The Best Australian Essays 2017

by Anna Goldsworthy

  All my life Italian has been my big dirty secret. Even now the Australians don’t know I carry it around inside. I used to feel that if people knew I spoke Italian they would charge me with something: breaking some kind of law, possession of a foreign language. Because I sound very Australian it’s like being undercover.

  *

  The natural thing for me to do was to turn my Italian into a job, so many years ago I became a translator. This meant I could read, write and speak and be paid for it.

  One day I’m called to a hospital. At the patient’s bedside the Australian doctor says to me in English:

  Tell this man he is dying and will be dead in a few days. He has very powerful bacteria in his blood and our strongest antibiotics have been unable to kill them. In fact the bacteria have been feeding off the antibiotics. The bacteria love the antibiotics and they have been growing. He now has very healthy, large and strong bacteria in his blood and soon the blood will no longer carry oxygen but just bacteria to his brain and heart and lungs. We have told him this in English but he apparently wants to hear it from someone like you in his own language which is Italian, is that right?

  I nod. I am overwhelmed at the responsibility that is being thrust on the Italian language about to come out of my mouth. I am overcome with grief but as I open my mouth and start to speak I feel that old familiarity and warmth enter the relationship that the language is gently constructing between me and the dying man. He looks at me and watches the words flow out of my mouth. He relaxes visibly when I start speaking Italian. He has no family or friends who speak Italian.

  The dying man taught me something that day. When he was born, the first language he heard was Italian. Now that he was dying he wanted to be told in the same language. Dying was like a new birth. He would come out of the womb again to the sound of his death. Your own language is your mother holding your hand, caressing your forehead. You do not want to die in a foreign language. As I left I remember thinking how I hoped the last language he would hear would be Italian, but this was not likely as he would be surrounded by Australian, English-speaking palliative care nurses.

  One afternoon I went to the Royal Dental Hospital. The Italian patient there was being seen by a mouth, tongue and jaw specialist.

  The doctor greeted me and gestured to the patient. What the patient said almost made me laugh. I stopped myself just in time.

  Mmmmlowamwololoalow.

  He tried again and failed.

  Mmmmlowamwololoalow

  The Australian specialist said:

  Tell the man this: his tongue, his mouth, his lips, have forgotten how to speak. He has lived alone for so many years and has not spoken to anyone for such a long time that he has forgotten how to form words.

  The man looked at me and I repeated in Italian what the doctor had said. Then he smiled and nodded and thanked me, speaking directly to me in Italian, without a problem in the world. The Australian looked at us suspiciously. What’s going on here? He decided to check whether there had been some kind of miracle cure, and asked him in English to say his name. The Italian man said:

  Mmmmlowamwololoalow

  That day I realised not only that human beings yearn to die in their own language but also that they need to speak to each other in their natural language.

  But a tragedy was looming.

  *

  When we arrived in Australia, at first it seemed that we were surrounded by Italians speaking Italian.

  As decades passed family friends got older and died or moved and disappeared off the face of the earth. After all, they were my parents’ friends not mine. I lost my Italian contacts. One thing is certain: all over Australia the Italians who speak Italian naturally are now dying.

  Like stars in a black night sky the lights have been going out. You don’t notice at first because each star is just a tiny pinprick. But by the time most of them have gone you see a large black space, until finally all you see are the few stars that are left. My Short History of the Italian Language is coming to an end.

  My mother stopped speaking and died, my in-laws and old family friends died. And now there is just one star left – my father.

  Oh Morè, queste chiacchierate con te mi fanno bene, sai come mi fanno bene? Sono una cosa favolosa.

  That’s my father telling me how much he enjoys our chats on the phone. With my brother, we’re the only Giovannonis from San Ginese in Australia left who speak Italian.

  But back to the beginning.

  Morè.

  Morè.

  In the natural order of things my father will die soon. He’s ninety years old.

  He’s the only person in the world now who calls me Morè.

