Dubbing something the best is problematic—it’s eye-catching but there are always naysayers and lobbyists for the left-out and, with a competing ‘best’ in The Best Australian Poetry 2005, published by UQP, it might be time to find a better collective title for these essentially valuable annual collections.
Frank Moorhouse, who has edited The Best Australian Stories 2005, comments pre-emptively that most readers would intelligently construe the term ‘best’ as an aspiration. No, I think not. It’s a judgment, but squeamishness about that is Australian or unAustralian, depending on your point of view.
This is the second year that separate editors have handled each of the collections following the bitter split between former editor Peter Craven and publisher Morry Schwartz. Robert Dessaix has grouped the essays into four sections: ‘I Remember When …’, ‘Creative Acts’, ‘Meditations’ and ‘The Way We Live Now’ and written a short introduction to each. Moorhouse has opted for a memorandum from the editor and Les Murray, in The Best Australian Poems 2005, for a preface, and both are a little defensive, getting in first this time around in the light of some criticism of their choices in the previous year’s editions.
The essays tend to be ruminative and gentle, rather than polemic. Dessaix clearly prefers persuasion, and though in general I agree, the passion that leaps from the page in Robert Hughes’s discussion of the sculpture of Richard Serra did leave me feeling wistful that I hadn’t been swept off my feet more often.
Dessaix has allowed the definition of essay some latitude, including what might be regarded as reportage (Anna Krien’s ‘Trouble on the Night Shift’, which first appeared in The Monthly, for example) and what might be called informed commentary (Robert Manne’s energetic summation of the culpability of Murdoch newspapers in promoting the war on Iraq, perhaps, or Kate Jennings’s cheerfully written but very depressing account of the US Republican Convention). The result is an eclectic mix of erudite discussion, acute observation and some moments of beauty.
There are 28 contributors and 24 of these essays have already appeared, or will appear, elsewhere, drawn from literary and cultural magazines, and newspapers; one was delivered as a seminar paper.
Some essays could have leapt sections—Robyn Davidson’s about belonging and representation of the landscape could have worked as well in ‘Creative Acts’ and Martin Thomas’s ‘Looking for Mr Mathews’, about the difficult search for the subject of his biography, would