Essays

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.

There is a slaughterhouse-like logic to the way humanity’s mistreatment of animals tends to be written about. Repetitive. Relentless. Atrocity piles upon atrocity, with no hope of remedy. Readers, probably appalled by the abattoir to begin with, likely vegetarians or vegans or animal fosterers, discomfort themselves yet again in the name of … what exactly? Duty? Academic interest? A renewed sense of the righteousness of animal liberation? We read on grimly, plumbing the depths of a despair that would feel commonplace if it didn’t remain, always, so excruciatingly raw.

'There are 206 bones in our bodies / and mine / are just like yours,’ writes Luka Lesson, rejecting the idea of the fundamental difference between the neurotypical and those who fill the pages of Admissions: Voices within mental health. ‘But I’ll be white ochre if I want to,’ the poet clarifies. ‘I’ll be eaten and reclaimed / decomposed and desired / if I want to.’ These words are about difference and dying, but the speaker is not ready ‘to feed the dirt’, and the poem is a resolute stocktake – of bones, of veins which have been named, and of the breaths transliterated here, breaths ‘that I may have never taken / and they / are the best shit / that I ever wrote.’