The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  4 August: Twenty-two-year-old student Freya Newman, a former part-time librarian at the Whitehouse Institute of Design, is charged with unauthorised access to restricted data following reports of Frances Abbott’s scholarship, after complaints to the police by the institute. The chair of the institute is Liberal Party donor and friend of the prime minister Les Taylor.

  5 August: Abbott announces the metadata of all Australians is to be kept by internet service providers for two years and made available to ASIO and police. That trawl will, of course, include the metadata of whistleblowers and journalists. He abandons at the same time his two-year crusade to amend the Racial Discrimination Act. Both moves he justifies in the light of terrorist outrages by Australian nationals in Syria. ‘When it comes to counterterrorism, everyone needs to be part of ‘Team Australia’,’ he says, ‘and I have to say that the government’s proposals to change 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act have become a complication in that respect. I don’t want to do anything that puts our national unity at risk at this time, and so those proposals are now off the table.’

  *

  Freedom Abbott had outlived his purpose. He was useful in Opposition. That’s when phony contests like the Culture Wars can wreak havoc on your opponents. But to keep the banner of freedom flying in office was always going to be hard. No Australian government has ever managed the feat. And Abbott is proving no political pioneer. Nothing done in his first year advances the cause he championed in Opposition. His rhetoric has proved threadbare. Poor old Values Abbott died on budget night when an ordinary Liberal Party agenda was served up to the nation. A couple of months later, Freedom Abbott followed him to the grave.

  The IPA marked the burial with a brutal full-page ad in the Australian. ‘Freedom of speech is an essential foundation of democracy,’ said Abbott across the top of the page. Across the bottom the IPA replied: ‘We agree, Prime Minister. That’s why we will fight to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Even if you won’t.’ John Roskam, the executive director of the IPA, spoke of a party base betrayed and Australians left ‘sad, angry, disappointed and worried’ by Abbott. ‘If the Coalition can sacrifice freedom of speech so easily, there’s nothing to stop, say, freedom of religion or the principle of equal education for girls and boys one day being treated in exactly the same way … under Tony Abbott, the Coalition believes freedom of speech is a threat to national unity.’

  Brandis was simply humiliated.

  Muslims were furious. Every ethnic community in Australia had put up their hand to protest, but Abbott had used the Muslims to cover his retreat. Tabloid pundits rammed the message home. It didn’t help that depraved clowns with Australian passports were cutting off heads for the Caliphate. Bolt blamed the Jews, the Muslims and, most of all, politicians who caved in to Muslim constituents:

  Pardon? We must placate Muslim Australians by restricting our freedom to say something critical of their culture, for example, extremists being so prone to jihad? Of course other ethnic and religious groups – not least Jews – also fought to save these restrictions. But make no mistake: muzzling Australians is now seen as necessary to please migrant communities. Among Liberal backbenchers who fought Abbott’s changes, none was louder than Craig Laundy, whose seat of Reid has a Muslim minority comprising 10 per cent of the vote … politicians are now so desperate for these blocs of ethnic votes that they sacrifice Australian values to accommodate imported ones.

  Tim Wilson was left with no freedom agenda. The day Brandis was supposed to address Free Speech 2014, Wilson announced he would soon set off on a ‘Rights and Responsibilities’ tour of the nation to hear what we have on our minds. He will likely discover nothing new. Our worries don’t change much with time: the fate of the ABC under Coalition governments; the expanding reach of intelligence agencies; heavy-handed film censorship; feeble protection for whistleblowers and journalists; punitive laws against demonstrators; attacks on freedom of association; and the old bugbear of defamation. Nothing stifles public debate in this country as much as the fear of being sued for defamation. But a smart guy like Wilson knows even before he sets out that the Human Rights Commission can’t fix much on that list. Almost all our worries are matters of state law. In July, the retiring disability discrimination commissioner, Graeme Innes, told the National Press Club: ‘The best way, frankly, for the attorney to provide the commission with the greater capacity to deal with the freedoms he talks about would be to put forward legislation for a charter of rights.’

  That’s the last thing Abbott stands for, though there is a fascinating shift underway in conservative Australia. Once despised as undemocratic, a bill of rights embedded in the constitution is beginning to be seen as a last resort to save our Way of Life. Even conservative Christians, hitherto the most implacable opponents of anything like the US First Amendment, are beginning to see their salvation might lie in such a form of words: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’

  And Abbott? Abandoning his freedom crusade has left him a diminished figure: not a pioneer of liberty in anyone’s eyes, just a blowhard on the campaign trail. The promises of freedom join all the other broken promises. Under Abbott no laws limiting freedom have changed for the better. Movement has all been the other way. The Coalition is running on instinct. We are back where we were under Howard. Freedom counts for little in political contest in this country. The only Abbott that matters, Politics Abbott, soldiers on. He has not lost his faith in himself. Astride the grave of Freedom Abbott in early August, as he ramped up ASIO’s powers and ditched his libertarian ambitions for 18C, he was still declaring: ‘I’m a passionate supporter of free speech.’

