Drusilla Modjeska (Ed.), The Best Australian Essays 2007. Black Inc., 2007, ISBN 9781863954198, RRP $35.00, website
'The Turning Tide', title of Judith Brett's contribution to this year's The Best Australian Essays, might usefully be taken as a subtitle for the collection as a whole. Implicit throughout many of the pieces, and highlighted explicitly in Modjeska's editorial introduction, is an awareness of a world, and more particularly a nation, at a fragile moment of social and political flux.
In a curious case of synchronicity I find myself writing quite literally on the eve of transition for Australia and her politics; within the next 12 hours the results of Australia's election will be known and a new political era will begin, testing or confirming the concerns and hopes expressed in these essays.
With pieces drawn not merely from authors and essayists, but more broadly from politicians, performers and sociologists, the collection juxtaposes explorations into literary, cultural and personal preoccupations of the past year.
Discussions range from Eros (in John Armstrong's elegant meditations on the darker side of desire) to Thanatos (in Nicholas Rothwell's thoughts on the role of the war correspondent) by way of Carthusian monks, pornography and Hitler.
Personal memoirs, travel-writing, political manifestos, and reviews all share the space, united in rare fashion in literature's generic chameleon: the essay. The form and function of the genre itself is challenged and interrogated, but the exploratory spirit of Montaigne's original 'Essais' — with its etymological origin crucially in 'essayer' — is maintained in the questioning and delicately nuanced approach of pieces such as Gert Reifarth's discussion of the impact of the GDR in fiction and in fact, and Susan Hampton's intensely personal account of the intersection of art and faith.
To seek a cumulative 'statement' therefore about the social and cultural condition of contemporary Australia from this collection is fundamentally to misunderstand the essay form itself. Rather this book gives the impression of undertaking, as Modjeska puts it, a 'vigorous conversation' on the subject, ultimately leaving to readers the task of assembling the conceptual pieces as they choose.
Inevitably in a collection of writings that share a single temporal and cultural moment there are particular seams of thought that run through multiple essays, repeatedly forcing their way to the surface where they reappear at different and unexpected angles. It is these moments of shared substance and overlap that generate the most interesting