Published by Black Inc.,
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Introduction and selection © Anna Goldsworthy and Black Inc. 2017
Anna Goldsworthy asserts her moral rights in the collection. Individual essays © retained by the authors, who assert their rights to be known as the author of their work.
9781863959605 (paperback)
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Contents
Introduction
* * *
Tim Flannery
Extravagant, Aggressive Birds Down Under
Robert Skinner
Lessons from Camels
Harriet Riley
Endlings
Sonya Hartnett
Hello, Stranger
John Clarke
Commonplace
Stan Grant
A Makarrata Declaration:
A Declaration of Our Country
Uluru Statement from the Heart
Keane Shum
The Tamarind Is Always Sour
Richard Cooke
Bonfire of the Narratives
Nick Feik
Killing Our Media
Micheline Lee
The Art of Dependency
Shannon Burns
In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class
Mandy Sayer
People Power at the Ponderosa
Michael Mohammed Ahmad
Bad Writer
Moreno Giovannoni
A Short History of the Italian Language
Barry Humphries
Up a Wombat’s Freckle
Janine Mikosza
How Not to Speak Polish
Melissa Howard
Now No-One Here Is Alone
Amanda C. Niehaus
Pluripotent
Jennifer Rutherford
House of Flowers
Michael Adams
Salt Blood
Sam Vincent
Peasant Dreaming
Lech Blaine
The Bystander
Helen Garner
Why She Broke
James Wood
Helen Garner’s Savage Self-Scrutiny
J.M. Coetzee
Zama: Life at the Limits of Empire
Sebastian Smee
Art Walks a Tightrope
Anwen Crawford
Towards Joy
* * *
Publication Details
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
In the New Yorker earlier this year, Jia Tolentino declared that ‘the personal-essay boom is over’, dating its ‘hard endpoint’ to the 2016 US presidential election, after which individual perspectives no longer seem ‘a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject’. In an era of fake news, she suggested, old-fashioned reportage has a renewed appeal, while the political has become so lurid that the personal struggles to compete.
Donald Trump certainly provides rich material for the essayist: so rich, in fact, that it risks being indigestible, blocking anyone’s capacity to absorb anything else. As Martin McKenzie-Murray wrote in the Saturday Paper in March, ‘incredulity has demanded rivers of ink to express itself’ – a phenomenon not limited to the country that (almost) voted Trump in. Based on the submissions to this publication, it would be possible to produce a Best Australian Trump Essays 2017, with many choice specimens to spare.
And yet the Trump victory is not a repudiation of the personal. Nor does it spell an end to essayistic biodiversity. Instead it is a reminder to heed voices too readily dismissed. In his widely circulated essay ‘In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class’, Shannon Burns recommends that ‘progressives might benefit from considering lower-class points of view, and the experiences that forge them, at least once in a while’. Engaging with other points of view and perspectives scarcely needs defending: it is one of the projects of literature. It might also provide a useful prophylactic – if not against future Trump victories, then at least against being blindsided by them.
The problem, then, may be less one of ‘individual perspectives’ than of the self-replicating ‘individual perspective’ filtered through the aperture of the Facebook feed – the technological hall of mirrors. There is no shortage of individual perspectives in these pages. It is possible to weary of the first person – that clamouring me, demanding to be heard, like the most insistent of toddlers – but perhaps there is greater humility in owning up to it than in renouncing it completely, with all the omniscience that implies. And it is not without distinguished precedent. It is almost part of the genre contract to quote Montaigne at the start of any essay collection, so here he is in his first book of essays of 1580: ‘Je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre’ (‘I am myself the matter of my book’).
Of course, the self in itself is not enough: it is what you do with it that counts. As William Deresiewicz observed in an essay about essays for the Atlantic, ‘what makes a personal essay an essay and not just an autobiographical narrative is precisely that it uses personal material to develop, however speculatively or intuitively, a larger conclusion.’
Is that, then, the definition of an essay? Everyone has their own theory. According to my own (evolving) criteria, an essay is not a poem (nonfiction though a poem often is); nor is it a speech, which operates according to rhythmic and textual laws of its own. Not all works of journalism, memoir or criticism are essays, though they can be if they reach beyond their subject and offer more, including the capacity to move. (Anwen Crawford represents a high-water mark here: the title of her analysis of Lady Gaga, Bob Dylan and Prince, ‘Towards Joy’, says it all.) That’s about as far as my definition goes. The more complete definition is: these things here, between the covers of this book.
When a group of essays get together in a room they start talking to each other, often in surprising ways. I wondered if I had favoured subjects that interested me, or if the emergence of certain themes reflected the so-called national conversation. Birds make repeat appearances – flying heralds, perhaps, of environmental crisis – as does displacement, not least in Keane Shum’s definitive ‘The Tamarind Is Always Sour’. Domestic abuse and mental health are recurrent themes, reflecting a growing acceptance of these conversations, as is digital disruption. And there is quite a lot about language: not surprising, really, given that this is a subject to which writers give a great deal of thought.