  The Monthly

  The Last Instructions of Patrick White

  J.M. Coetzee

  Patrick White is, on most counts, the greatest writer Australia has produced, though the sense in which that country produced him needs at once to be qualified – he had his schooling in England, studied at Cambridge University, spent his twenties as a young man about town in London, and during World War II served with the British armed forces. What Australia did provide him with was fortune, in the form of an early inheritance – the White family were wealthy graziers – substantial enough for him to live an independent life.

  The nineteenth century was the heyday of the Great Writer. In our times the concept of greatness has fallen under suspicion, especially when attached to whiteness and maleness, and Great Writers courses have largely been retired from the college curriculum. But to call Patrick White a Great Writer – specifically a Great Writer in the Romantic mould – seems right, if only because he had the typically great-writerly sense of being marked out from birth for an uncommon destiny and granted a talent – not necessarily a welcome one – that it is death to hide, that talent consisting in the power to see, intermittently, flashes of the truth behind appearances.

  The life arc of the kind of artist White felt himself to be is most clearly shown forth in Voss (1957), the novel that made his reputation. Johann Ulrich Voss sets off with a miscellaneous band of followers on a journey of exploration into the vast Australian outback. Most of the party die, including Voss himself; but in the course of their long march Voss makes discoveries about the human spirit in extremis that, by a kind of spiritual telepathy, he transmits to the beloved he has left behind in Sydney, and through her to us.

  White’s sense of being special was closely tied to his homosexuality. He did not contest the verdict of the Australia of his day that homosexuality was ‘deviant’, but took his deviance as a blessing as much as a curse:

  I see myself not so much a homosexual as a mind possessed by the spirit of man or woman according to actual situations or [sic] the characters I become in my writing … Ambivalence has given me insights into human nature, denied, I
believe, to those who are unequivocally male or female.

  The award of the Nobel Prize in 1973 took many by surprise, particularly in Australia, where White was looked on as a difficult writer with a mannered, unnecessarily complex prose style. From a European perspective the award made more sense. White stood out from his Anglophone contemporaries in his familiarity with European Modernism (his Cambridge degree was in French and German). His language, and indeed his vision of the world, were indelibly marked by an early immersion in Expressionism, both literary and pictorial. His sensibility was always strongly visual. As a young man he moved among artists rather than among writers (he was an habitué of the studio of his close contemporary Francis Bacon), and often remarked that he wished he could have been a painter.

  Between 1939 and 1979 White published eleven big novels. In the remaining years of his life, up to his death in 1990, he produced stories, plays, and memoirs, but no fiction on the previous grand scale. His health was declining. Since childhood he had suffered from asthma; in his last years he was flattened by severe respiratory attacks for which medical science could offer little help. His letters suggest that he doubted he had the staying power, and perhaps the will too, to bring off a substantial new work.

  To an inquiry from the National Library of Australia as to his plans for the disposition of his papers, he responded: ‘I can’t let you have my papers because I don’t keep any.’ As for his manuscripts, he said, these were routinely destroyed once the book had appeared in print. ‘Anything [that is] unfinished when I die is to be burnt,’ he concluded. And indeed, in his will he instructed his literary executor, his agent Barbara Mobbs, to destroy whatever papers he left behind.

  Mobbs disobeyed that instruction. In 2006 she committed the surviving papers, a surprisingly large cache packed in thirty-two boxes, to the NLA. Researchers, including White’s biographer David Marr, have been busy with this Nachlaß ever since. Among the fruits of Marr’s labours we now have The Hanging Garden, a 50,000-word fragment of a novel that White commenced early in 1981 but then, after weeks of intense and productive labour, abandoned.

  Marr has high praise for this resurrected fragment: ‘A masterpiece in the making,’ he calls it. One can see why. Although it is only a draft, the creative intelligence behind the prose is as intense and the characterisation as deft as anywhere in White. There is no sign at all of failing powers. The fragment, constituting the first third of the novel, is largely self-contained. All that is lacking is a sense of where the action is leading, what all the preparation is preparatory to.

  After the initial burst of activity White never returned to The Hanging Garden. It joined two other abandoned novels among the papers that Mobbs was instructed to destroy; it is not inconceivable that these too will be resurrected and offered to the public at some future date.

  The world is a richer place now that we have The Hanging Garden. But what of Patrick White himself, who made it clear that he did not want the world to see fragments of unachieved works from his hand? What would White say of Mobbs if he could speak from beyond the grave?

  Perhaps the most notorious case of an executor countermanding the instructions of the deceased is provided by Max Brod, executor of the literary estate of his close friend Franz Kafka. Kafka, himself a trained lawyer, could not have spelled out his instructions more clearly:

  Dearest Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people’s, sketches and so on, is to be burned unread and to the last page, as well as all writings of mine or notes which either you may have or other people, from whom you are to beg them in my name. Letters which are not handed over to you should at least be faithfully burned by those who have them.

  Yours, Franz Kafka.

