essays

THIS PINING HABIT OF METAPHOR

Peter Rose

Peter Craven (ed)
The Best Australian Essays 2000
Black Inc., $24.95pb, 505pp
1 86395 250 0

HAPPY THE CRITIC WHO doesn't feel obliged to preface a review of a new anthology of essays with a hopeful theory 'whether cautious or idiosyncratic' of the genre. In recent years many of these collections have been published, both here and overseas, and readers are familiar with their defences and taxonomies. Peter Craven's series of the year's best 'essays' is now in its third year. This thumping edition is likely to prove as successful as last year's. It would be difficult to nominate a better sample of the state of our writing or of the issues and ideas that vivify our culture and our politics.
      First, the annual report. There are forty-three essays, three more than last year. The book is forty pages longer than its predecessor perhaps a shade too long at 505 pages. Only six of last year's contributors reappear, whereas fourteen of the original contributors, from 1998, are included in the new edition. This bespeaks both a pleasing openness to diversity and new voices and a fitting sense of the quality and durability of a core of commentators. As in previous years, many of the essays are drawn from the Age and the Australian's Review of Books. Apart from newspapers and magazines there are also pamphlets, a speech, a television script, and extracts from coming memoirs. Nine of the essays, including some of the finest ones, are published here for the first time. The book is once again attractively published, at an affordable price, but there are too many typos for this reader's liking.
      Peter Craven is an eclectic sponsor of the essay. In his introduction he states that 'the term "essay" is one of the loosest ones we have and in this series I have deliberately used it with maximum latitude.' His ideal essay is rather personal than pontifical. It asks more questions than it answers. It regrets, it reminisces, it mourns, it even yearns. Though playful at times, it can be an edgy beast.
      Prominent in this year's edition is a new note of disquiet. Too many contributors brood on globalisation and economic rationalism for it to be coincidental. Perhaps the recent Olympics and the republic referendum, combined with the looming centenary of Federation, inspired this new, nervous mood. Interestingly, the word 'feeling' recurs throughout the book. David Malouf uses it often in his essay 'The People's Judgement'. 'Policies that take no account of feeling inevitably fail,' he writes. Policies and politics will only improve ' and the republic be attained ' when the gap between popular feeling and political exigencies narrows. 'Perhaps, after a century of theories and ideas and technologies, some of them murderous, we might try listening at last to what people have to say.'
      How much more considered and persuasive this is than Peter Ryan's rancorous piece on republicanism.'This old devil', as Craven describes him admiringly, has written much more stylishly than this. His 'war dance in celebration of its defeat' (Craven again) is full of contradictions about republicanism. He attributes the phenomenon to 'trendies, upstarts, expatriates, new arrivals and nation-swapping billionaires.' It's a while since anyone has blamed the expats and the New Australians! Ryan conveniently ignores the fact that a clear majority of Australians want an Australian as head of state, not a foreign monarch.
      Hugh Stretton's essay 'Leaders', is indispensable reading. Like Don Watson, who follows him, he writes about Paul Keating, but there the parallel ends. In language of great clarity and potency Stretton regrets the economic policies of successive Australian governments of both persuasions and reminds us that fifteen years of reduced investment and taxes and services have not produced the promised full employment, social advances and acceptance by the world economy.Ê
      In his speech-cum-essay, Geoffrey Blainey points out that globalisation is not new. Even before Federation, Australia was dependent on the world economy. Globalisation has always been 'to some degree an effect of peace', he argues, wondering if it will again be thwarted by world conflict in the new century.
      Paul Sheehan, author of Among the Barbarians, writes about the decline of both major political formations. In another clever juxtaposition, Gideon Haigh then profiles 'The Last Barbarian' in one of the more incisive essays in the book. The first sentence alone is coolly loaded in a manner of which Jane Austen would approve: 'Paul Sheehan's desk on level 27 of the John Fairfax headquarters at Darling Harbour is a small but well-positioned fortification overlooking the suite of editorial offices.' Upper levels, suites and fortifications tell us much, but quietly. The intrinsic modesty of the essay form often disguises labyrinths.
      Nor is Australian theatre spared. Jack Hibberd, in an engaging polemic, bemoans the antiquated state of our subsidised theatre and the 'masturbations of Post-Modernism'. He can be parti pris at times, and the repeated digs at the arts editor of the Age become tedious, but his summation is powerful. 'Is a culture that rolls over so readily, owing to thinness and lack of deep purchase, a culture that is rapidly losing distinctiveness in a blandifying wash of globalisation and brute capitalism, a popular culture that thrives on imitation, equipped for the authentic independence of a republic?'
      Ê In a brilliant stroke, Craven includes the text of the other John Howard's 'apology' drawn from John Clarke's masterly television series The Games. 'For many thousands of people,' Craven writes, 'it was much the greatest 'essay' of the year.' Will the next prime minister refer to this piece when he or she writes that inevitable speech?
      Not all the essays deal with questions of economic capitulation or national identity. We get several of Helen Garner's weekly columns in the Age. The practice of combining discrete articles is not always successful. Garner's poignant closing article, on her mother's descent into dementia, would have sufficed. Juliette Hughes' defence of the Harry Potter books looks odd here because too specific and ephemeral. The extract from Hilary McPhee's long-awaited memoir is very welcome. We meet her as a child, greatly influenced by a grandmother who was a voracious reader but who was incapable of acknowledging that Australia had produced a decent poem or novel. McPhee ends up in London in the 1960s contemplating her return to Australia 'a place where there was a chance to make something from the damaged past.'

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