The Best Australian Essays 2015 (33 page)

In his journalism, Camus was also focused on domestic French, European, and international politics. A constant refrain in his
Combat
editorials and articles – written in the course of facing day-to-day political and social struggles – is the criticism that what is lacking in contemporary politics is a sense of ‘imagination'. Like Orwell, Camus saw the imagination as essential to forcing an individual to see the concrete reality beyond the words and ideologies of his day. Here is but one example, from an editorial on 30 August 1944: ‘Thirty-four Frenchmen tortured and then murdered at Vincennes: without help from our imagination these words say nothing. And what does the imagination reveal? Two men, face-to-face, one of whom is preparing to tear out the fingernails of the other, who looks him in the eye.' There are numerous other examples in Camus' journalism. They are the equivalent of Orwell's famous line: ‘As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me' – of which he, too, has numerous other, lesser-known examples in his own writing.

But each of these tiny moments of detail is the outcome of a more fully developed imagination. Such imagination is the lynchpin between the political and the literary aspects of the work of both Orwell and Camus. For Orwell, this political imagination is associated with ‘decency'. Camus also spoke of ‘decency' in his journalism, but, for him, it was associated mainly with an attitude of ‘modesty'.

Much of the development of Camus' political thinking, culminating in
The Rebel
, is based around his opposition to all forms of modern nihilism, whether they came from the right or the left. But even here Camus has a unique perspective on what nihilism is: ‘A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.' It is precisely the same criticism that Orwell levelled against totalitarianism: ‘Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.' Most commentators focus on the first part of this statement, and ignore the implications of the second part. This is from the same essay in which Orwell rehearses an image used so powerfully in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
: ‘So long as physical reality cannot be altogether ignored, so long as two and two have to make four …' And the essay in which this appears? ‘The Prevention of Literature'.

Camus' equivalent to this essay appeared as a later chapter in his political work
The Rebel
. There he described how the roots of rebellion – and its inextricable belief in limits, predicated upon what exists, and its preservation – were the same as the roots of art. For Camus, as for Orwell, the separation of the two aspects of human experience, the political and the literary, is the first sign of the decadence of each. Camus writes:

4.

So what would have happened had these two men actually met in 1945? Les Deux Magots was a popular cafe and meeting place for Parisian writers and intellectuals. In 1928, when Orwell was down and out in Paris, fresh out of the Burmese Police, he thought he saw James Joyce there. Now here he was seated at that same cafe, wearing a British Army officer uniform, standard for a war correspondent. He was in France to write articles about the liberation for
The Observer
and the
Manchester Evening News
. Camus would have been in his usual suit and trench coat. They would probably have spoken in French, Orwell being better at French than Camus at English. They would have smoked, albeit different cigarettes.

Orwell was ten years older than Camus, but Camus was often at ease with older male figures, perhaps because he never knew his father. One of his most significant male relationships throughout the late '30s and early '40s was Pascal Pia. He was the same age as Orwell. Pia introduced Camus to the newspaper world, and found him work in Paris. He was part of the resistance, and worked with Camus, as a sort of political mentor, at
Combat
. André Malraux was another figure Camus admired and became friends with. He was two years older than Orwell and Pia. Malraux was perhaps closer to Orwell in sensibility, a literary man who liked action. He also took part in the Spanish Civil War, and he liked to wear military dress, like Orwell during this period as a war correspondent.

Orwell had arranged the meeting with Camus, ostensibly on the basis of the latter having been the editor of
Combat
during the final months of the war. In an article Orwell was researching at the time – published in the
Manchester Evening News
on 28 February 1945 – about the French newspaper scene, Orwell cited
Combat
as one of the leading ‘Left-wing Socialist' newspapers that was still able to retain some of its critical power amidst the rising status quo and censorship of post-war Paris. Orwell was probably thinking of the likes of Camus when he wrote: ‘But the experience of the occupation has produced in large numbers a new type of journalist – very young, idealistic and yet hardened by illegality, and completely non-commercial in outlook – and these men are bound to make their influence felt in the post-war Press.' So they would have probably spoken about the occupation and the liberation, and about the press, about censorship and paper shortages.

