The Best Australian Essays 2007
Can the intellectual life of a society be encapsulated in
an annual digest that, read from end to end, conveys the debates
and discontents that somehow define the nation at a particular
time? The obvious answer, of course, is that human experience
permits no such tidy divisions: a title such as The Best Australian
Essays 2007 can only describe a disparate selection of works,
united simply by the accident of having been published in the same
year. And, in the introduction to her latest anthology of
disputatious and reflective prose for Black Inc., Drusilla Modjeska
certainly makes no more ambitious claim. At least, she does not do
so explicitly. But it is in the nature of an editor’s task that the
temptation to discern a wider unity of theme in one’s choices is
never entirely suppressed.
The year that has just passed, Modjeska assures us, was marked
by a quickening of public debate in Australia, which in turn
breathed new vigour into the essay form and especially into that
sub-genre of engagement, the review essay. And that quickening, she
declares, writing even before the federal election was announced,
was in considerable part a reflection of the growing awareness that
the Howard era in Australian politics was approaching its end. Thus
some of the essays that have made their way into this volume
anticipate the election result, and chart the changes in the
national mood that produced it. Most notable among these is Judith
Brett’s “The Turning Tide”, which first appeared in The Monthly in
March. Brett’s take on the election, in this and other essays, has
already been discussed on these pages in recent weeks; here it
suffices to say that “The Turning Tide’s” prophetic quality amply
justifies its inclusion in the anthology.
Also in this Best Essays is another contribution to The Monthly
that helped define the year in politics: Kevin Rudd’s “Faith in
Politics”, an exploration of the thoughts of his hero, the Lutheran
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is a piece as remarkable for the
reception it has had as for the quality of the argument itself,
elevated and erudite though that is.
Modjeska suggests that one of the noticeable changes in public
debate during the past 12 months has been the way that Australians
have taken to arguing about “God and the devil”. I would have
thought, to the contrary, that the rash of sometimes baffled,
sometimes sneering responses to Rudd’s essay has confirmed the
discomfort that many public intellectuals in this country continue
to feel in discussing religion in any way that is not merely
dismissive.
Rudd’s avowed aim in writing “Faith in Politics” was to reclaim
Christianity as an ethically transformative framework for
progressive politics, rather than the conservative bulwark that
some Australian politicians, aping the religious right in the US,
have sought to make it. Since the essay appeared references to it
have mostly taken the form of jibes about the Labor leader’s
sincerity, implying that subsequently we have seen him only in the
guise of political technocrat, which must be “the real” Rudd. But
if the essay has, in a sense, been stillborn, receiving an
embarrassed “ahem” from those to whom it was addressed, that surely
reveals at least as much about them and their cultural milieu as it
does about the new Prime Minister.
Rudd on Bonhoeffer is accompanied in Best Essays by “It’s too
easy to say that ‘God is Dead’ ” - a contribution to the Australian
Financial Review’s review pages by Guy Rundle. If this selection is
intended to bolster Modjeska’s contention that Australians have
sloughed off their traditional reserve in discussing religion, I am
still not convinced. Rundle is certainly not one of those who
simply dismiss arguments such as those made by Rudd, and he is too
well read in cultural history to be puzzled or affronted by the
resilience of faith in a secular age.
Yet even here there is an intellectual sleight of hand: Rundle’s
willingness to accept religion as a human phenomenon is not the
same as a willingness to engage it on its own terms. Faith - or
more precisely the three monotheistic faiths of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam - is still for him a problem to be
explained, and the broad lines of his explanation will be familiar
to anyone who has read Feuerbach and Durkheim. He offers what
purports to be a general history of Western religiosity, and it
will dazzle some; but others will wonder how deeply he is
acquainted with the complex theological traditions about which he
makes such confident, and sometimes glib, generalisations.
Of course, there is much, much more to be quarried in Best
Essays than the seams of religious argument uncovered by Rudd and
Rundle. I have chosen to write about them partly in response to
Modjeska’s inclination to see them as indicative of a national
trend, and partly because many of the other essays she includes -
Helen Garner on the filming of Rai Gaita’s Romulus, My Father, for
example, or Noel Pearson’s vision of self-supporting indigenous
communities - will already be familiar to many readers. (The Rudd
essay has been much cited, of course, but I wonder how many, even
among those who refer to it, have bothered to read it closely.)
Any anthology invites readers to cherry-pick favourites. The
essays I most enjoyed, and found most intellectually engaging, were
those that transcended specifically Australian concerns. Anne
Manne’s “Love me Tender?”, on the pornification of Western popular
culture, for example (another Monthly offering), and two others
that could be read as companion pieces to it, on the well-springs
of eroticism, from male and female perspectives: “The Heart of
Desire”, by John Armstrong, and “In Fealty to a Professor”, by Anne
Sedgley. Taken together, these three amount to a desolate
commentary on a world that is shredding its capacity for intimacy.
It was happening long before John Howard entered our lives, and it
may still be happening when Kevin Rudd leaves them. I wonder what
they’ll have to say about it in The Best Australian Essays
2008?
Ray Cassin is a senior staff writer.
