My mother loved to read essays. I suppose it was pretty clear what an essay meant to her. Walter Pater, Edmund Gosse, Aldous Huxley, and Walter Murdoch were among its practitioners. Fine writing was part of its trademark; that, and a kind of shapeliness. It was not much like the journalism that my father practised, and not at all like the scholarly essays – now called papers – which nobody in this country wrote back then, except in the sciences. And then, in another region altogether, there were those essays that we had to write at school: scrannel exercises written in a hurry, laying a bit of logic on enough empirical information to pass. Those in History were an utter mystery to me, since my work could range from failure to stardom, for no apparent set of reasons. In English, I could more or less see the point.

The essay has fallen upon complicated times, as this new, variegated anthology goes out of its way to demonstrate. Peter Craven’s Best Australian Essays 2003 is a fat book; an assembly of a great many pieces of writing. In the past, Craven’s reputation was that of a rigorous discriminator, something of an aesthete, unfavourably disposed toward the merely academic and the journalistic. Perhaps this was something of a caricature, but it appeared to fit him in the high old days of Scripsi. But the editor who is flagged by this anthology is an easy-going populist, a hatcher of the curate’s emu’s egg.