Had the conversation gone off topic, had they spoken about other than immediate things, it is likely that they would have spoken about Spain. Orwell's 1938 book
Homage to Catalonia
, about his experience of the Spanish Civil War, was soon to be published in a French translation. Camus had an abiding affiliation with Spain. His mother was Spanish. He was also currently having a love affair with María Casares – a Spanish actress, the daughter of Santiago Casares y Quiroga, the prime minister of Spain during the military uprising in 1936, which started the civil war. Camus would have been interested to hear about Orwell's time in Spain, and especially about his being shot through the throat. Orwell would have been interested to hear, via Camus' close contacts, current news of Spain.

But they would perhaps not have spoken for long, or about many of the topics discussed here. Orwell and his English reserve, Camus and his Algerian
pudeur
, would have seen to this, at least at their first meeting. Coffee over, cigarettes snubbed out, they would have shaken hands and then gone their separate ways, but ever in the same direction.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Mirror Rim: Lost and Found on the Abrolhos

Ashley Hay

I thought
Batavia
was the story I was carrying on my trip to the Abrolhos in the first weeks of spring. You know the one – the Dutch East India Company ship that ran aground there in 1629, delivering 316 people to a cluster of tiny islands in the northern part of the archipelago where some endured a murderously mutinous attack at the hands of their fellow travellers. Only 116 arrived safely in the Spice Islands, half a year later.

I thought it was that ship, that story, those people who underscored how I approached this place, the way I saw it and what I experienced. It took me some time to fathom the truth.

Perhaps it's a writer's worst habit, carrying narratives around to fit to new places, or having unexpected ones rear up in places that should be fresh and free of all associations. Their eyes always open for a scene, a sentence, a moment to steal for a story they don't yet know they'll tell. I'm with Hilary Mantel when she says: ‘Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.'

Which probably makes me awful to travel with – or sleep with.

*

It disappeared so quickly, the enormous heft of Australia. It was spring and, in the striped blue thickness of the Indian Ocean below our tiny plane, whales surfaced and frolicked – a spray of water, a raised flipper, the giant splash of a breach. The occasional vessel appeared: trawler, cruiser, carrier. There was so much space around each that the chance of any one intersecting with another seemed impossible. The chance of intersecting with anything seemed remote.

Yet more than ninety boats' lookouts are known to have failed at their post in this place, leading their vessels to run afoul. Below the plane, we saw the boiler of a recent wreck (the
Windsor
, 1908), the remnants of the
Zeewijk
(1727), below which was, perhaps, the
Agtekerke
, lost two years earlier in 1725 but only – possibly – revealed in 2012. For almost 400 years, for all anyone knew, the
Agtekerke
could have fallen off the face of the earth.

It's an A to Z of submarine detritus, drawn to – and destroyed by – the Abrolhos Islands, this exquisite scatter of reefs, shoals, shallows and 170-odd ‘islands, islets and above-water rocks' that covers 800 square kilometres of space about 70 kilometres off Australia's western shore. This spotty archipelago, a smattering of limestone and coralline punctuation spread across a wide, wet canvas.

You do not just happen across the Abrolhos. There's a small seasonal crayfishing industry and some aquaculture operations, mainly pearl farms: the oysters here can produce a pearl the colour of an indigo dusk. But there are no public jetties and no marinas – only private access ways and a handful of public moorings. There are three airstrips and one local helicopter company has the right to land anywhere it can set a chopper down.

If you do get there, you're not supposed to stay: there's nowhere to book a room; nowhere to camp. The chance of sleeping over comes by working with the fishermen or pearlers and bunking in one of their huts – or by being invited to stay, as we were, in the Department of Fisheries' dormitories on Rat Island, in the middle cluster of these outcrops, the Easter Group.

And so we came, a handful of visiting writers – offered the chance to be somewhere, see somewhere, as writers sometimes are – and we stared across the shape of this small piece of land, its vast blue sky busy with the sounds and swoops of birds.

More than 2 million birds breed throughout these islands: terns and noddies (including the only Australian breeding population of Australian lesser noddies,
Anous tenuirostris melanops
) and gulls. There are populations of
Larus pacificus
here, the heavier, more cartoonish gull that lived around Sydney until it was out-competed by that smaller, harsher-voiced kelp gull with its red beak and beady eyes. There was the possibility of sea lions too – the Abrolhos is the northern limit of the breeding population of
Neophoca cinerea
, and one was known to come and play.

