The Best Australian Essays 2014 (37 page)

To be a writer or an artist preoccupied with landscape is to accept a weird and constant tension between the indoors and the outdoors, the abstract and the sensual. You work from both mind and body. You need to be thin-skinned. But this has its challenges. I'm particularly thin-skinned about weather. I have a craving for physical sensation, to be in a dynamic, living system. So I seem to spend half my working life fretting and plotting escape like a schoolboy. Sat near a window as a pupil, I was a dead loss. I remain so to this day. Which is why I make myself write indoors. I can't even hang a painting in my workroom, for what else is a painting but a window? My thoughts are sucked outward; I am entranced. So a lot of the time I work in a blank cubicle, my back to the view. Which means I spend quite a bit of the day restless. I'm forever getting up to leave the room, to stand outside in the sunlight for a minute, sniffing the wind, looking at the sky, the birds, listening to the state of the ocean.

Now and then, of course, I just bolt. I pile a few chattels into the LandCruiser and put my foot down. I know many Australian men and women possessed by the same impulse. The wide open road. To drive all day until sunset and then pull over in a different state of mind. There's often no purpose to these excursions beyond the immediate sensation of being in the open, the pleasure of rolling a swag out in a creekbed or in a hollow between dunes, to sit by a fire, to feel the stars come out like gooseflesh in the heavens. I don't think of it as escape. To me it's a homing impulse. Lying under the night sky I feel a sense of return. This feeling of homecoming is not unlike the way I felt as a kid coming in the back door at dusk when the homely smell of the laundry and the slap of the screen door restored me to myself in moments.

These homecomings can be harsh and bewildering. The places dearest to me can be hard to reach. Hence the LandCruiser. They are remote, austere, savage, unpredictable. And like taciturn cousins and leery in-laws they're not very forthcoming. They give you the stink-eye at breakfast, do what they can to make your stay uncomfortable. But homecomings are about submitting to the uncomfortably familiar, aren't they? Like a hapless adult child, you go back for more, despite yourself, eternally trying to figure out the puzzle of relationships with parents and siblings, perplexities of heritage, dependency, belonging. But you get sustenance from this, from the actual trying, by remaining open to mystery. For if you give up on home, you suspect you'll be left with nothing.

My country leans in on you. It weighs down hard. Like family.

I have spent a lot of time watching Australians do this family dance with the outdoors. Urban and prosperous as they are, living beyond the constraints of weather and nature in a way their forebears could never have foreseen, many seek to engage in an almost ritual courtship with the outdoors. We spend billions each year on off-road vehicles, caravans, campers and outdoor recreational equipment. This cultural impulse isn't just a matter of escaping the indoor servitude of working life. There is a palpable communal outward urge, a searching impulse, something embedded in our physical culture, our sensory make-up. To my mind it speaks of an implicit collective understanding that the land is still present at the corner of our eye, still
out there,
awaiting us, but also carried within, like some sense memory. There's such restlessness, such yearning. It's down hard and deep like the tap-root of a half-forgotten tree, and it shows no sign of withering away. For despite how ordered and franchised and air-conditioned contemporary life has become, the land remains a louring presence at the edge of people's minds. We've imbibed it despite ourselves; it's in our bones like a sacramental ache. Waiting for us. If not a felt presence, then a looming absence. I can't count the number of times I've been standing in a supermarket queue when a complete stranger blurts out, apropos of nothing that I can make out, that one day they're gonna chuck everything, the house, the job, and just go, pack up the Tojo, pull the kids out of school and ‘just see what's out there'. If this yearning wasn't real advertisers wouldn't spend their billions exploiting it. Here you can cue the music, open the lens to the rosy light of late afternoon and dub in the breathy voiceover. ‘Behold, the glory of Kakadu, the endless beaches of Fraser Island, the blood-red breakaways of Karijini, the dark and primordial mysteries of the Tarkine, the miracle of Lake Eyre in flood.' To sell something disposable and ephemeral you need to set it against something truly substantial, something remarkable and enduring. And in Australia what's more impressive than the land?

Landscape continues to press in, leaning through our windows and insect screens, creeping at the edges of consciousness. No matter how we live, and what we tell ourselves, the sublimated facts of our physical situation constantly resurface; the land continues to make its presence felt. Until climate change began to erode the modern sense of immunity in the northern hemisphere, this felt pressure of nature was almost unique to Australia amongst developed nations. Feeling subject to nature is supposedly the province of the poor in undeveloped places. The recent vulnerability of first-world countries is a sudden reversal in Europe, but in Australia it's been our vivid, steady state. If anything, climate change has only intensified what Australians have always felt – which is, at best, mildly besieged. Nowadays bush-fires don't merely threaten the timbered outskirts of small Australian towns; they have infiltrated and ravaged the inner suburbs of capital cities, panicking and paralysing major populations. Similarly, major flood events are no longer just the nightmare of rural riverside communities; in recent years coastal capitals like Brisbane have been calamitously inundated. Others of course, like Perth, are so drought-weakened that without desalination plants they would no longer be viable settlements at all. Clearly, geography and weather have never been less incidental, less likely to remain mere backdrop. You only need to stand on a street corner in the central business district of Perth and watch the desert dust fall like red rain upon the gridlocked traffic to know that. Whatever else we have told ourselves, we are not yet out of nature and nature is not done with us.

Ours has always been a conditional, permeable settlement and it remains so. The land continues to confound, enchant, appal and inspire. It fizzes, groans, creaks and roars at the edge of consciousness. But I think a geographically thin skin is a boon to our culture. We need to guard against growing too thick a hide, in this sense at least. Isn't it good for the spirit, being reminded that there is something bigger to consider than ourselves, something, older, richer and more complex and mysterious than humankind? Despite our immense success, our mobility and adaptability there is still an organic, material reality over which we have little control and for which we can claim no credit.

Humans are a brilliant species, an exception, a privileged minority. And few humans are luckier than Australians. Generations of experience have transformed us. Those who arrived here in antiquity were changed and changed and changed by the continent; the land made them anew. Those of us whose roots are not as deep are startled to learn how different we are from our immigrant forebears, for our island is a place that soon renders people strangers to their own ancestors. It has real, ongoing power to shape people. It influences our thoughts and habits, our language, our sensory register. However stubbornly we resist, it knocks us about, bends us out of shape and moves us on somehow. In my own lifetime Australians have come to use the Aboriginal-English word ‘country' to describe what my great-grandparents might have called territory. Slowly, fitfully, geographic ambivalence and diffidence have given way to a new respect. Patriotism has evolved to include a reverence for the land itself, and the passion to defend the natural world as if it were family. This is why we write about the island, the place, the natural physical world. This is why we paint it. From love and wonder, irritation and fear, hope and despair, because like family, it's an enduring puzzle and it refuses to be incidental.

The Weekend Australian Review

Publication Details

Caroline Baum
's ‘Waltzing the Jaguar' appeared in
My Mother, My Father: On Losing a Parent,
edited by Susan Wyndham, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2013.

J.M. Coetzee
's ‘The Last Instructions of Patrick White' appeared in the
New York Review of Books,
7 November 2013.

Jessie Cole
's ‘The Breaking Point' appeared in
Meanjin,
vol. 72, no. 3, Spring 2013.

Peter Conrad
's ‘A Rolf in Sheep's Clothing' appeared in the
Monthly,
July 2014.

Robyn Davidson
's ‘Vale Doris Lessing' appeared in the
Monthly,
December 2013–January 2014.

Tim Flannery
's ‘A Natural Wonder in Peril' appeared in the
New York Review of Books,
14 August 2014.

Helen Garner
's ‘Dreams of Her Real Self' appeared in
My Mother, My Father: On Losing a Parent,
edited by Susan Wyndham, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2013.

Moreno Giovannoni
's ‘The Percheron' appeared in
Southerly,
vol. 73, no. 2, 2013. The photograph ‘Champlin's horse, Kronprinz' is used with permission of the Ames Historical Society.

Dennis Glover
's ‘Doveton' appeared in the
Age,
8 February 2014.

Antonia Hayes
's ‘Wolf Like Me' appeared in
Meanjin,
vol. 73, no. 1, Autumn 2014.

Karen Hitchcock
's regular column ‘The Medicine' appears in the
Monthly.
The items reprinted here appeared in the November 2013, December 2013–January 2014, March 2014 and July 2014 issues.

Clive James
's ‘Poems of a Lifetime' appeared in the
Times Literary Supplement,
18 May 2014, and in his
Poetry Notebook: 2006–2014
(Picador, 2014); it is used with permission of the publisher. Copyright © Clive James, 2014.

Rozanna Lilley
's ‘The Little Prince, and Other Vehicles' appeared in
Southerly
, vol. 74, no. 1, 2014.

David Malouf
's ‘Oh Walt, You're a Leaky Vessel' appeared in
Sydney Review of Books,
5 July 2014.

David Marr
's ‘Freedom Abbott' appeared in the
Monthly,
September 2014. The essay grew out of the 2014 John Button Lecture for the Melbourne School of Government, delivered on 23 July 2014.

Luke Mogelson
's ‘The Dream Boat' appeared in the
New York Times Magazine,
17 November 2013.

Neil Murray
's ‘Cry When We're Gone' appeared in
The Best Music Writing Under the Australian Sun,
edited by Christian Ryan, Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne, 2014.

Rachel Nolan
's ‘Men of a Certain Age' appeared in the
Monthly,
May 2014.