There is one piece in this collection that is not penned by an Australian but takes an Australian as its subject: James Wood’s appreciation of Helen Garner from the New Yorker. It seemed fitting to include it, not least because Garner’s voice echoes through many essays here, as it does through Australian letters at large. Many times, as I read submissions, I registered the quiet skewering of amour-propre; the transcription of an overhead conversation; the more or less successfully deployed reduction to tears – Garneresque moments assimilated into a writer’s own style.
Still, I doubt there is such a thing as an ‘Australian essay’, and nor would one wish there to be (for one thing, it would presage the un-Australian essay). As Michael Mohammed Ahmad thunders in ‘Bad Writer’, ‘while bad writing in Western Sydney has everything in common with bad wri
ting everywhere else, good writing in Western Sydney, and good writing everywhere else, has nothing in common with good writing anywhere else – it is good as an unhappy family is unhappy, in its own way.’
The essays in this collection are good, then, in the ways that unhappy families are unhappy, and their diversity is perhaps the most Australian thing about them. They operate at different velocities – some are sentence-savouring, others story-driven – and have different agendas. The most thrilling thing for me is the number of younger voices to be found here. Though much in these pages might lead to discouragement, the existence of these voices – stylish, vital, frequently wise – is a source of hope.
Anna Goldsworthy
Extravagant, Aggressive Birds Down Under
Tim Flannery
Towards the end of his highly enjoyable book Where Song Began, Tim Low informs us that ‘it might be said that the world has one hemisphere weighted towards mammals and one towards birds.’ The hemisphere weighted towards mammals is the northern one. And Low makes a convincing case that, in the south, birds of a most extravagant type occur. But is the southern hemisphere truly weighted towards birds? One window into the question is through bird–human interactions. We humans are used to getting our way with nature, but in the Antipodes birds occasionally gain the upper hand.
Such was the case when, in 1932, Australia decided to declare war on the emu, an enormous flightless bird whose image is emblazoned on the country’s coat of arms. Sir George Pierce, Australia’s defence minister, was beseeched by farmers from Australia’s south-west for deliverance from the ravening creatures, which were swarming out of the desert in countless thousands, driven south by drought. Sir George agreed to help, and so was sparked what would become known as the Great Emu War.
Major C.P.W. Meredith of the Seventh Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery was ordered to proceed with armed troops to the environs of Campion, a small town located near the emu ‘front line’. There, the army was to use Lewis guns (machine guns) to disperse the invaders. Hostilities commenced on 1 November, but the birds were at such a distance that gunfire was largely ineffective. The next day, a thousand emus were seen advancing on a dam. Meredith and his troops were in a splendid position to inflict maximum casualties, but after only fewer than twelve birds were killed the Lewis guns jammed. Frustrated by the fleetness of the birds, Meredith had the machine guns mounted on trucks, but the emus easily outran the vehicles.
A month later, a crestfallen Meredith was forced to explain to the Australian parliament that the war had been lost. He said of his foe:
If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world. They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like the Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop.
The war was not over, however. Irregular troops in the form of bounty hunters were enlisted, but even they could not subdue the foe, and the conflict continued for decades.
Being defeated in war by one’s avifauna is ignominious. But Australians are inured to being stung, bitten, envenomated or outright eaten alive by a hostile fauna. Incredibly, Low claims that even Australian songbirds are dangerous. The Australian magpie looks like a very large jay, and when it breeds in the spring, it turns the country into a battle ground. Magpies defend their territory by ‘dive-bombing’ ‘invaders’ from the rear, which is why you may see Australian pedestrians waving umbrellas into a clear sky, or cyclists with rearward-looking faces painted on their helmets.
Magpies, according to Low, ‘can distinguish kindly adults from scheming boys’. Postmen are particularly detested: Australia is perhaps the only country on earth where they fear songbirds as much as dogs. And those whom magpies particularly loathe will be identified and targeted, even if they haven’t been seen for years. Low tells of a ‘terrorized school in Brisbane’ where ‘throngs of screaming parents at the gates were trying to get their terrified children to run quickly across the open area to the main building where the school medical officer was waiting with the first aid kit.’ Over two weeks, more than a hundred children had their faces cut by magpies. But the damage can be much worse. Magpies will sometimes land in front of a person they despise, and then leap at their face. Each year, one or two people are stabbed in the eyes.
Surveys indicate that 85 per cent of Australians have been harassed by magpies, so it seems remarkable that a magpie that blinded a boy in the Queensland town of Toowoomba was relocated rather than killed. In 1856, the naturalist George Bennett said of these remarkable creatures, ‘It is a bird of much importance in its own estimation, struts about quite fearless of danger, and evinces, on many occasions, great bravery.’ It says something of the national character of Australians that they can forgive such a creature almost anything.