Beneath the sounds of the birds lay the strange wuthering the wind makes where there's not much for it to play against – sounds a usually busy mind could easily spin into something like a noisy road on a wet day. A thing so far from real: the island was deserted but for us and our stomping, two out-of-season cray-fishers working on their hut, and what remained of Giuseppe Benvenuto, who drowned in 1929 when his boat went down nearby. The view beyond the headstone of his neat and obvious grave gave way to limitless west.

There was something compelling about the water beyond that grave. Close by, where it turned against the sandy shore, it sometimes rested – completely still, like a millpond – for the better part of a minute, even more. There was not the slightest ripple or wave, and then, like a breath, some pulse would return; a small fold, another and another. There was no discernible pattern to this, no logic, and far out against the western horizon the high white walls of breakers rose up and shattered against the raised ocean floor. Too far to hear their noise; too far to gauge their size or weight or power. They were a suggestion, or a threat, perhaps, like a misplaced loop of film disrupting an otherwise serene line.

Those waves evoked the phrase long-ago sailors used when they left charted waters: they spoke of ‘sailing out of the world'. Out there was the far shore that closes
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
– the far shore that opens
Twelfth Night
. Out there were lost stories and undiscovered lands.

The clouds took on rose-gold and apricot as the sun began to set and the light went down. Out at the edge of the world.

*

I'm an utterly east coast creature: I grew up with my feet in the Pacific Ocean and a clear stretch between me and Chile – had I been able to see that far. All my life, the sun has risen out of the ocean, illuminating a coast spotted with the colonial busyness of familiar British names: Cook and Banks, Bass and Flinders.

On the west coast, where the sun falls into the sea, the names are more exotic and the narrative of colonial exploration is more than a hundred and fifty years older. Dirk Hartog nailed his silver plate to a tree in 1616. Willem de Vlamingh, more than seventy years later, coasted from Rottnest Island up to Hartog's landing site near Shark Bay, replacing the original plaque. In between came Frederick de Houtman, charting the constellations of the southern sky along the Dutch East India Company's route between Europe in the north and the Spice Islands – as Indonesia was known – in the south.

In the days before the reliability of longitude, the smart navigational money was on tracking east from South Africa until the coast of New Holland – or Australia – appeared. Turn left at the place now called Kalbarri, the thinking went, and you could track north-west to Batavia (Jakarta).

But Frederick de Houtman found a suite of reefs between his vessel and the sea cliffs of Kalbarri in July 1619. He named them for a common seafaring phrase –
abri voll olos
: ‘keep your eyes open'. Hoping no one else would stumble on them as he had.

But here came
Batavia
, in the early hours of 4 June 1629.

I thought I saw the sea breaking on some shallows, said the ship's lookout.

I thought you saw the moonlight on the water, said her skipper.

And the ship ran aground, her hull gouged.

Of the 316 people aboard, forty drowned. The rest made it to shore – even the panicky second-in-command, Jeronimus Cornelisz, who spent the last twenty-four hours of the ship's life clinging to the bowsprit because he couldn't swim. You know what happened next. There are novels and non-fiction books; there are operas; there are films.

The ship's skipper, Ariaen Jacobsz, and its commandant or ‘upper merchant', Francisco Pelsaert, slunk off under the cover of darkness with a subset of crew and passengers and the two small extant boats, first to search for water and then, failing that, to attempt the 3000-kilometre open-water sail to Indonesia to effect a rescue. In their absence – deemed treacherous by the abandoned survivors – command devolved onto that unstable apothecary, the ‘under merchant' Cornelisz, a man who'd been planning mutiny well before the reefs of the Abrolhos appeared. He began separating the remaining passengers and crew; he began ordering them killed – more than a hundred of them were, and the skeletons of some were found, centuries later, in shallow graves. When Pelsaert returned – having been unable to locate the islands for a month, thanks to the dubious calculations of latitude and longitude taken by his now imprisoned skipper – Cornelisz was tried. He had one of his hands amputated – some reports say two – before he was hung alongside several other mutineers.