  I never thought it would matter to me to be called Morè but when I stop hearing it, it will hurt.

  *

  My father lives in the country and used to call me to talk in Italian about everything. One night we had people around for dinner and he rang to ask me about the life span of his goose. He had kept a pet goose for twenty years and wanted to know how much time it had left. I googled it and told him a goose can live for twenty years. Well then, he said, time’s almost up (I just translated that into English for your benefit).

  Another time he was in his car and he stopped by the side of the road to call me to tell me how beautiful the sunset was. My father comes from a long line of peasants. He was a tobacco grower all his life, doing hard physical work, working long hours in mud or on dry cracked earth, but part of him has always been a romantic poet. He loved reading Italian books and magazines. He loved talking.

  *

  In the natural order of things my father will die soon. He’s ninety years old. He’s the only person left in the world who calls me Morè.

  My Short History of the Italian Language ends this way.

  It was inevitable that it would end this way. It ends with the realisation that the worst thing for a natural speaker of Italian is the inevitable silence at the other end of the phone line.

  Up a Wombat’s Freckle

  Barry Humphries

  ‘I hope there won’t be any colloquialisms in this fillum Barry,’ said Tom Stacey breathlessly. The senior Sydney accountant had bounded across the tarmac at Kingsford-Smith aerodrome to catch us before we boarded the flight to London to start filming The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. The director Bruce Beresford and I were co-authors of the screenplay and Mr Stacey was charged with administering the total production budget of $250,000 advanced to us by the Australian Film Corporation. He was nervous. Naturally I reassured him: ‘It’s a family film, Tom,’ I lied in my teeth. When the film was released on 12 October 1972 and returned its total investment to the AFC in a matter of weeks, it was, notwithstanding, excoriated by every critic, journalist and disc jockey in Australia as a vulgar calumny; a cruel misrepresentation of Australian refinement. The script was a ceaseless stream of colloquialisms – new, obsolete and invented. It was the filthiest Australian film of the year, the nadir of Australian cinema, which by then had entered its soft focus ‘idyllic’ phase, representing the nice Australia we all wanted to inhabit. A few short years were to pass before another film company produced a sanitised version of Barry McKenzie about a working-class fellow who chased crocodiles and always wore a hat, a hero moreover who would have delighted the Stacey family. He soon became the approved and ‘iconic’ Australian hero. The reader should be warned that there are one or two colloquialisms in this essay, but Australian colloquialisms are either quaint and innocent or merely filthy. However, they are always sincere. The English have twenty-five ways of saying ‘sorry’ and they don’t mean one of them.

  However, I was overjoyed to find that the term ‘pillow biter’ had found its way into the magnificent, second edition of the Australian National Dictionary, edited by Bruce Moore under the venerable imprint of the Oxford University Press. I am proud to say that I was present when my friend, the aforementioned filmmaker, Bruce Beresford, coined the term, inspired in the mid-1970s by a notorious
case when a leading British Liberal politician made a much-publicised response to the allegations of an importunate catamite. The blackmailer complained in a letter, read to the court, of the initial discomfort of unlawful penetration. In response, The Right Honourable gentleman exhorted his correspondent to ‘bite the pillow’. This exchange, at once graphic, homophobic or obfusc, is commemorated in the term ‘pillow-biter’, which I managed to successfully promote, especially in Sydney where no pillow goes unbitten.

  This scholarly two volume work contains a generous entry under the word ‘chunder’, a word unknown in my youth outside the Geelong and Ballarat grammar schools, until I relentlessly promulgated it in the comic strip of Barry Mackenzie in Private Eye. There the eponymous hero regularly and compulsively regurgitated. This expressive, even onomatopoeic term took off in trendy London circles and is now in universal, colloquial use.

  I have in my London library, an interesting collection of Australian dictionaries from Dr Karl Lentzner’s Slang English of Australia of 1892, Cornelius Crowe’s Slang Dictionary of 1895 right through to the lexicons of Eric Partridge and Sydney J. Baker, and, pride of my collection, the very rare First World War publication by W.H. Downing, Digger Dialects. And now eclipsing them all are the twin tomes of the new Australian National Dictionary.

