Essays

For a creature born to life as a small songbird, days and nights can be treacherous. At any moment, a goshawk, a cat, or a goanna may be lurking, waiting to turn the songbird into supper. So these pretty little prey objects – scrubwrens and lorikeets and honeyeaters and the like – have developed an astute group behaviour. One bird spots the predator and issues an alarm call. Others hear it and zip out from behind branch and leaf to surround the threat, all of them twitting and hissing and flitting about, a mixed-species hullabaloo that together harasses the predator into pitiful retreat. This behaviour, known as a ‘mobbing flock’, is an evolutionary survival response. It is beautiful in its ingenuity, and the conviction it displays in the power of the collective. It is, to draw a metaphor from the literary ecosystem, an anthological act, a communal relay of meaning born of a shared inner urgency.

John Tregenza’s 1963 study of Australian Little Magazines noted that neither Meanjin nor its near-contemporary Southerly could be characterised as ‘little’, unlike their predecessors and earlier selves. No longer solely dependent on subscription income from a small local band of devotees, both had attracted a wide following. Indeed on transferring his journal from Brisbane to the University of Melbourne in 1945, Meanjin’s Clem Christesen claimed that it had become ‘a well-established quarterly ... with a circulation of 4,000 copies per issue’.

When the MV Tampa entered Australian waters in 2001, the ensuing row over its 433 Afghan passengers ignited renewed debate about immigration, citizenship and national identity. The Howard government’s subsequent re-election on a platform of border protection and security coincided with the centenary of the first substantial legislation passed by the newly constituted Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. The Immigration Restriction Act (1901) was the centrepiece of the White Australia Policy and reflected the new nation’s desire to regulate the composition of its population and culture, free from British interference. This collection of essays, authored by some of the country’s foremost academics in law, history and politics, commemorates that anniversary. It is a timely publication, and demanding in its persistent consideration of what the Australian national project has been and what it could be in the twenty-first century.

Don’t judge a book by its cover? There is no problem with this book. The cover and artist’s note, declaring inspiration from such diverse art forms as traditional Indian miniature painting, Indian matchbox design, and a ‘harmonious blend of Indian and Australian flora’, encapsulate the intertwining narratives and cultural crossovers of the stories within.

Loïc Wacquant has documented the migration of the term ‘underclass’ from its original structural meaning (as coined by Gunnar Myrdal) to contemporary usage, classifying those who exbibit a cluster of behaviours provoking anxiety or disgust from mainstream society. Australian publishing is, belatedly, providing opportunities for diverse voices across gender, sexuality, and race, but the underclass Wacquant delineated remains largely mute.

On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.

In the year of my birth, trichotillomania did not exist,’ writes Adele Dumont. Hair-pulling has been depicted in human culture for millennia: in Greek myth, in the Bible, in painting and sculpture, and, most commonly, in vernacular expression (‘I’m tearing my hair out’). But hair-pulling as a compulsive, recurring behaviour – trichotillomania – was only named in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987. Formal psychiatric diagnosis has become the dominant means by which we understand emotional distress, but this has happened very recently, and diagnosis can leave the sufferer, as Dumont writes, feeling ‘categorised’ and struggling to articulate those aspects of their illness that may seem, in spite of everything, like comfort.

For a man many would regard as the very epitome of the type, Raimond Gaita seems rather hostile to the concept of the intellectual. It is ‘irredeemably mediocre’, he explains, inferior to the kinds of moral and political responsibility that attach to teacher or politician. Intellectuals are active in the public domain, grappling with ideas, culture, and politics, but they have often lacked independence of mind, he says, ‘because they never had it or because they sacrificed it to the cause’.

The interconnected essays in Gemma Nisbet’s début collection, The Things We Live With, revolve around a premise that is as familiar as Marcel Proust’s madeleines or W.G. Sebald’s images: that things – objects, documents, photographs, even colours – evoke memories of the past. Her essays shift seamlessly from childhood to adult travels, jobs, relationships, and the problems that can lurk beneath a functional exterior.

The vibrant state of Aboriginal intellectual life is immediately evident upon reading Melissa Lucashenko’s foreword and Daniel Browning’s introduction to his Close to the Subject: Selected works. Lucashenko combines insight with an engaging, colloquial style; Browning, without apology or artifice, weighs up the successes, failures, and resentments of almost three decades as a journalist.