Essays

I had never been to Adelaide in my life when I arrived for an interview that, as it turned out, would result in my spending the next twenty-five years in South Australia. The early November heat was too much for my Melbourne best suit, and I was carrying my coat when I walked gratefully into a city pub for a post-interview beer. In the bar – air conditioned down to a level threatening patrons with cryogenic suspension – I tried Southwark and then West End, finding both just drinkable, and lingered in front of a wall poster about the Beaumont children, by that time missing for nine or ten months.

This book consists of sixteen essays based on papers delivered at the symposium of the Australian Academy of the Humanities held in Hobart in 2004. The title of the book was the theme of the symposium. A conference must have a theme, of course, or no one would ever fund the participants, but individual speakers do not always address it, or they do so tangentially. We have all been at conferences where the relationship of the speaker’s paper to the theme is the same as that between the ugly sisters’ feet and Cinderella’s dancing slipper – a great deal of stretching and contorting to make the text fit the theme, and vice versa. This is why conference proceedings rarely make good books.

The annual series of lectures held at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography are a lively tradition on the city’s cultural calendar, and are noted for both their critical currency and diversity of voices. This collection of essays and images, selected from lectures and exhibitions held at CCP from 2000–4, continues the allied tradition of publications that record selected papers from the series. Its time-frame also marks Daniel Palmer’s energetic tenure as coordinator of the lectures, during which time the Centre played host to a wide range of critics, practitioners, curators and academics.

Slow in the writing and slow in the reading: it is so easy to drift on the tides of Beverley Farmer’s book, and also to lose your bearings. The three long essays that make up The Bone House are prose poems organised by biorhythms, it seems, rather than by any architectural design. They carry all sorts of startling images in on their tides, like the fragments the writer finds washed up on the shores: ‘A figleaf burning in a patch of sun on the path, a ribbed shell like a boat, balanced on its stalk, a crumple of brown on one side, all its freckles and veins clear in a green pool of light.’

I could always rely on Gerald Murnane for a beautiful quote. Nine years ago, when I was researching a piece on writers and technology, he told me he wrote all his books on a manual typewriter with the index finger of his right hand: ‘My favourite word to type, as a one-finger typist, is “afterwards”,’ Murnane told me over the phone. ‘It’s a beautiful whirly movement with one finger.’ Afterwards, as I transcribed his perfectly weighted sentences, it was clear that Murnane had probably already written the words he spoke to me. ‘I tend to think of words as written things rather than spoken things,’ Murnane writes in ‘The Breathing Author’, one of the more recent pieces in Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, his first book in a decade. ‘While I speak, I often visualise my words as being written somewhere at the same time.’

There are at least three reasons why we left-leaning, right-thinking, middle-class readers value Robert Manne’s essays. Over the last twenty years, he has – in books, as editor of Quadrant from 1988 to 1997, as a newspaper columnist – been writing with an uncommon intellectual lucidity. He is that rare combination of good scholar and good journalist. His style is transparently reasonable: his essays shine as models of speaking rationally.

The travails of Australian universities have increased in recent years, for well-aired reasons. These considerable difficulties followed unsettling and much criticised structural transformation initiated during the Dawkins era. They have been accompanied by pressures for international benchmarking of performance, the rapid growth of information technology, and an added impetus to form international networking alliances.