aims to strengthen ideologies that make men unhappy?

  And yet, where Orwell is praised for his political judgement, albeit based upon a denigration of his literary imagination, Camus is praised for his literary works (he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, after all), but, in the process, he is denigrated for his political thinking – often dismissed as a noble but vague humanism; admirable, but not worth taking seriously.

  However, by the time most of the French intelligentsia embraced Communism in the late 1940s and ’50s, Camus had already joined and been expelled from the Communist Party (the Algerian branch). At a time when many others – such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre – were being seduced by Communism, Camus was already aware of its theoretical contradictions and practical impossibilities. His experiences during the purges of the mid-1940s showed him that today’s victims can easily become tomorrow’s executioners. His own political thinking – which, like Orwell’s, was grounded in intellectual honesty and concrete experience – developed early, through his growing up in poverty in working-class Algeria. What Orwell learned only slowly, and from the outside, about poverty and working-class culture, Camus knew firsthand, from the root source.

  Camus sharpened his political sensibilities through his journalism, which forced upon him the practice of keeping an open mind, of collecting the facts for himself, and then thinking through their significance and implications. Take, for example, his 1939 series of articles on the drought and famine of the Kabylia region of Algeria. The lyricism of Camus’ prose is often cited, but what is ignored are the dozens of pages full of painstaking detail, facts and figures, and reported conversations with those affected, the attempt to examine the environmental, the social, the cultural, the colonial, the economic, and the political aspects of the situation. Nearly two decades later, these pieces were collected together with Camus’ other writings about Algeria. Covering more than eighty printed pages, his preface notes, however, that ‘pieces were too long and detailed to reproduce here in their entirety, and I have cut overly general observations and sections on housing, welfare, crafts, and usury’. These articles are the equivalent of Orwell’s investigation into working-class life, published as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). When they were first published in June 1939, the political and media uproar led to Camus’ blacklisting in Algeria and his self-exile to Paris. Needless to say, he was not blacklisted for his lyricism.

  In a series of articles published in May 1945 in Combat, Camus examined the changing political situation in Algeria, based on his previous series of articles in 1939, and showed how it had shifted for the worse. More than a decade before the French intelligentsia would see colonialism and the Algerian situation as an ‘issue’ worth thinking about, Camus was already warning that the political reality on the ground was leading the country into self-destruction. His practical solutions – suggested in 1939, updated in 1945 – and his early criticisms against French colonialism all went unheeded.

  In his journalism, Camus was also focused on domestic French, European, and international politics. A constant refrain in his Combat editorials and articles – written in the course of facing day-to-day political and social struggles – is the criticism that what is lacking in contemporary politics is a sense of ‘imagination’. Like Orwell, Camus saw the imagination as essential to forcing an individual to see the concrete reality beyond the words and ideologies of his day. Here is but one example, from an editorial on 30 August 1944: ‘Thirty-four Frenchmen tortured and then murdered at Vincennes: without help from our imagination these words say nothing. And what does the imagination reveal? Two men, face-to-face, one of whom is preparing to tear out the fingernails of the other, who looks him in the eye.’ There are numerous other examples in Camus’ journalism. They are the equivalent of Orwell’s famous line: ‘As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me’ – of which he, too, has numerous other, lesser-known examples in his own writing.

  But each of these tiny moments of detail is the outcome of a more fully developed imagination. Such imagination is the lynchpin between the political and the literary aspects of the work of both Orwell and Camus. For Orwell, this political imagination is associated with ‘decency’. Camus also spoke of ‘decency’ in his journalism, but, for him, it was associated mainly with an attitude of ‘modesty’.

  Much of the development of Camus’ political thinking, culminating in The Rebel, is based around his opposition to all forms of modern nihilism, whether they came from the right or the left. But even here Camus has a unique perspective on what nihilism is: ‘A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.’ It is precisely the same criticism that Orwell levelled against totalitarianism: ‘Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.’ Most commentators focus on the first part of this statement, and ignore the implications of the second part. This is from the same essay in which Orwell rehearses an image used so powerfully in Nineteen Eighty-Four: ‘So long as physical reality cannot be altogether ignored, so long as two and two have to make four …’ And the essay in which this appears? ‘The Prevention of Literature’.