  Had Brod done his duty, we would have neither The Trial nor The Castle. As a result of his betrayal, the world is not just richer but metamorphosed, transfigured. Does the example of Brod and Kafka persuade us that literary executors, and perhaps executors in general, should be granted leeway to reinterpret instructions in the light of the general good?

  There is an unstated prolegomenon to Kafka’s letter, as there is in most testamentary instructions of this kind: ‘By the time I am on my deathbed, and have to confront the fact that I will never be able to resume work on the fragments in my desk drawer, I will no longer be in a position to destroy them. Therefore I see no recourse but to ask you act on my behalf. Unable to compel you, I can only trust you to honor my request.’

  In justifying his failure to ‘commit the incendiary act’, Brod named two grounds. The first was that Kafka’s standards for permitting his handiwork to see the light of day were unnaturally high: ‘the highest religious standards’, Brod called them. The second was more down to earth: though he had clearly told Kafka that he would not carry out his instructions, Kafka had not dismissed him as executor, therefore (Brod reasoned) in his heart Kafka must have known the manuscripts would not be destroyed.

  In law, the words of a will are meant to express the full and final intention of the testator. Thus if the will is well constructed – that is to say, properly worded, in accordance with the formulaic language of testamentary tradition – then interpretation of the will will be a fairly mechanical matter: we need nothing more than a handbook of testamentary formulas to gain unambiguous access to the intention of the testator. In the Anglo-American legal system, the handbook of formulas is known as the rules of construction, and the tradition of interpretation based on them as the plain meaning doctrine.

  The plain meaning doctrine has for a while been under siege. The essence of the critique was set forth over a century ago by the legal scholar John H. Wigmore:

  The fallacy consists in assuming that there is or ever can be some one real or absolute meaning. In truth, there can be only some person’s meaning; and that person, whose meaning the law is seeking, is the writer of the document.

  The unique difficulty posed by wills, one might add, is that the writer of the document, the person whose meaning the law is seeking, is by definition absent.

  The relativistic approach to meaning expressed by Wigmore has the upper hand in many jurisdictions today. According to this approach, our energies should be directed in the first place to grasping the anterior intentions of the testator, and only secondarily to interpreting the written expression of those intentions in the light of precedent. Thus rules of construction no longer provide the last word; a more open attitude has come to prevail toward admitting extrinsic evidence of the testator’s intentions.

  In 1999 the American Law Institute, in its Restatement of Property, Wills and Other Donative Transfers, went so far as to declare that the language of a document (such as a will) is ‘so colored by the circumstances surrounding its formulation that [other] evidence regarding the donor’s intention is always [my emphasis] relevant’. In this respect the ALI registers a shift of emphasis not only in US law but in the entire legal tradition founded on English law.

  If the language of the testamentary document is always conditioned by, and may always be supplemented by, the circumstances surrounding its formulation, what circumstances can we imagine, surrounding instructions from a writer that his papers be destroyed, that might justify ignoring those instructions?

  In the case of Brod and Kafka, aside from the circumstances adduced by Brod (that the testator had unrealistic standards for publication of his work; that the testator was aware that his executor could not be relied on), there is a third and more compelling one: that the testator could have had no reliable idea of the broad significance of his work.

  Public opinion is, I would guess, solidly behind executors like Brod and Mobbs who refuse to carry out their testamentary instructions on the twofold grounds that they are in a better position than the deceased to see the broad significance of the work, and that considerations of the public good should trump the expressed wishes of the deceased. What then should a writer do if he truly, finally, and absolute
ly wants his papers to be destroyed? In the reigning legal climate, the best answer would seem to be: do the job yourself. Furthermore, do it early, before you are physically incapable. If you delay too long, you will have to instruct someone else to act on your behalf, and that person may decide that you do not truly, finally, and absolutely mean what you say.

  The Hanging Garden is the story of two European children evacuated for their safety to Australia during World War II. Young Gilbert Horsfall has been sent from London to escape the bombing. Eirene Sklavos, whose Greek father, a Communist, has died in prison, is brought to Sydney by her Australian mother, who then returns to the theatre of war. The two children find themselves boarding with Mrs Bulpit, a British-born widow.

  During their first night alone at Mrs Bulpit’s the children, whose ages are not given but who must be eleven or twelve, share a bedroom and, for most of the night, a bed. In Eirene there begins to grow an obsession with Gilbert in which inchoate sexual stirrings are mixed with an obscure realisation that they are not just fellow aliens in a new land but two of a kind (yet of what kind?), brought together by fate. Of Gilbert’s feelings for Eirene we know less, in part because he is trapped in boyish male disdain for girls, in part (one guesses) because his realisation of her importance in his life was intended to come later, in the body of the book that never got written.

  The children make Mrs Bulpit’s overgrown garden, on a cliff overlooking the bay, into a refuge from the crassness and tedium of life in their new country. In a huge old fig tree they build a tree house where they can hide out and practice intimacies that have more to do with physical curiosity than sexual desire.