  Of course this work has not confined itself to the vernacular, but there is an arresting definition on every page. I am delighted, for example, to see that the ‘mallee root’ merits a learned entry. In obsolete rhyming slang a ‘mallee’ referred to sexual congress. Mallee roots were familiar objects in my Melbourne childhood, regularly delivered by our local woodman. They were the heavy, nodular roots of various eucalypts, deracinated from the red soil of the Mallee district in Victoria which subsequently became a dustbowl. For the middle classes, they were a popular, slow-burning fuel and I often watched my father heave one onto the grate. I am reminded of an anecdote once related by the comedian, Dick Bentley. During the London Blitz there was a small and subterranean bar near Piccadilly Circus, frequented by ‘sensitive’ gentlemen. One evening during a heavy air-raid which jangled the crème de menthe and Kummel bottles behind the bar, an expatriate Australian ballet dancer (Robert Helpmann?), always lightly rouged, staggered down the stairs covered with dust, ‘Did you hear that?’ he cried. ‘It blew a chip off me mallee root pendant!’ A brave jest which only a Melbourne or Adelaide person would really appreciate.

  Needless to say, there are innumerable expressions to describe thirst and drunkenness but there are some I have noted which have eluded the lexicographer and not hitherto found their way into any dictionary. They illustrate Australian verbal ingenuity, and in stretching the expressive possibilities of the English language, they often possess a kind of sardonic poetry. A thirsty man might therefore say, ‘I’m as dry as a Pommy’s bathmat’, which incorporates a reference to the well-known English aversion to bathing. I’ve also heard an inebriated man employ what must be the most offensive rhyming slang for intoxication when he declared, ‘Sorry, mate, I’m a bit Schindlers.’

  Of course, the use of the word ‘mate’ is ubiquitous in Australia and has slowly lost its old, comradely meaning. Not seldom it can now have a hostile ring, as in ‘Whadaya think you’re doin’, mate?’ It is often used by prime ministers, especially the Honourable Tony Abbott, whom I otherwise admire, who uses the word in order to sound down-to-earth and patriotic. We have even invented a thing called ‘mateship’ which imputes to us qualities of fellowship, generosity and even bravery which we do not always exhibit (see under ‘world-class’ and ‘internationally-acclaimed’).

  Women are not always named respectfully and are not necessarily offended when called ‘horn-bags’ or ‘ceiling inspectors’. The female anatomy has been a perennial inspiration to the anonymous genius who enriches our language with his verbal inventions. Female breasts are ‘norks’ or ‘fun-bags’ and in days gone by, if well-developed, commemorated a famous mail-bag robbery of 1863 in the New South Wales town of Mudgee: ‘She’s got norks on her like a pair of Mudgee mail bags.’ The shape of the female pudenda has long been compared to the map of Tasmania and the ‘ labia majora’ has not escaped the scabrous attentions of the Australian slang-meister and, if pendulous, I once heard them compared to the accoutrement of a once popular Hollywood cowboy: ‘Geez they looked like Gene Autry’s saddle bags!’

  The modern Australian male, like men all over the world, rarely wears a hat, but in the 1930s and 1940s he never went out bare-headed. The artist Sidney Nolan told me his uncle once mysteriously referred to the crowd at a football match as having ‘heads on them like mice’. I never understood this phrase until I saw an old newsreel of a footie match (Aussies love infantile diminutives: ‘footie’ for football, ‘chewy’ for chewing gum, etc.) and seen from above I observed a multitude of grey fedoras with their pinched crowns, which resembled nothing less than a plague of mice.

  The editors of the new Australian National Dictionary have magnificently recorded what must surely be the richest vernacular in history of human utterance, and if you don’t believe me you can stick your head up a wombat’s freckle.