Noel Pearson
's ‘War of the Worlds' is an excerpt from his
A Rightful Place
(Quarterly Essay 55), Black Inc., Melbourne, 2014.

Nicolas Rothwell
's ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy' appeared in the
Weekend Australian Review,
18–19 January 2014.

Guy Rundle
's ‘Burning Men: An American Triptych' appeared in
Crikey/Daily Review,
29 January 2014 (on Pete Seeger); 23 May 2014 (on
True Detective);
and 28 May 2014 (on Elliot Rodger).

Christian Ryan
's ‘The Unremembered Six' appeared in
The Nightwatchman
, Spring 2014.

Luke Ryan
's ‘Sex and Cancer: A History in Three Parts' appeared in his book
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chemo: A Memoir of Getting Cancer – Twice!,
Affirm Press, Melbourne, 2014.

Carrie Tiffany
's ‘Reading Geoff Cochrane' appeared in
Griffith Review,
no. 43, January 2014.

Christos Tsiolkas
's ‘May Day: How the Left Was Lost' appeared in the
Monthly
, May 2014.

Don Watson
's ‘My Fellow Australians' appeared in
Good Weekend,
25 January 2014.

Tim Winton
's ‘The Island Seen and Felt: Some Thoughts about Landscape' appeared in the
Weekend Australian Review,
14–15 December 2013. It is an edited transcript of his speech to the Royal Academy, London, on 14 November 2013.

Notes on Contributors

T
HE
E
DITOR

Robert Manne
was professor of politics at La Trobe University until December 2012. Presently, he is Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe and the convenor of its Ideas & Society Program. His books include
Left, Right, Left: Political Essays 1977–2005, W.E.H. Stanner: The Dreaming and Other Essays
(ed.),
Making Trouble: Essays against the New Australian Complacency
,
Bad News: Murdoch's Australian and the Shaping of the Nation
(Quarterly Essay 43) and
The Words That Made Australia: How a Nation Came to Know Itself
(ed.). In 2012 he was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Literature.
State of the Nation: Essays for Robert Manne
was published by Black Inc. in October 2013.

C
ONTRIBUTORS

Caroline Baum
is the editorial director of Booktopia, Australia's largest online bookseller. She writes for the
Sydney Morning Herald,
Qantas inflight magazine,
Slow Magazine, SBS Feast
and other publications about books, food, travel, the arts and aspects of contemporary life.

J.M. Coetzee
was born in South Africa and educated in South Africa and the united States. He has published twelve works of fiction, as well as criticism and translations. He has won the Booker Prize (twice) and, in 2003, the Nobel Prize for Literature. He lives in Adelaide.

Jessie Cole
's debut novel
Darkness on the Edge of Town
was shortlisted for the 2013 ALS Gold Medal, and her non-fiction work has appeared in the
Big Issue, Daily Life,
the
Saturday Paper, Meanjin
and the
Guardian.
Her latest novel,
Deeper Water,
was published in August 2014. She lives and works in northern New South Wales.

Peter Conrad
lives in London and New York. His latest books are
Verdi and/or Wagner
and
How the World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere
, published by Thames & Hudson. He has recently written and presented a BBC Radio 4 series on ‘21st Century Mythologies', updating Roland Barthes.

Robyn Davidson
is an award-winning writer who has travelled and published widely. Her books include
Tracks
,
Desert Places
,
No Fixed Address: Nomads and the Future of the Planet
(Quarterly Essay 24) and, as editor,
The Picador Book of Journeys.
The screen adaptation of
Tracks
was released by Transmission Films in 2014.

Tim Flannery
has published over a dozen books, including
The Future Eaters, The Eternal Frontier, The Weather Makers, Now or Never: A Sustainable Future for Australia?
and
Here on Earth
. He was Australian of the Year in 2007.

Helen Garner
was born in Geelong in 1942 and lives in Melbourne. Since 1977 she has published eleven books of fiction, essays and long-form non-fiction, including
The First Stone
and
Joe Cinque's Consolation,
as well as screenplays and feature journalism. She won the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2006. She is a frequent contributor to the
Monthly,
and her most recent book is
This House of Grief
.

Moreno Giovannoni
grew up on a tobacco farm at Buffalo River in north-east Victoria but was born in San Ginese, where he left a large part of himself. He lives in Melbourne, where he works as a freelance translator. He is writing a book,
Tales from San Ginese
.

Dennis Glover
is a speechwriter and freelance author. He is the son of factory workers from Doveton and has degrees from Monash and Cambridge universities. He has written speeches for every federal Labor leader since Kim Beazley and is the author of
Orwell's Australia
(Scribe, 2003) and
The Art of Great Speeches
(CUP, 2010).

Antonia Hayes
is a writer from Sydney who lives in San Francisco.
Relativity,
her debut novel, will be published in 2015.

