Reading Best Australian Essays: An Annual Rite

Reading Black Inc. anthology of best Australian essays of the year has become something of an annual rite for my readerly self. Edited by a well-known published writer, the anthology showcases essays that meet three criteria.

Firstly, the essays have to satisfy the standards set by the editor, which could include parameters such as currency and relevance to contemporary debates and issues, literary and aesthetic merits, and whatever else the particular  idiosyncrasies of the editor dictates. Secondly, the writers have to be Australians and/or the essays have to engage Australian topics. Lastly, the essays have to have been published in the previous calendar year.

Having found last year's offering, The Best Australian Essays 2008, which was edited by David Marr, a bit disappointing, I bought this year's collection with a degree of reservations. I need not have worried. So far, the essays, which range far and wide just as Black Inc. promises, have succeeded to 'entertain, inspire and provoke'.

I have been reading the essays in random order (surely, an oxymoron), and two essays that have so far stood out are Richard Castles' Death Duties and Robert Dessaix's The Grand Illusion. In the former, Castles recounts the year when he worked in the grandiosely named Transfer Response Unit but which the author liked to think of as a 'taxi service for the already departed'. In unadorned terms, the job involved collecting dead bodies or body parts from homes, hospitals, nursing homes and crash sites whenever the coroner wanted to examine the bodies.

Castles observes that 'death could be beautiful', especially when old folks died in nursing homes. However, "Like all things in life, death can be done in a variety of bizarre and often messy ways". And, yes, people die during sex, he informs helpfully from his macabre experience.

The writer describes his first body pick-up memorably. A gung-ho homicide detective greets him and has a dig at him for his inexperience. He writes: "I simply told him that he was right, that this was my first time. As I walked through the door, I caught first glimpse of the body in situ. I never got used to the jolt of those moments. A dead body is always out of place: an interruption in the picture; a spectre; a mistake."

In a culture where death is sanitized, where most people have never seen a dead body, Castles' essay confronts readers with the pervasiveness of death, its finality and  implacability, the stark reality that it is always lurking nearby in the shadows, just below our consciousness.

[caption id="attachment_344" align="alignright" width="105" caption="Robyn Davidson, editor of The Best Australian Essays 2009. Picture Courtesy of Black Inc."][/caption]

Dessaix's essay The Grand Illusion sifts through the travel industry hype and hyperbole to re-define the notion of a perfect getaway, in itself a quaint Victorian notion that became a 20th century mass consumer craze just like MacDonald's thanks to the swelling of the middle class rank in the developed countries.

For Dessaix, who, among others, authored Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004), the perfect holiday destination is not tourist-infested Bali but the "grubby little Tozeur on the edge of the Sahara in Tunisia's south, however, where there's nothing to see and nothing ever happens" but where "I feel dense with wakefulness".

"In Tozeur, in the labyrinth of the old town, lost amongst the endless palms, or just loitering with intent outside a carpet shop at night, when the town springs to life, I find myself very interesting indeed."

The central contention of this essay is that modern travel is a form of escape from our own bored, satiated selves to places where we find ourselves interesting again. This may not necessarily happen in luxury hotels and resorts where we end up drinking the same cocktails and watching the same silly sitcoms as at home.

"The antidote to boredom lies not in excitement, amazement, unparalleled vistas or repose in paradise, but in being woken up to our own inner complexity, our density, and befriending it," Dessaix writes. He cheekily suggests that such inner awakenings could take place even in, wait for it, Dubai, the new Mecca of conspicuous consumerism, for "Good travelling depends not on the travel, but on the traveller."