And It's On For Young And Old
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday July 19, 2008
Much ground can be covered in the space of 10,000 words, writes Jane Sullivan.
GERMAINE GREER knows what it is to feel rage. At her 50th birthday party, one of the guests, "a smug bastard", started to rile her with his comments about Australian Aborigines. "I felt my heart rate increasing and my breath coming faster," she writes. "The muscles of my throat began to ache and my mouth turned dry as ash. Then my voice went funny as if someone else was speaking through me. My eyes were stinging with unshed tears ..."It is not, however, her own rage that Greer writes about in her latest essay, On Rage.It is the helpless rage that eats away at the hearts of Aborigines, particularly the men, which leads, she says, to violence towards women and children, and suicide, but which is caused in the first place by white men. Instead of an annual Sorry Day, she calls for an Angry Day, "when Whitey would get reminded of just what he has done for Australia".Greer's comments, particularly her focus on the historic sexual abuse of Aboriginal women by settler men and her rejection of the recent Northern Territory intervention, are bound to stir things up and could provoke some reciprocal rage. And yet the new On books, a series of 10,000-word essays by Australia's best writers on themes of their own choosing, are not really about stirring the possum. They are more like meditations, with moments of confession.The first four hardbacks, "little books on big themes" - Greer's On Rage, Barrie Kosky's On Ecstasy, David Malouf's On Experience and Blanche d'Alpuget's On Longing - are released on July 28, another four are due by Christmas and at least eight more have been commissioned for next year."I imagined it would be quite a polemical series," says Louise Adler, director of Melbourne University Publishing, who dreamed up the idea and commissioned the books. "But all the writers have come back with very personal and quite powerful material. I was surprised at the intensity of the words and themes."Anyone who knows Kosky's work for the theatre would expect his essay, On Ecstasy, to be outrageous and provocative, and so it is. But the surprise is the charm and humour of his childhood memories.As a schoolboy, Kosky was transfixed every afternoon by the TV show H.R. Pufnstuf, especially Jack Wild's jeans in the opening credits: "They were wet. Very wet. And they were tight. Very tight ... "I sat there, a cross-legged, bespectacled seven-year-old in a Melbourne Grammar uniform, holding my breath, sinking into the shag pile with a feeling of palpitating, delicious nausea."Kosky, now a theatre and opera director based in Berlin, goes on to define the dark ecstasy he has discovered and interpreted in the music of Mahler and Wagner, and in his own productions, including scenes of Medea murdering her own children or a baritone singing Ligeti in a never-ending stream of his own excrement.And yet it's the personal moments of sensuous ecstasy that linger for the reader: the childhood joys of grandmother's chicken soup or a woman on a record singing Madam Butterfly or the intoxicating smells of Melbourne Grammar's changing rooms - or Jack Wild's tight, wet jeans.Adler says she got the idea for the series from a Princeton University Press book, On Bullshit, by American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. The author wasn't exactly a household name and the content was earnest and thorough but it became a "sleeper" - a bestseller that started slowly and gradually built up momentum through word of mouth."The title was so great, so pithy. We thought there was something to be done here with the idea of 'On'. We wanted people to write on themes they felt deeply committed to." The On books are part of a renaissance of the essay form in Australia in recent years, notably in magazines, anthologies and in books such as Black Inc's Quarterly Essay series. Where these differ are in length - there are no other obvious outlets for 10,000-word essays in book form - and its sense of personal passion. "You feel the individual voice behind it," Adler says.Another inspiration for her was Don Watson's 2001 Quarterly Essay, Rabbit Syndrome, which looked at America's influence on the Australian imagination. "It's one of the best essays I've ever read. I liked the elegance of the structure, moving from John Updike's Rabbit character to the US Administration to develop the idea and theme."One of the first people she contacted for her series was Blanche d'Alpuget, best-known as Bob Hawke's former biographer and current partner. "I'd always wanted to publish Blanche; I'd been a great fan of her novels and it had been a long time since she'd written. I thought, how can I bring Blanche back to writing? She said immediately that what she wanted to write about was longing."The result, Adler says, is a meditation on longing, weaving between d'Alpuget's sense of yearning for the men in her life (including, naturally, Bob Hawke) and the longing she has experienced in the process of writing fiction. The authors' choices of theme are revealing in themselves. Don Watson chose On Indignation, Malcolm Knox On Obsession, Anne Summers On Luck and foodie Gay Bilson On Indigestion; these books will be out for Christmas. Next year we can expect to read Susan Johnson On Beauty, poet Dorothy Porter On Passion, Julianne Schultz On Tall Poppies and Robert Dessaix On Humbug.As Adler says, David Malouf brings the results of a lifetime's reading to his essay, On Experience. Again, there are powerful personal moments, such as "the secret machinery" of childhood, the work children do as eavesdroppers and voyeurs in order to begin to understand the world.As a boy, Malouf was "a little loiterer" on the thresholds of adult conversation, a memory he also describes in his memoir 12 Edmondstone Street, and this propensity has never left him: "For writers, like children who have never quite grown up, life retains a quality of strangeness."Malouf goes on to build a powerful argument for the value of individual and private experience and testimony against the murderous forces of history, such as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, that impose their own notions of collective experience on their subjects. The writer's experience in this struggle is crucial: "When he speaks, what he says goes directly to the heart of many who are incapable of finding words for what they feel but recognise it, and with a real lightening of the spirit, the moment it is stated."It's hard to think of any other essay series that in four books could bring together the Holocaust, Aboriginal dispossession, a writer's longing for a former prime minister and a Melbourne teenager conducting Mahler in his bedroom with a plastic chopstick.On Longing, by Blanche d'Alpuget; On Rage, by Germaine Greer; On Ecstasy, by Barrie Kosky; and On Experience, by David Malouf, will be published by MUP on July 28, $19.95 each.
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald