The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  Landscape continues to press in, leaning through our windows and insect screens, creeping at the edges of consciousness. No matter how we live, and what we tell ourselves, the sublimated facts of our physical situation constantly resurface; the land continues to make its presence felt. Until climate change began to erode the modern sense of immunity in the northern hemisphere, this felt pressure of nature was almost unique to Australia amongst developed nations. Feeling subject to nature is supposedly the province of the poor in undeveloped places. The recent vulnerability of first-world countries is a sudden reversal in Europe, but in Australia it’s been our vivid, steady state. If anything, climate change has only intensified what Australians have always felt – which is, at best, mildly besieged. Nowadays bush-fires don’t merely threaten the timbered outskirts of small Australian towns; they have infiltrated and ravaged the inner suburbs of capital cities, panicking and paralysing major populations. Similarly, major flood events are no longer just the nightmare of rural riverside communities; in recent years coastal capitals like Brisbane have been calamitously inundated. Others of course, like Perth, are so drought-weakened that without desalination plants they would no longer be viable settlements at all. Clearly, geography and weather have never been less incidental, less likely to remain mere backdrop. You only need to stand on a street corner in the central business district of Perth and watch the desert dust fall like red rain upon the gridlocked traffic to know that. Whatever else we have told ourselves, we are not yet out of nature and nature is not done with us.

  Ours has always been a conditional, permeable settlement and it remains so. The land continues to confound, enchant, appal and inspire. It fizzes, groans, creaks and roars at the edge of consciousness. But I think a geographically thin skin is a boon to our culture. We need to guard against growing too thick a hide, in this sense at least. Isn’t it good for the spirit, being reminded that there is something bigger to consider than ourselves, something, older, richer and more complex and mysterious than humankind? Despite our immense success, our mobility and adaptability there is still an organic, material reality over which we have little control and for which we can claim no credit.

  Humans are a brilliant species, an exception, a privileged minority. And few humans are luckier than Australians. Generations of experience have transformed us. Those who arrived here in antiquity were changed and changed and changed by the continent; the land made them anew. Those of us whose roots are not as deep are startled to learn how different we are from our immigrant forebears, for our island is a place that soon renders people strangers to their own ancestors. It has real, ongoing power to shape people. It influences our thoughts and habits, our language, our sensory register. However stubbornly we resist, it knocks us about, bends us out of shape and moves us on somehow. In my own lifetime Australians have come to use the Aboriginal-English word ‘country’ to describe what my great-grandparents might have called territory. Slowly, fitfully, geographic ambivalence and diffidence have given way to a new respect. Patriotism has evolved to include a reverence for the land itself, and the passion to defend the natural world as if it were family. This is why we write about the island, the place, the natural physical world. This is why we paint it. From love and wonder, irritation and fear, hope and despair, because like family, it’s an enduring puzzle and it refuses to be incidental.

  The Weekend Australian Review

  Publication Details

  Caroline Baum’s ‘Waltzing the Jaguar’ appeared in My Mother, My Father: On Losing a Parent, edited by Susan Wyndham, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2013.

  J.M. Coetzee’s ‘The Last Instructions of Patrick White’ appeared in the New York Review of Books, 7 November 2013.

  Jessie Cole’s ‘The Breaking Point’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 72, no. 3, Spring 2013.

  Peter Conrad’s ‘A Rolf in Sheep’s Clothing’ appeared in the Monthly, July 2014.

  Robyn Davidson’s ‘Vale Doris Lessing’ appeared in the Monthly, December 2013–January 2014.

  Tim Flannery’s ‘A Natural Wonder in Peril’ appeared in the New York Review of Books, 14 August 2014.

  Helen Garner’s ‘Dreams of Her Real Self’ appeared in My Mother, My Father: On Losing a Parent, edited by Susan Wyndham, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2013.

  Moreno Giovannoni’s ‘The Percheron’ appeared in Southerly, vol. 73, no. 2, 2013. The photograph ‘Champlin’s horse, Kronprinz’ is used with permission of the Ames Historical Society.

  Dennis Glover’s ‘Doveton’ appeared in the Age, 8 February 2014.

  Antonia Hayes’s ‘Wolf Like Me’ appeared in Meanjin, vol. 73, no. 1, Autumn 2014.

  Karen Hitchcock’s regular column ‘The Medicine’ appears in the Monthly. The items reprinted here appeared in the November 2013, December 2013–January 2014, March 2014 and July 2014 issues.

  Clive James’s ‘Poems of a Lifetime’ appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, 18 May 2014, and in his Poetry Notebook: 2006–2014 (Picador, 2014); it is used with permission of the publisher. Copyright © Clive James, 2014.

  Rozanna Lilley’s ‘The Little Prince, and Other Vehicles’ appeared in Southerly, vol. 74, no. 1, 2014.

  David Malouf’s ‘Oh Walt, You’re a Leaky Vessel’ appeared in Sydney Review of Books, 5 July 2014.

  David Marr’s ‘Freedom Abbott’ appeared in the Monthly, September 2014. The essay grew out of the 2014 John Button Lecture for the Melbourne School of Government, delivered on 23 July 2014.

  Luke Mogelson’s ‘The Dream Boat’ appeared in the New York Times Magazine, 17 November 2013.

  Neil Murray’s ‘Cry When We’re Gone’ appeared in The Best Music Writing Under the Australian Sun, edited by Christian Ryan, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2014.

  Rachel Nolan’s ‘Men of a Certain Age’ appeared in the Monthly, May 2014.

  Noel Pearson’s ‘War of the Worlds’ is an excerpt from his A Rightful Place (Quarterly Essay 55), Black Inc., Melbourne, 2014.

  Nicolas Rothwell’s ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ appeared in the Weekend Australian Review, 18–19 January 2014.

  Guy Rundle’s ‘Burning Men: An American Triptych’ appeared in Crikey/Daily Review, 29 January 2014 (on Pete Seeger); 23 May 2014 (on True Detective); and 28 May 2014 (on Elliot Rodger).

  Christian Ryan’s ‘The Unremembered Six’ appeared in The Nightwatchman, Spring 2014.

  Luke Ryan’s ‘Sex and Cancer: A History in Three Parts’ appeared in his book A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chemo: A Memoir of Getting Cancer – Twice!, Affirm Press, Melbourne, 2014.

  Carrie Tiffany’s ‘Reading Geoff Cochrane’ appeared in Griffith Review, no. 43, January 2014.

  Christos Tsiolkas’s ‘May Day: How the Left Was Lost’ appeared in the Monthly, May 2014.

  Don Watson’s ‘My Fellow Australians’ appeared in Good Weekend, 25 January 2014.

  Tim Winton’s ‘The Island Seen and Felt: Some Thoughts about Landscape’ appeared in the Weekend Australian Review, 14–15 December 2013. It is an edited transcript of his speech to the Royal Academy, London, on 14 November 2013.

  Notes on Contributors

  THE EDITOR

  Robert Manne was professor of politics at La Trobe University until December 2012. Presently, he is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe and the convenor of its Ideas & Society Program. His books include Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1977–2005, W.E.H. Stanner: The Dreaming and Other Essays (ed.), Making Trouble: Essays against the New Australian Complacency, Bad News: Murdoch’s Australian and the Shaping of the Nation (Quarterly Essay 43) and The Words That Made Australia: How a Nation Came to Know Itself (ed.). In 2012 he was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. State of the Nation: Essays for Robert Manne was published by Black Inc. in October 2013.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Caroline Baum is the editorial director of Booktopia, Australia’s largest online bookseller. She writes for the Sydney Morning Herald, Qantas inflight magazine, Slow Magazine, SBS Feast and other publicati
ons about books, food, travel, the arts and aspects of contemporary life.

  J.M. Coetzee was born in South Africa and educated in South Africa and the united States. He has published twelve works of fiction, as well as criticism and translations. He has won the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Adelaide.

  Jessie Cole’s debut novel Darkness on the Edge of Town was shortlisted for the 2013 ALS Gold Medal, and her non-fiction work has appeared in the Big Issue, Daily Life, the Saturday Paper, Meanjin and the Guardian. Her latest novel, Deeper Water, was published in August 2014. She lives and works in northern New South Wales.

  Peter Conrad lives in London and New York. His latest books are Verdi and/or Wagner and How the World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere, published by Thames & Hudson. He has recently written and presented a BBC Radio 4 series on ‘21st Century Mythologies’, updating Roland Barthes.

  Robyn Davidson is an award-winning writer who has travelled and published widely. Her books include Tracks, Desert Places, No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Future of the Planet (Quarterly Essay 24) and, as editor, The Picador Book of Journeys. The screen adaptation of Tracks was released by Transmission Films in 2014.

  Tim Flannery has published over a dozen books, including The Future Eaters, The Eternal Frontier, The Weather Makers, Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia? and Here on Earth. He was Australian of the Year in 2007.

  Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942 and lives in Melbourne. Since 1977 she has published eleven books of fiction, essays and long-form non-fiction, including The First Stone and Joe Cinque’s Consolation, as well as screenplays and feature journalism. She won the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2006. She is a frequent contributor to the Monthly, and her most recent book is This House of Grief.

  Moreno Giovannoni grew up on a tobacco farm at Buffalo River in north-east Victoria but was born in San Ginese, where he left a large part of himself. He lives in Melbourne, where he works as a freelance translator. He is writing a book, Tales from San Ginese.

  Dennis Glover is a speechwriter and freelance author. He is the son of factory workers from Doveton and has degrees from Monash and Cambridge universities. He has written speeches for every federal Labor leader since Kim Beazley and is the author of Orwell’s Australia (Scribe, 2003) and The Art of Great Speeches (CUP, 2010).

  Antonia Hayes is a writer from Sydney who lives in San Francisco. Relativity, her debut novel, will be published in 2015.

  Karen Hitchcock is a doctor and writer. She is a regular contributor to the Monthly, and the author of a collection of short fiction, Little White Slips.

  Clive James is the author of more than forty books. As well as his five volumes of autobiography, he has published collections of literary and television criticism, essays, travel writing, verse and novels. In 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Literature, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His latest book is Poetry Notebook: 2006–2014 (Picador, 2014).

  Rozanna Lilley is a social anthropologist and an author. She has published widely in journals, books and, more recently, literary reviews and magazines. Her current research is on autism and social life. The youngest daughter of writers Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley, she is working on a memoir of family eccentricities.

  David Malouf is the author of eleven novels, as well as collections of stories, poetry and libretti. He has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Prix Femina Étranger and the Australia–Asia Literary Award; he has also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in Australia.

  David Marr has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Monthly, been editor of the National Times, a reporter for Four Corners, presenter of ABC TV’s Media Watch and now writes for the Guardian. His books include Patrick White: A Life, The High Price of Heaven, Dark Victory (with Marian Wilkinson) and four Quarterly Essays: His Master’s Voice, Power Trip, Political Animal and The Prince.

  Luke Mogelson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Based in Kabul, Afghanistan, Mogelson has also worked for GQ, Harper’s, the Nation and the Washington Monthly. His fiction has appeared in the Hudson Review, Kenyon Review and Missouri Review.

  A founding member of the Warumpi Band, Neil Murray has released a dozen solo albums, received an APRA song of the year award, and published stories, lyrics, poems, a play and the autobiographical novel Sing for Me, Countryman.

  Rachel Nolan was Transport, then Finance and Arts Minister in Queensland’s Bligh Labor Government. Since leaving politics she has travelled extensively; she has just completed an overland journey from Ireland to Australia (excepting warzones). She now writes, owns a café in her hometown of Ipswich, and teaches English to migrants.

  Noel Pearson is a lawyer and activist, and chairman of the Cape York Partnership. He has published many essays and newspaper articles. His first book, Up from the Mission (2009), is a collection of essays that charts his life and thought from his early days as a native title lawyer to his position today as one of Australia’s most influential figures.

  Nicolas Rothwell was educated in European schools and was a classical scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a foreign correspondent. He is the author of Heaven & Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior.

  Guy Rundle is the global correspondent-at-large for Crikey. He is the author of Down to the Crossroads: On the Trail of the 2008 US Presidential Election, and two Quarterly Essays, The Opportunist and Bipolar Nation.

  Christian Ryan is the author of Golden Boy, Australia: Story of a Cricket Country and most recently Rock Country, a thirty-three-essay, 160-photo, multi-authored trip into Australian rock music. His recent essays include ‘Five Pictures’, ‘Gone Crabbing’ and ‘Jeff Thomson is Annoyed’. He is a former editor of the Monthly.

  Luke Ryan is a freelance writer, comedian and man about town. He writes short-form non-fiction with a comic edge and has just released his debut book, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chemo (Affirm Press), a comedy memoir about having had cancer a couple of times.

  Sybille Smith (née Gottwald) was born in Vienna and arrived in Australia with her family in 1939. She studied English and German at Sydney University and then taught German at the University of Tasmania. Her study Inside Poetry first appeared in 1985.

  Carrie Tiffany was born in West Yorkshire and grew up in Western Australia. She spent her early twenties working as a park ranger in Central Australia and now lives in Melbourne, where she works as an agricultural journalist. Carrie has published two award-winning novels: Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living and Mateship with Birds.

  Christos Tsiolkas is the author of four novels: Loaded (filmed as Head On), The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award. The Slap won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award and the ALS Gold Medal. He is also a playwright, essayist and screenwriter. He lives in Melbourne.

  Don Watson’s columns, articles and essays have appeared in all major Australian journals and newspapers. His book American Journeys (2008) won the Age Non-Fiction and Book of the Year awards, the inaugural Indie Award for Non-Fiction, and the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction.

  Tim Winton has published twenty-six books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the Australian Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music and Breath), and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for The Riders and Dirt Music). He lives in Western Australia.

 

 

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