  How Not to Speak Polish

  Janine Mikosza

  Clipped off by infinity. Poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky is describing the ends of a bridge arching over the Canal Grande on a night trip around Venice. On my reading of Brodsky’s words to Janina, she speaks of her father: she is the bridge with no ends and her father is infinity.

  Two Poles walk into a cafe. One is Janina, a second-generation Australian; I am an immigrant who occasionally struggles with the peculiarities of speaking English in this country. I want to write about Janina’s life, so we sit in the cafe on Acland Street in St Kilda and Janina tells me she is scared of her father. She is middle-aged – at her last birthday she turned forty-eight – but she remains scared of a man she hasn’t seen for many years. The fear sticks to her guts and it is the same size as it was when she was eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen years old.

  Here is one meaning of fear: when a thought of someone or something arrives unwelcomed in your mind and begins a tug of war between your heart muscle with its needy hurt and every other muscle fibre in your body, rigid with adrenaline.

  To unknot this sensation, the thought requires shaking loose. To shake loose means its opposite here: it is to sit still with a thought and the emotion fed by that thought. In her hands, Janina holds a filthy folded piece of paper. She unwraps it and reveals a handwritten list of dos and don’ts for the times in the day when her heart, mind and body separate and compete for attention. Do sit with the discomfort, which will roll over you like a wave (but mostly like a tsunami, Janina says). Do name the emotion. Don’t resist it. Don’t chase the thought or the feeling. Do accept the pain, and that what you are feeling right at this moment is your hurting heart, and that it will pass. Do this repeatedly, for as long as it takes until the suffering ends.

  Janina speaks of her father in a whisper using his given name and even this is a reluctant utterance. She was born in Australia but carries his European past in her blood, skin and muscle. For four decades Janina has not spoken about what happened to her as a child. Some mornings she is surprised to be alive, surprised that she can see out another day. She is sensitised to the intensities of daily life, and recites to me lines from a poem (by a poet whose name she cannot recall) that reminds her of this vulnerability: ‘With disbelief I touch the cold marble, / with disbelief I touch my own hand.’

  It is Czeslaw Milosz. This, I can understand. Milosz writes poems only in Polish, refusing to write for English speakers: ‘Let them accommodate; why should I accommodate to them?’ he said.

  Janina says: I can only know this Polish man through translation by another.

  *

  Janina talks to me about a professor of literature, Elaine Scarry, whose book The Body in Pain explores pain as being not ‘of’ or ‘for’ something. We have a fear of something (terrorism, something happening to our chil
dren) and we hold a love for someone or something (a tiny wounded bird in our hands), but pain has no object in the external world. Pain is not of or for anything: it can only ever be itself. And pain itself has the ability to destroy a sufferer’s language.

  The experience of suffering great pain and watching others in pain can unmake humans in different ways, Janina says. Although the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia is ongoing, and although the media is saturated with commentary on how damaging this form of abuse can be, she says the inability to understand or empathise with another’s pain is why some human beings can listen to adult victims of child abuse and say: It happened decades ago. Can’t you move past it? Why didn’t you speak up sooner?

  Janina knows these questions well; she regularly asks them of herself.

  Vivian Gornick writes: ‘the way life feels is inevitably the way life is lived’. Janina says she struggles with her shattered identity – her sense of ‘I’ – and now and again life feels too painful for her to continue. She says she cannot help feeling this way. She wants it to be otherwise, but she cannot find the words to make it so.

  *

  And what of the commissioners and county court judges exposed to accounts of institutional sexual violence against children or sexual abuse within the social institution of the family, Janina asks. Imagine the pain of hearing another’s agony so intricately described and watching the faces of those reliving relentless memories from long ago.

  The commissioners overseeing the royal commission have access to counselling and peer support, I say. A County Court of Victoria worker told me the court offers a similar program to help judges, associates and tipstaves with the vicarious trauma that can result from listening, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, to testimonies of sexual violence.