The Best Australian Essays 2011

The Best Australian Essays 2011 This collection, edited by Ramona Koval, has amassed a body of work that is all together cyclic, deafening, relevant and brave. Given the scope of the content, one feels dwarfed, altered – as if suddenly renamed Ishmael and swallowed, or perhaps, stolen, kidnapped and knocked out, resurfacing in different locations and time periods. And, whilst in the blackout, we soaked, became aware of and eventually refamiliarised with the Australia we call home.

Strikingly so, it is Delia Falconer who reminds us of a Sydney that once was (and with imagination still is), speaking nostalgically of Chippendale’s mould-caked houses and of a city whose pleasures “are so bound up with revulsion” and their “beauty so dependent on the knowledge of corruption” that we become Falconer’s fingernails clawing at the excrement and fascination of Kings Cross, the beaches, this city’s gradual acceptance of gay culture: we emerge from the seething beast’s underbelly renewed with a look to the future.

Then, Amanda Lohrey glimpses into the private life of David Walsh, the atheist, almost mythic, man responsible for Australia’s newest and conceivably most intriguing museum: the Museum of Old and New Art. Both art collector and professional gambler, we learn that Walsh believes his “path in life a fluke, a product of circumstance”. Fascinating in themselves, though given the breadth and themes of the book’s essays, it is possible MONA and Walsh represent a new Australia, one that is independent and strong, which, now-not-so-alone in our globalised world, has grown tired of recycled themes, of trailing the ideologies of other countries and is ready to pursue its own restless mind.

As in William Laffan’s essay on Sidney Nolan, where he describes his art to be “blurred constantly, and enigmatically, shifting”, Koval reminds us too that Australia – and the world – is lying on the proverbial fault lines of an unfathomable shift. Presented in Robert Manne’s The Cypherpunk Revolutionary: Julian Assange and MJ Hyland’s The Trial of Mary Bale, we are reminded not only of the inconceivable speed at which information can travel, but also to the insurmountable damage – the stripping of a personal freedom that should be integral to democracy – Internet censorship could cause.

Nicolas Rothwell’s Living Hard, Dying Young in the Kimberly paints a somber, if not dystopian, picture of the Australian North. He writes “The Kimberly is an expanse, its dispersed people bound by family ties: just over 40,000 people live there, half that total Indigenous, their median age twenty-one: many of that number are without work and unable to read or write to any degree of competence.” We learn of the region’s alarming suicide rate. Rothwell’s essay is a screaming, pleading wake up to the entire country that something needs to be done because “it is breakdown time. Everyone can see and no one says. A crisis of grief is unfolding: a spiritual collapse so deep it cannot be held back or gainsaid.” Perhaps the most important piece in the compilation, it is summed up best by Rothwell’s concluding sentence: “Those watching, on both sides of the divide between peoples, struggle for words, and fear they may be watching as an entire culture, acting collectively, destroys itself.”

The Best Australian Essays 2011 is a deeply affecting, highly intelligent look at an Australia we may or may not be familiar with.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

The Best Australian Essays 2011
Black Inc
Paperback, 320 pages
RRP $29.95