reviews | Jeff Sparrow

CONVENTIONAL PUFFERY

   Robert Dessaix (ed.): Best Australian Essays
   2004 (Black Inc., $24.95)

Many will remember 2004 for the bitterly fought election campaigns, for the destruction of Fallujah, for Abu Ghraib, for the High Court’s acquiescence to the indefinite detention of asylum seekers and for a host of other (equally dismal) events. Robert Dessaix remembers it for the noise. The year, complains the new editor of Best Australian Essays, was “uncommonly loud”. The world, like a selfish neighbour, refused to turn down its misery and thus “the gentle voice of the traditional essay [was] almost drowned out”.

But it’s not just the essay that had a bad year. According to Dessaix, 2004 sent many Australian writers themselves a bit gaga. “In the face of cataclysmic events”, he explains, the literati “beat drums”, they “fulminat[ed]” and “angrily thump[ed] pulpits, trying to shout evil down.”

As fond of a good fulmination as the next man, I opened my copy of Best Australian Essays with some anticipation, keen to see these drum-beating tub-thumpers in angry action. But though Dessaix acknowledges that “panic and seriously inflamed passion” encouraged the socially engaged rather than the ruminative, his selection includes only one full-blooded polemic—Richard Flanagan’s blistering denunciation of the deforestation of Tasmania.

Most of the other pieces are, in fact, examples of gentle, traditional essays. Thus we have Marion Halligan writing on cookbooks, Peter Conrad on Tintin, Kerryn Goldsworthy on choral singing, Chris Wallace-Crabbe on illness and Donald Horne on ageing. Many of these are, in themselves, accomplished and successful pieces of writing. George Seddon manages to make the trees of north-western Australia interesting to those of us who wouldn’t know a baobab from a basilisk, Nicholas Shakespeare’s nuanced essay on Somerset Maugham possesses the kick of a good whisky and soda, while Cassandra Pybus offers a fascinating historical detective story, tracking the life of the black American slave John Moseley, who was transported to Botany Bay:

[b]y a series of remarkable escapes, he finally found freedom and modest prosperity at the end of the world, where with consummate irony, he could describe himself as a tobacco planter from America, his ultimate escape from a dehumanising economy that categorised him as property.

Though Peter Mares contributes a more-in-sorrow-than-anger account of the death of Viliami Tangionoa in an Australian detention centre and Bruce Grant looks at Balinese culture in the context of the Sari Club bombing, there’s a glaring absence of writers intervening in the issues that dominated 2004. It’s a lack that makes Best Australian Essays a curiously timeless read, akin to flicking through old magazines in a dentist’s waiting room. Since Dessaix dismisses the long and noble tradition of polemical writing as “haranguing and hectoring”, he guts the book of interventions around the events that made the year distinctive. The ‘war on terror’ might cow gentle voices but it has inspired best-selling essay collections by Gore Vidal, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein and (God spare us!) Christopher Hitchens. Where are their Australian counterparts?

While Dessaix might prefer what he calls “intimate disclosures” to the “faceless assertions of public virtue”, he could have given his own hobbyhorse a fair ride without barring all other gallopers from the race. As it stands, the traditionalist, middle-brow aesthetic of his introduction (the personal over the public, the ruminative over the argumentative, the reflective over the angry, etc.) excludes most of Australia’s journals of dissent. Best Australian Essays includes pieces from Quadrant, Meanjin and Griffith Review, and selections from the Bulletin, the Age, Weekend Australian, Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review. But there’s no Overland, no Arena, and nothing from the smaller publications that sprang up in the last year or so (White-Ant, Spinach7, Seeing Red, etc.). Such journals are by their nature strident, and stridency is verboten.

There are other strange exclusions, too. If the elevation of Salaam Pax, the ‘Baghdad Blogger’, into an international celebrity during the Iraq war, drew attention to the growing clout of internet essayists, 2004 was the year blogging came in from the cold, with the Democratic National Convention actually issuing press accreditation to political bloggers. According to a recent survey, some eight million Americans now maintain their own blogs, while blog readership stands at 27 per cent of internet users. These are staggering statistics, and one suspects comparable numbers would emerge from an Australian study. Why then does Best Australian Essays show no interest whatsoever in local explorers of Blogastan?

Again, it seems a matter of the editor acting as gatekeeper rather than curator. You can see why online essayists might offend Dessaix’s MOR sensibilities: bloggers tend to be crass, aggressive and—often—political. Nonetheless, the rise of a new medium that has more people reading and writing essays than at any time in memory would seem a development worthy of at least a cursory mention.
When we buy 400 grams of ‘Best Australian Butter’, we accept the superlative on the packaging as conventional puffery of the supplier’s own wares, rather than an assessment of the relative merits of dairies throughout the country. Unless Black Inc. opens its essay collection to a broader range of voices, literary consumers will—with some justification—reach a similar conclusion.

Jeff Sparrow is Overland’s reviews editor and author, with sister Jill, of Radical Melbourne 2 (Vulgar Press, 2004).

Overland 178–autumn 2005, pp.74–75