Australia and New Guinea are joined at times of low sea level and share many species in common. Consequently, Low uses ‘Australia’ as shorthand for Australia–New Guinea throughout his book. The flightless cassowary inhabits the rainforests of New Guinea and north Queensland. The size of a man, it has a gaudy purple, yellow and red head that bears a high crest and a frighteningly malicious eye. On its foot is a four-inch-long dagger-like claw, which Low suspects is used to ‘kill many more people in New Guinea than tigers do in most countries in Asia’.
I worked for twenty years in New Guinea, and am certain that Low is correct. It’s the male cassowaries that incubate the eggs and care for the chicks, and they will attack out of the blue if you go anywhere near their young. There being so very few accounts of cassowary attacks (because most happen among remote tribes living in dense jungle), it is worthwhile recounting one instance here. Professor Joe Mangi is a friend and archaeologist who told me of an attack that occurred in the 1980s in Papua New Guinea’s Southern Highlands. The victim had found a cassowary nest and was taking the eggs (which are bright green and up to five and a half inches long) when he heard a booming noise. He barely had time to grab his machete and leap to meet the attacking bird. They met midair, the man severing the cassowary’s leg, the bird disembowelling the man with its claw.
Joe dispatched the wounded cassowary and gathered the man’s intestines, which were stretched over yards of forest floor. Uncertain about medical treatment, he emptied the entire contents of his medical kit onto the guts before gathering them up and stuffing them back into the abdominal cavity. When the villagers arrived, they daubed their faces with white clay and began mourning: they considered the victim a dead man. With the nearest airstrip a full day’s walk away, Joe urged that a stretcher be made. But the victim sat up and said, ‘You take my first wife. You the second. And you get the pigs.’ Joe’s reassurances that the man would survive if he could be got to a hospital were as cries in the wilderness.
Carrying the stretcher over the broken limestone country was hard going, so Joe sent two boys ahead to request fresh carriers. They never arrived, and when Joe got to the village he found it in mourning for the victim. The village chief was so enraged at the youths, who had told him that the victim had died, that he struck them on the head with a piece of timber. Now the cassowary had claimed three victims.
When the stretcher carrying the first victim approached the airstrip an aircraft was heard, but Joe’s feet were so torn that he was crippled, so he sent a muscular villager ahead to ask the pilot to wait for the casualties. The young Australian pilot was naturally alarmed at the sight of a Papuan charging towards his plane, his grass pubic covering waving wildly in the breeze. He leapt into the cockpit and began preparations for take-off when he noticed that the Papuan, who spoke no English, had grasped the propeller. Joe arrived in time to explain things, and the victim made a full recovery.
Low offers a curious aside about emus and cassowaries. They are some of the few birds that possess penises. Only 3 per cent of all bird species are so endowed, the other 97 per cent getting by with a ‘cloacal kiss’ to transfer sperm. Possession of a penis is an ancestral condition
inherited from the dinosaurs, and just why most birds have lost their penis is a curious question. Low puts it down to hygiene, saying that ‘birds face more disease risks than mammals since they use the same opening for defecation and sex’. But what to make of the Argentine lake duck, whose sixteen-inch phallus is longer than its body? Low offers the rather feeble observation that ducks are cleaner than most birds because their bottoms are immersed in water. But if there is no disease risk, then why do some female ducks possess multiple false vaginas?
Another curious question concerns why Australia’s birds are so aggressive, and often so large. The continent’s mammals are mostly marsupials, and Low claims that they are rather poor competitors for the birds, so birds have come to dominate some ecological niches, including fruit-eating in tropical forests – a niche exploited by cassowaries. But there is more to the story than that. Strange as it may seem, neither the cassowary nor the magpie can claim to be Australia’s most aggressive bird. That title must go to a rather drab grey member of the honeyeater family known as the noisy miner.
Accused in a scientific paper of ‘despotic aggressiveness’, the species has been recorded driving off fifty-seven rival types of bird. Indeed, the noisy miner’s aggression has led to it becoming ‘one of the most important mechanisms through which habitat fragmentation and degradation threaten populations of eastern Australian woodland birds’. ‘They will turn on almost anything,’ Low says: ‘koalas, cows, bats, pigs, snakes, lizards, people’, as well as other birds. And worse, they recruit allies in their bullying, including the aptly named butcherbird – a sharp-beaked, shrike-like predator that the noisy miners leave alone – provided they refrain from taking their eggs and young.
Noisy miners will even recruit humans as allies. Some years ago, a great fracas emanating from a mob of noisy miners outside my house in Sydney induced me to leave my work and investigate. As I stepped outside, the birds fell into silent expectation. Looking down, I saw a python. I got the distinct feeling that the noisy miners expected me to deal with it. But I like pythons, so I left it and returned inside. The howl of disappointed rage emerging simultaneously from dozens of beaks had to be heard to be believed. To get any peace, I was forced to move the snake.
The Best Australian Essays 2017 Page 1
