Best Australian Essays 2008
Best Australian Essays is always worth reading if you are interested in Australian writing. This year's guest editor is writer and human rights advocate David Marr.
Usually the editor agonises over a definition of the modern essay. But Marr cuts to the chase by first ruling out very long works and speeches, after which: "All other prose was eligible if it brought personal experience to bear vividly on its subject through voice, judgment or eyewitness authority".
On this basis he makes a great selection of more than 30 essays.
For me, Marr's stand-out selection is "Where Wonders Await Us", Tim Flannery's review of two photo books on life in the ocean depths. A picture is worth a thousand words and Flannery had his work cut out for him, using just words to do justice to two collections of amazing pictures.
Until well into the 19th century it was thought there was no life in the depths of the oceans, but in fact life abounds; it takes fantastic forms to fill every ecological niche available, and uses every means imaginable to hunt, hide, and breed.
Covering an area 11 times greater than the Earth's land mass, in some parts it goes as deep as 11,000 metres. A ship floating above the Mariana Trench near the Philippines is as far above the earth's surface as any jet in the sky.
"Where Wonders Await Us" brings this world alive for us, but comes with a predictable warning. Frightening amounts of chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive materials have been dumped in the ocean.
Britain alone has dumped 137,000 tonnes of chemical weapons, and Russia has illicitly dumped 17 nuclear reactors in the Arctic Ocean.
As well, there is over-fishing. The orange roughy, or deep-sea perch, is taken in unsustainable numbers when it breeds at the top of ocean mountains. This fish lives up to 150 years, which should put people off eating it, even those who don't care about conservation.
The good news from Flannery's essay is that there is a wonderful world just beyond our coastlines. The bad news is another beautiful part of our planet that needs protecting from capitalism.
A collection like this can give a snapshot of issues having an impact on society. This is apparent when Marr juxtaposes two essays on a similar theme, Don Watson's "Moral Equivalent to Anzac" and Les Carlyon's "Dark Victories".
They deal with the commemoration of war. Carlyon says Australians should be more aware of, and proud of, the role of Australian troops in the Allied victories towards the end of World War One. Watson questions the use of war service as the basis for our ideals of civic duty.
Watson is scathing of politicians who play on public sympathy for the dead of past wars to win support for the current conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a debate anti-war activists should be a part of.
Another must read is "War Between the Worlds", which deals with Ed O'Loughlin's six years as Fairfax News's Middle East correspondent. It begins with O'Loughlin at the scene of the massacre of a group of media workers by the Israeli military.
As he admits, "Hundreds of innocent people die in Gaza every year — far more than we bother writing up in Western newspapers", but this one made the world news because one of its victims, 23-year-old Fadel Shanan, actually filmed the shell that killed him, fired from an Israeli tank 1.5 kilometres away, as he stood in his media flak jacket by his clearly marked media van. Five others died in that massacre, two of them boys. One was killed by a second shot fired, O'Loughlin says, to get any would-be rescuers.
O'Loughlin then reflects on the evolution of the Erez checkpoint, the sole legal crossing into Gaza, and key to Israel's ongoing siege. What was just a street-level military checkpoint in 2002 is now "a sci-fi nightmare of concrete passages, steel cages, sliding blast doors, turnstiles, metal detectors, sniffer machines, and — for the unlucky — a bare concrete strip search room with a metal-grill floor, yawning over a three meter drop to the basement floor below".
But it's not all politics. There is also the arts world, human relationships, even some very good humorous pieces. All in all, Marr has given us another great edition of Best Australian Essays