It's a grisly tale, told and retold. Its first incarnation as a book was published in 1647 and became an immediate bestseller. But the recitative of its horror notwithstanding, perhaps some fates are worse. The abecedary of known shipwrecks encapsulates many hundreds of lives cut short – but what of the utterly lost, those ships whose fates aren't known? As Simon Leys calculated in his own elegant essay on
Batavia
, of the ships that sailed to the East Indies, one in fifty never arrived. On the return voyage, the odds dipped to one in twenty. ‘Most of the lost ships,' he wrote, ‘disappeared without a trace.'

‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live,' as the famous Joan Didion quote goes, and perhaps it's our stories that keep us alive when we're gone – a stab at immortality. If a story cannot be told – if its last teller disappears beneath the last wave with the crumbling bowsprit – then the shape of its narrative is necessarily upended, incomplete. Who knows what has happened or where? Someone has to survive; the longboat or the yawl has to make it back. Otherwise the story sinks, forgotten, into the ocean.

*

On the Abrolhos the moon rose out of the sea as bright and as orange as the sun. It was two fingers above the horizon by the time I reached the foreshore, swung up so fast and already apparently diminishing. Someone knew the trick of holding your thumb against its disc to undo the illusion that it rises large and begins to shrink, and we sat there, measuring the moon and measuring our misperceptions.

This demonstrable difference between how we see things and how they are was irresistible. We joked about it. We joked about the creepiness of this empty island with its empty huts. We joked about the ghosts we didn't want to see – the worst of them just over there, 27 kilometres to the north, where
Batavia
went down. We talked, we told each other stories. We turned ourselves towards sleep.

We know that we sleep differently to our ancestors (they often slept in two blocks a night, waking in between to eat, pray, love – even to burgle, brew beer, or pop out to see a neighbour). We know, too, that different cultures still sleep differently to each other today (from the famous southern European siesta to various African tribes where no one is ever told to sleep and where the boundaries between waking and sleeping are described as ‘very fluid'). So can different landscapes generate different experiences of sleeping? Can different landscapes generate different dreams?

Twice I skidded out of somnolence, jolting awake with a shock, like a step taken with no ground suddenly beneath it. The second time, I know I cried out too. The night was ringingly quiet and the sleep that finally arrived was tessellated so that I seemed to dream that I was awake when I knew I must have been dreaming and woke as exhausted as if I'd never closed my eyes.

I did dream of Francisco Pelsaert's mother, dispossessed and punished via the decision that her son was partly culpable for the mess of
Batavia
because he had left his ship and sailed for rescue. I dreamt of walking into a depth of water that suddenly levelled out, shallow and only chest-deep – and I dreamt of walking across to Australia's mainland through this flat and silvery rime.
Batavia
was reckoned to have a top speed of about 4.5 kilometres per hour; I could walk faster than that and reach Geraldton in ten hours, top speed.

And then I slept, deep, dreamless, as if I'd disappeared from my own imagination.

I woke, though, with the unsettling thought of Cornelisz's amputated hands. Lying on my front, my left hand was gripping at the fingers of my right while the full weight of my body pressed onto both; they'd been numbed and dulled of all sensation. I managed not to cry out again – my roommate was still asleep.

Through the window the morning was the blank silver of the time before sunrise when the world hasn't yet found its colour, and the gulls rose silently to hover on thermal streams, as if to regain their wings after a quiet night on the ground.

I shook the feeling back into my hands and sent the power-mad apothecary away. The sun shone a straight line across the water to the end of one of the jetties, just as the moon had the night before, and the real world seemed far off.

‘I had such a wonderful sleep,' said my roommate, smiling and stretching towards the beginning of her day.

Hours later, as our plane rose up from the airstrip and cleared the land's friable edge, my phone clicked back into range and immediately started to ring. I sent an automatic message – ‘can't talk now' – wishing I could shout instead, over the engine's roar. ‘You'll never guess where I am; you'll never guess at the beauty I'm seeing.'

Keep your eyes open; tell something from this place.

*

Of course it's a compulsion, the need to convert time and space into stories. A bunch of writers on a speckle of island, a limestone platform undercut by the movement of water so that it hovered like a tree on its trunk: we couched it in terms of longing to be marooned in a place like this; the fear of being marooned in a place like this; whether or not we saw a snake, a lizard, or a seal; whether we could ever have enough of the exhilaration of a land's edge.