  Camus’ equivalent to this essay appeared as a later chapter in his political work The Rebel. There he described how the roots of rebellion – and its inextricable belief in limits, predicated upon what exists, and its preservation – were the same as the roots of a
rt. For Camus, as for Orwell, the separation of the two aspects of human experience, the political and the literary, is the first sign of the decadence of each. Camus writes:

  The trial of art has been opened definitively and is continuing today with the embarrassed complicity of artists and intellectuals dedicated to calumniating both their art and their intelligence. We notice, in fact, that in the contest between Shakespeare and the shoemaker, it is not the shoemaker who maligns Shakespeare or beauty but, on the contrary, the man who continues to read Shakespeare and who does not choose to make shoes – which he could never make, if it comes to that.

  4.

  So what would have happened had these two men actually met in 1945? Les Deux Magots was a popular cafe and meeting place for Parisian writers and intellectuals. In 1928, when Orwell was down and out in Paris, fresh out of the Burmese Police, he thought he saw James Joyce there. Now here he was seated at that same cafe, wearing a British Army officer uniform, standard for a war correspondent. He was in France to write articles about the liberation for The Observer and the Manchester Evening News. Camus would have been in his usual suit and trench coat. They would probably have spoken in French, Orwell being better at French than Camus at English. They would have smoked, albeit different cigarettes.

  Orwell was ten years older than Camus, but Camus was often at ease with older male figures, perhaps because he never knew his father. One of his most significant male relationships throughout the late ’30s and early ’40s was Pascal Pia. He was the same age as Orwell. Pia introduced Camus to the newspaper world, and found him work in Paris. He was part of the resistance, and worked with Camus, as a sort of political mentor, at Combat. André Malraux was another figure Camus admired and became friends with. He was two years older than Orwell and Pia. Malraux was perhaps closer to Orwell in sensibility, a literary man who liked action. He also took part in the Spanish Civil War, and he liked to wear military dress, like Orwell during this period as a war correspondent.

  Orwell had arranged the meeting with Camus, ostensibly on the basis of the latter having been the editor of Combat during the final months of the war. In an article Orwell was researching at the time – published in the Manchester Evening News on 28 February 1945 – about the French newspaper scene, Orwell cited Combat as one of the leading ‘Left-wing Socialist’ newspapers that was still able to retain some of its critical power amidst the rising status quo and censorship of post-war Paris. Orwell was probably thinking of the likes of Camus when he wrote: ‘But the experience of the occupation has produced in large numbers a new type of journalist – very young, idealistic and yet hardened by illegality, and completely non-commercial in outlook – and these men are bound to make their influence felt in the post-war Press.’ So they would have probably spoken about the occupation and the liberation, and about the press, about censorship and paper shortages.

  Had the conversation gone off topic, had they spoken about other than immediate things, it is likely that they would have spoken about Spain. Orwell’s 1938 book Homage to Catalonia, about his experience of the Spanish Civil War, was soon to be published in a French translation. Camus had an abiding affiliation with Spain. His mother was Spanish. He was also currently having a love affair with María Casares – a Spanish actress, the daughter of Santiago Casares y Quiroga, the prime minister of Spain during the military uprising in 1936, which started the civil war. Camus would have been interested to hear about Orwell’s time in Spain, and especially about his being shot through the throat. Orwell would have been interested to hear, via Camus’ close contacts, current news of Spain.

  But they would perhaps not have spoken for long, or about many of the topics discussed here. Orwell and his English reserve, Camus and his Algerian pudeur, would have seen to this, at least at their first meeting. Coffee over, cigarettes snubbed out, they would have shaken hands and then gone their separate ways, but ever in the same direction.

  Los Angeles Review of Books

  Mirror Rim: Lost and Found on the Abrolhos

  Ashley Hay

  I thought Batavia was the story I was carrying on my trip to the Abrolhos in the first weeks of spring. You know the one – the Dutch East India Company ship that ran aground there in 1629, delivering 316 people to a cluster of tiny islands in the northern part of the archipelago where some endured a murderously mutinous attack at the hands of their fellow travellers. Only 116 arrived safely in the Spice Islands, half a year later.

  I thought it was that ship, that story, those people who underscored how I approached this place, the way I saw it and what I experienced. It took me some time to fathom the truth.

  Perhaps it’s a writer’s worst habit, carrying narratives around to fit to new places, or having unexpected ones rear up in places that should be fresh and free of all associations. Their eyes always open for a scene, a sentence, a moment to steal for a story they don’t yet know they’ll tell. I’m with Hilary Mantel when she says: ‘Insights don’t usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I’m on the move. Or half-asleep.’

