essays

INSPIRED EAVESDROPPING

IF CHRISTOPHER SKASE were to devote some of his enforced leisure to the perusal of volumes of essays (it's a beguiling thought) what on earth, I wonder, would he make of this one -- this motley lay-it-on-the-table prose catalogue and commentary on the places, the land, the characters, mores, ideas and connections he so lavishly and carelessly consigned to his wake.

A self-aware Skase might read and recognise himself strutting with the would-be wide boys down Henry Lawson's King Street in 1899 (in 'If I Could Paint'). In an ideal world he might even be chastened by Patrick White's or Alister Kershaw's profound understandings of expatriatism, but also by their good reasons for coming home.

White and Kershaw are timeless grace notes in the strong middle section (essays from the '50s) of this book. Lawson's high relief, fin de siècle depression landscape (Paddy's market, Saturday night, with a goaded women scalding, 'Where am I to get hokey-pokey money from?') is period to its last stitch ('Do you want to know what strapped pants are? Well, rip the side and 'tween-leg seams of a pair of pants...'). And yet he is immediate too, eerily familiar. Our millenarian anxieties now are not very different and our touts and villains have changed only their techniques. Pity more of them don't read essays instead of the stock market listings. But they don't, and won't, and that very fact provides some of the matter for the kind of musing that cross-hatches this book, turning it into a vivid and sustained cultural conversation. Salusinszky has expanded his editor's role into inspired eavesdropping.

If somewhat less vividly than Lawson's, many of the other nineteenth century essays play tug of war with memory and moral sensibility. We have been over this ground, thought similar thoughts, salved ourselves with related ironies. 'The history of the Australian essay teaches us much, but proves nothing, except perhaps the truth of the saying that what goes around comes around,' Salusinszky remarks in his agreeably spiky introduction. But in the early essays there are surprises too, not quite locked up in belle-lettristic language. One hundred plus years ago men and women looked about them, quizzed their own observations, then made something startling, or simply dignified, out of the collision of self and experience -- the classic task of the essayist. When Sir James Martin gives an account of `sun-set' as seen from South Head in 1838, only an unselfconscious grandiloquence (`Happy land, ejaculated I') makes his task distinct from one we might attempt now. The sunset is the same -- extraordinary and irreducible. But not the received sunset of Florence or New York -- Martin understood that. The writer's problem remains the intractable one: how to be honest, to be faithful to the local yet still nudge the mystical -- without becoming vaporous. Styles shift, fashions alter, but Michel de Montaigne was onto a good thing when he began this elastic dialogue between self and world. Essays have their currency not in their subjects so much as in their interrogative intent. Thus, Salusinszky's selection and editing of this heterogeneous mass of material has the effect, whether engineered or serendipitous, of telescoping the times.

Not that you can't trace the evolution of what he calls 'something elusively but decidedly Australian' in the patterning of these sixty-one essays written between 1829 and 1996. The collection as a whole marks not just stylistic shifts but paradigm leaps, implicitly noted, as you would expect in an Oxford book that pays its dues to inclusiveness and history. Some of the early pieces now seem almost comic in their anglo or eurocentricity, their maleness, their pre-Freudian confidence. Some are Australian but in unrecoverable ways. It is not longer possible to write as Sir Ernest Scott did (in 1914) in his centenary celebration of Matthew Flinders. Seamless commendation of heroic, even stoic, devotion to duty doesn't recommend itself to our contemporary scepticism. But nonetheless you can't resist the timeless poignancy of Scott's Matthew Flinders, the man sailors called 'Flinders the Indefatigable', writing his punctilious letters to the Commissioners for victualling His Majesty's Navy, explaining that he had been obliged to expend considerably more than the allowed sum on candles because His Majesty's sloop Investigator carried six men of science who worked in their cabins at night.

Scott, like many of his fellows -- the assured early twentieth century essayists in this volume -- leaves much out that we would now want in. Revision is endemic in the essay as in culture.

Morag Fraser is the editor of Eureka Street.

Return to October 1997 / AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW