As the new editor of The Best Australian Short Stories 2004, Frank Moorhouse had the task of reading through 600 stories to select 27 for publication. He says that never before has he been ‘exposed in such a short time to such fine writing and such intriguing and venturesome stories’. Of those selected, six are from previously unpublished writers. In an environment where Moorhouse fears the short story has been rendered ‘sub-economic’, this suggests that the genre is still capable of surprises.
The anthology works partly because of Moorhouse’s decision to arrange the stories in a way that ‘loosely follows the organic order—from stories of youth through to stories of ageing’. The book offers a range of human experiences, from the awkwardness of adolescence to the despair and resignation of old age.
Among the collection, two first-timers stand out: Nathan Besser’s Letter to the Drowned and Alli Banard’s Finding the Way Home. With a sense of foreboding, Besser parallels the waters rising around a house with the breakdown of a relationship. In contrast, Banard’s work is a terse tale of a country girl returning home, capturing the atmospheres of the neglected bush and its forgotten people. The story ends with the Australian motif of the clattering screen door.
Erin Gough’s Jump and i.j. oog’s the american dream will appeal to those who relish rich prose. Gough writes of ‘salt and chips air’ that is ‘thicker than pub smoke’, while oog places his seething protagonist in a derelict house in the middle of nowhere. Disenfranchised masculinity is a theme that reappears in Paul Mitchell’s In the Shell, a story about two blokes working in a service station on the Hume Highway, and what happens to one when the other decides to shoot himself in the head. These are bleak tales, snapshots of people on the edge.
Conscious that many published essays in Australia began as public lectures, Robert Dessaix, the new editor of The Best Australian Essays 2004, expresses a desire to revive the voice of ‘the amateur’. Dessaix contrasts ‘panic and seriously inflamed passions’ with the attitude of the personal essay and its preference for ‘imaginative reflection’ and ‘tentative speculation’. Essays, Dessaix suggests, reveal the subtle working of the mind.
Organised into three categories—Memories, Arts and Artists, and The Wider World—Best Essays has a curious structure. Slightly bitter pieces such as Herself—Bille Brown’s memory of accompanying a dying screen star on one of