  Which probably makes me awful to travel with – or sleep with.

  *

  It disappeared so quickly, the enormous heft of Australia. It was spring and, in the striped blue thickness of the Indian Ocean below our tiny plane, whales surfaced and frolicked – a spray of water, a raised flipper, the giant splash of a breach. The occasional vessel appeared: trawler, cruiser, carrier. There was so much space around each that the chance of any one intersecting with another seemed impossible. The chance of intersecting with anything seemed remote.

  Yet more than ninety boats’ lookouts are known to have failed at their post in this place, leading their vessels to run afoul. Below the plane, we saw the boiler of a recent wreck (the Windsor, 1908), the remnants of the Zeewijk (1727), below which was, perhaps, the Agtekerke, lost two years earlier in 1725 but only – possibly – revealed in 2012. For almost 400 years, for all anyone knew, the Agtekerke could have fallen off the face of the earth.

  It’s an A to Z of submarine detritus, drawn to – and destroyed by – the Abrolhos Islands, this exquisite scatter of reefs, shoals, shallows and 170-odd ‘islands, islets and above-water rocks’ that covers 800 square kilometres of space about 70 kilometres off Australia’s western shore. This spotty archipelago, a smattering of limestone and coralline punctuation spread across a wide, wet canvas.

  You do not just happen across the Abrolhos. There’s a small seasonal crayfishing industry and some aquaculture operations, mainly pearl farms: the oysters here can produce a pearl the colour of an indigo dusk. But there are no public jetties and no marinas – only private access ways and a handful of public moorings. There are three airstrips and one local helicopter company has the right to land anywhere it can set a chopper down.

  If you do get there, you’re not supposed to stay: there’s nowhere to book a room; nowhere to camp. The chance of sleeping over comes by working with the fishermen or pearlers and bunking in one of their huts – or by being invited to stay, as we were, in the Department of Fisheries’ dormitories on Rat Island, in the middle cluster of these outcrops, the Easter Group.

  And so we came, a handful of visiting writers – offered the chance to be somewhere, see somewhere, as writers sometimes are – and we stared across the shape of this small piece of land, its vast blue sky busy with the sounds and swoops of birds.

  More than 2 million birds breed throughout these islands: terns and noddies (including the only Australian breeding population of Australian lesser noddies, Anous tenuirostris melanops) and gulls. There are populations of Larus pacificus here, the heavier, more cartoonish gull that lived around Sydney until it was out-competed by that smaller, harsher-voiced kelp gull with its red beak and beady eyes. There was the possibility of sea lions too – the Abrolhos is the northern limit of the breeding population of Neophoca cinerea, and one was known to come and play.

  Beneath the sounds of the birds lay the strange wuthering the wind makes where there’s
not much for it to play against – sounds a usually busy mind could easily spin into something like a noisy road on a wet day. A thing so far from real: the island was deserted but for us and our stomping, two out-of-season cray-fishers working on their hut, and what remained of Giuseppe Benvenuto, who drowned in 1929 when his boat went down nearby. The view beyond the headstone of his neat and obvious grave gave way to limitless west.

  There was something compelling about the water beyond that grave. Close by, where it turned against the sandy shore, it sometimes rested – completely still, like a millpond – for the better part of a minute, even more. There was not the slightest ripple or wave, and then, like a breath, some pulse would return; a small fold, another and another. There was no discernible pattern to this, no logic, and far out against the western horizon the high white walls of breakers rose up and shattered against the raised ocean floor. Too far to hear their noise; too far to gauge their size or weight or power. They were a suggestion, or a threat, perhaps, like a misplaced loop of film disrupting an otherwise serene line.

  Those waves evoked the phrase long-ago sailors used when they left charted waters: they spoke of ‘sailing out of the world’. Out there was the far shore that closes The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – the far shore that opens Twelfth Night. Out there were lost stories and undiscovered lands.

  The clouds took on rose-gold and apricot as the sun began to set and the light went down. Out at the edge of the world.

  *

  I’m an utterly east coast creature: I grew up with my feet in the Pacific Ocean and a clear stretch between me and Chile – had I been able to see that far. All my life, the sun has risen out of the ocean, illuminating a coast spotted with the colonial busyness of familiar British names: Cook and Banks, Bass and Flinders.