Best Australian Essays

After only four annual volumes, The Best Australian Essays has reached the point where the law of increasing expectations begins to kick in. By now the series has done so much that we want it to do everything. Speaking as an Australian who lives offshore, I would be well pleased if each volume could contain, on every major issue, a pair of essays best presenting the two most prominent opposing views. This would give me some assurance that I was hearing both sides of the national discussion on each point, despite my being deprived of access to many of the publications in which essays, under one disguise or another, nowadays originate. (I leave aside the probability that most Australians living in Australia are deprived of access too, the time having long passed when any one person could take in all the relevant print.) But the editor, Peter Craven, could easily point out that my wish is a pipe-dream.

Even in the United States, where the First Amendment theoretically rules, nobody now believes that everyone should be heard: that awkward ideal has now been replaced by a more realistic one, the town meeting at which the moderator merely ensures that everything worth hearing is said - an object which dictates that not everyone gets a say. Craven could add that he is not running a town meeting either. He is selecting for quality, and a criterion of quality automatically limits variety. There might be some views worth hearing but nobody has written them down with sufficient skill for the essay to rank as literature. At the risk of putting words into Craven's mouth, I would suggest that he would suggest that the compiling of an annual literary anthology - a showcase for the essay as an art form in which Australians excel - is his first object, and that if I want to plug into the complete national discussion I should keep googling until I attain omniscience. He's running a boutique, not a shopping mall. It's a big boutique, but selectivity is still the selling feature.

That being accepted, what wealth is here: so much that there is little point in complaining about what is absent. In the 2001 volume I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Hall's assault on Keith Windschuttle's view of Aboriginal history, but I was still at the stage of thinking that an essay by Windschuttle should have been in there too. Windschuttle, however, best advances his arguments in book form, rather than through the essay. His The Killing of History is an important book about the disastrous effect of Cultural Studies on the proper study of history, and his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is at the very least considerable, or so many people would not have rushed to consider it. For my own comfort, I would like to believe that his argument against the use of the genocide concept when it comes to the crimes committed against the Aboriginals is a necessary correction to a vocal but slipshod consensus. On the other hand, Richard Hall the hard-nosed foot-slogger was undoubtedly right to point out the dangers of a scholar's trusting the reliability of official reports. As well as being right about that, he could write. "The revisionist historians have dug themselves into their trenches and want to stay there." Launched with the economical accuracy of an old-time brawler, Hall's sentences hit home. If you had only his essay to go on, you would think there was a good case for regarding the behaviour of modern Australia towards its Aboriginals as being in grim parallel to the behaviour of modern Turkey towards its Armenians. Make way for the Pilger vision of the irredeemably racist land in the South. But now, in this year's volume, we have Noel Pearson's essay "The Need for Intolerance". After duly praising Paul Keating's legacy on Aboriginal policy, Pearson enters his caveat.

(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)
Photograph by Gillian Mann.