Meanjin Anthology

Sally Heath

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780522861556
• eBook ISBN: 9780522861563
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Meanjin is Australia's second oldest literary journal. Founded by Clem Christesen in 1940, it has documented both the changing concerns of Australians and the achievements of many of the nation's writers, thinkers and poets. This anthology offers a broad sweep of essays, fiction and poetry published in Meanjin since the magazine began. Readers will get a sense of the debates waged in print over those seven decades and the growing confidence of the Australian written voice. The collection will interest the general reader, the literary enthusiast and those interested in Australian culture.The anthology has been compiled by current Meanjin editor Sally Heath, associate editor Zora Sanders, poetry editor Judith Beveridge, Richard McGregor and Emma Fajgenbaum.

2000s

Suttee (2001)

Alison Croggon

I was the sick one in a forest of icicles

I looked out windows and the stone looked back

eating the morning sun as if it were emeralds

everywhere windows and everywhere flowers burning

everywhere viruses sweating out of the earth

I had no time for their careful measurements

already busy with the swift decays

how brittle these arms reach towards the end of things

talking it so comfortable it’s frightening

and these glass screens glaring and a music

strange and intimate like the hum of cars

or jets screaming so high you cannot see them

imagining the sky itself is screaming

no might I say to the demon it is spring

and a child leap from my vulva like a coal

flaming and alive and consuming itself

no I might say it is the afternoon of me

these endless flanks of sand and a single

silhouette where once unsalted

an oakapple wove itself to itself

no I might say it was a wound reopening

like the night which deepens in a locked roc m

a deadly rose seductive and odorous

the red pulse of rain in an empty house

the ghost in the mirror like a cut hand

o lovely lovely violence

whispers the demon the locks are mute

in the planet’s hollow children are screaming

they are not my children their lips bleed in my skull

my skin a lace of burns the soft air hurts

yes I would sleep in thy mild arms o black f ower I would

sleep and never wake again

I (2002)

Helen Garner

Last winter I had an unexpected visitor: the man I called Javo in my first novel, Monkey Grip, turned up at my front door. He looked fabulous, like a crazy Red Indian, healthy as can be, the father of two kids, and talking like a Buddhist. We stood in my back yard looking at the vegetables and he said, ‘Listen, Hels. I used to think Monkey Grip was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But now I love it. My only criticism of it is that you should have left in all our real names.’

Shouldn’t a real writer be writing about something other than herself and her immediate circle? I’ve been haunted by this question since 1977 when a reviewer of Monkey Grip asked irritably what the fuss was about: as far as he could see, all I’d done was publish my diaries. I went round for years after that in a lather of defensiveness: ‘it’s a novel, thank you very much’. But I’m too old to bother with that crap any more. I might as well come clean. I did publish my diary. That’s exactly what I did. I left out what I thought were the boring bits, wrote bridging passages, and changed all the names. It was the best fun I ever had, down there in the domed Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria in 1976, working with a pencil and an exercise book on one of those squeaking silky oak swivel chairs. I’ll never be that innocent again.

Why the sneer in ‘All she’s done is publish her diaries’? It’s as if this were cheating. As if it were lazy. As if there were no work involved in keeping a diary in the first place: no thinking, no discipline, no creative energy, no focusing or directing of creative energy; no intelligent or artful ordering of material; no choosing of material, for God’s sake; no shaping of narrative; no ear for the music of human speech; no portrayal of the physical world; no free movement back and forth in time; no leaping between inner and outer; no examination of motive; no imaginative use of language.

It’s as if a diary wrote itself, as if it poured out in a sludgy, involuntary, self-indulgent stream—and also, even more annoyingly, as if the writer of a diary were so entirely narcissistic, and in some absurd and untenable fashion believed herself to be so entirely unique, so hermetically enclosed in a bubble of self, that a rigorous account of her own experience could have no possible relevance to, or usefulness for, or offer any pleasure to any other living person on the planet.

What is the ‘I’ in a diary? There can be no writing without the creation of a persona. In order to write intimately—in order to write at all—one has to invent an ‘I’. Only a very naive reader would suppose that the ‘I’ in, for example, the essays and journalism collected in my book The Feel of Steel is exactly, precisely and totally identical with the Helen Garner you might see before you, in her purple stockings and sensible shoes.

The word ‘invent’ here is probably not the right one. It seems to imply something rational, purposeful, clear-headed, conscious. What about ‘choose’, then? How about this: ‘I choose, in the act of writing, aspects of myself that will suit the tale that is wanting me to tell it’?

No. That sounds as if one were confronted with a clear array of possibilities, leaning in a row against a wall all oiled and primed, like rifles.

Choose, like ‘invent’, is in this context as hubristic as the grandiose political fantasy that one chooses one’s sexuality. There’s something organic in the development, the crystallisation of a persona. I don’t understand this process—how I ‘do’ it, or how it’s done to me, or in me, by the demands of my story.

There must be a connection here with the experience that most writers would recognise—that of having to learn to write again for each new book. Between books one passes—or I do, at least—through a phase of having no accumulated competence, of being once again a complete beginner, helpless, frustrated and dumb. The term ‘writer’s block’ hardly touches the sides. It’s a painful state, and it can continue for years. I’ve been stuck in it since December 1999. Many false dawns have announced themselves in the meantime. Despair is not too strong a word.

But it occurs to me that what I’m doing in this state, perhaps, is waiting for the new persona to crystallise—the one that suits the story, the material, the particular area of darkness I want to go stumbling and fumbling into. I need to find a new ‘I’ that feels right. I can’t rush this process. I can’t force it. It’s organic, instinctive. If I launch out by force with the wrong persona, I start after about three pages to feel phoney. I get lost. And I waste the freshness of the material.

I’m always surprised when people I know express appalled amazement to me about what they see as my ‘self-exposure’. One of my sisters, a nurse, told me that when she read my story ‘A Spy in the House of Excrement’, about the Thai health spa where one fasted and took enemas twice a day, she wanted to ‘pull the screen around me’. But I don’t feel exposed—because in this mysterious way I’m trying to describe, the ‘I’ in the story is never completely me.

I’m aware that the persona I create—or that crystallises between me and my story—may not strike ...

Table of contents

• 1940s
• 1950s
• 1960s
• 1970s
• 1980s
• 1990s
• 2000s