Karen Hitchcock
is a doctor and writer. She is a regular contributor to the
Monthly
, and the author of a collection of short fiction,
Little White Slips.

Clive James
is the author of more than forty books. As well as his five volumes of autobiography, he has published collections of literary and television criticism, essays, travel writing, verse and novels. In 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Literature, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His latest book is
Poetry Notebook: 2006–2014
(Picador, 2014).

Rozanna Lilley
is a social anthropologist and an author. She has published widely in journals, books and, more recently, literary reviews and magazines. Her current research is on autism and social life. The youngest daughter of writers Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley, she is working on a memoir of family eccentricities.

David Malouf
is the author of eleven novels, as well as collections of stories, poetry and libretti. He has won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Prix Femina Étranger and the Australia–Asia Literary Award; he has also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in Australia.

David Marr
has written for the
Sydney Morning Herald,
the
Age
and the
Monthly,
been editor of the
National Times,
a reporter for
Four Corners,
presenter of ABC TV's
Media Watch
and now writes for the
Guardian.
His books include
Patrick White: A Life, The High Price of Heaven, Dark Victory
(with Marian Wilkinson) and four Quarterly Essays:
His Master's Voice, Power Trip, Political Animal
and
The Prince
.

Luke Mogelson
is a contributing writer for the
New York Times Magazine.
Based in Kabul, Afghanistan, Mogelson has also worked for
GQ, Harper's,
the
Nation
and the
Washington Monthly.
His fiction has appeared in the
Hudson Review, Kenyon Review
and
Missouri Review
.

A founding member of the Warumpi Band,
Neil Murray
has released a dozen solo albums, received an APRA song of the year award, and published stories, lyrics, poems, a play and the autobiographical novel
Sing for Me, Countryman
.

Rachel Nolan
was Transport, then Finance and Arts Minister in Queensland's Bligh Labor Government. Since leaving politics she has travelled extensively; she has just completed an overland journey from Ireland to Australia (excepting warzones). She now writes, owns a café in her hometown of Ipswich, and teaches English to migrants.

Noel Pearson
is a lawyer and activist, and chairman of the Cape York Partnership. He has published many essays and newspaper articles. His first book,
Up from the Mission
(2009), is a collection of essays that charts his life and thought from his early days as a native title lawyer to his position today as one of Australia's most influential figures.

Nicolas Rothwell
was educated in European schools and was a classical scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, before becoming a foreign correspondent. He is the author of
Heaven & Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk
,
Another Country
,
The Red Highway
and
Journeys to the Interior
.

Guy Rundle
is the global correspondent-at-large for Crikey. He is the author of
Down to the Crossroads: On the Trail of the 2008 US Presidential Election
, and two Quarterly Essays,
The Opportunist
and
Bipolar Nation
.

Christian Ryan
is the author of
Golden Boy, Australia: Story of a Cricket Country
and most recently
Rock Country
, a thirty-three-essay, 160-photo, multi-authored trip into Australian rock music. His recent essays include ‘Five Pictures', ‘Gone Crabbing' and ‘Jeff Thomson is Annoyed'. He is a former editor of the
Monthly.

Luke Ryan
is a freelance writer, comedian and man about town. He writes short-form non-fiction with a comic edge and has just released his debut book,
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chemo
(Affirm Press), a comedy memoir about having had cancer a couple of times.

Sybille Smith
(née Gottwald) was born in Vienna and arrived in Australia with her family in 1939. She studied English and German at Sydney University and then taught German at the University of Tasmania. Her study
Inside Poetry
first appeared in 1985.

Carrie Tiffany
was born in West Yorkshire and grew up in Western Australia. She spent her early twenties working as a park ranger in Central Australia and now lives in Melbourne, where she works as an agricultural journalist. Carrie has published two award-winning novels:
Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living
and
Mateship with Birds.

Christos Tsiolkas
is the author of four novels:
Loaded
(filmed as
Head On), The Jesus Man
and
Dead Europe,
which won the 2006
Age
Fiction Prize and the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award.
The Slap
won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize and was shortlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award and the ALS Gold Medal. He is also a playwright, essayist and screenwriter. He lives in Melbourne.

Don Watson
's columns, articles and essays have appeared in all major Australian journals and newspapers. His book
American Journeys
(2008) won the
Age
Non-Fiction and Book of the Year awards, the inaugural Indie Award for Non-Fiction, and the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction.

Tim Winton
has published twenty-six books for adults and children, and his work has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Since his first novel,
An Open Swimmer
, won the
Australian
Vogel Award in 1981, he has won the Miles Franklin Award four times (for
Shallows, Cloudstreet, Dirt Music
and
Breath),
and has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize (for
The Riders
and
Dirt Music
). He lives in Western Australia.