Empathy and the Human Heart: A Review of ‘The Best Australian Stories 2015’ and ‘The Best Australian Essays 2015’

The Best Australian Stories ed. Amanda Lohrey; Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc. RRP $29.99, 240pp, ISBN: 9781863957786

The Best Australian Essays ed. Geordie Williamson: Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc. RRP $29.99, 360pp, ISBN: 9781863957779

Maria Papas

When I read, I read for empathy. The narratives I like most are those in which the writer shows genuine concern for both subject matter and reader. I like to feel that he or she wrote not from knowledge, expertise, or even research, but from a point of empathy – and by empathy I do not mean the attempt to walk in someone else’s shoes, but rather the willingness to listen to, learn from, and walk alongside one’s subject. I hesitated when I picked up The Best Australian Short Stories 2015 and The Best Australian Essays 2015. ‘Best of’ collections do not have the luxury of a thematic thread or an organising principle. Whereas other anthologies might offer the promise of ‘love’ or ‘culture’ or something similar to guide a reader like me, here there was nothing other than the knowledge that someone – an editor – thought these narratives ‘best’. I couldn’t tell at face value what kinds of stories and essays I would encounter. ‘Best’ could mean anything, and what I hoped for was very specific. I needn’t have worried. What I read, in both volumes, was the gentle succession of voices that cared.

In her foreword to The Best Australian Stories 2015, Amanda Lohrey suggests that although the narratives in this collection vary widely, all have a common element of danger. Whilst I see this, I also believe they are brought together by a sense of vulnerability. Often there is an unveiling or a new way of seeing. Always there is compassion. Goldie Goldbloom, for example, writes what appears to be a simple holiday narrative; yet within this seemingly easy disruption to everyday life, she examines each of her characters’ histories through the complexities of religion, war, displacement and divorce. One is not left with an alliance towards any particular character, but rather with an understanding that pain, untethered, brings about more pain. Likewise, Balli Kaur Jaswal, Jo Lennan and Omar Musa also explore the ways in which humans hurt. Jaswal writes of a new Australian so disillusioned with the conditions of his living, he constructs a lie for his yet-to-arrive wife; Lennan explores a culture so full of empty promises no-one is satisfied; and Musa examines the broken dreams of a man who once wished to become an astronaut but instead trained as an engineer. Although more obviously a story of political corruption, this narrative hits at the heart of anyone who ever allowed themselves to believe an untruth. Compare such tales of cultural displacement with Cate Kennedy’s Australian honeymooners in Bali. Here a newly-married Karen naively wishes for an ‘authentic’ Bali experience, but can never quite access a culture deeper than the one designed for tourist consumption. When finally she sees something authentic—poverty, vulnerability and Western entitlement—it is not quite as she expects.

There are other kinds of displacements as well. Ryan O’Neill’s protagonist no longer belongs to his marriage or to his livelihood; Jo Case writes of a single mother who struggles to fit in; and Sarah Klenbort sensitively explores a young girl’s acceptance within the deaf community. Health features prominently throughout the volume. Nick Couldwell (in a story selected from Westerly 60.1) offers a very poignant description of the human heart, and Nicola Redhouse does the same with the brain. Eleanor Limprecht’s story is one of my favourites. Focalising through the eyes of a nurse, Limprecht writes beautifully about a woman with dementia who has fallen in love. Such is the nature of this collection that it feels as though each of the writers sought to understand a world or a living quite outside of themselves.

Edited by Geordie Williamson, The Best Australian Essays 2015 works perfectly as a theoretical companion. In a very different way, it is also loosely underpinned with an empathic questioning of the world. In ‘The Informed Imagination’ Drusilla Modjeska examines the problems she faced writing her novel ‘The Mountain’, and comes to several important conclusions about the inequality present between the white narrator and the post-colonial subject. Alison Croggon writes of gender inequalities, sexual violation and male entitlement in her very brief but sharp essay, ‘Trigger Warning’; Helen Garner justly takes on the discriminations of age; and Maria Tumarkin interviews a number of highly educated first-generation migrants whose overseas degrees, experience and expertise were rendered worthless in the Australian working environment. She talks of their wasted knowledge, their constant struggles, even the diminishment of their accomplishments. Tumarkin’s father—a PhD-educated scientist—is central to her piece. If empathy is the willingness to walk next to another, then Tumarkin writes with kilometres spent by her father’s side. Nadia Wheatley and Tim Winton also write of their fathers. Wheatley takes a trip to Belsen in order to research her father’s role as a doctor in the liberation of the Jewish people post-World War II, and in doing so she shines a light on persistent systemic anti-Semitism amongst British army and officials of that time. Winton writes much closer to home. His is a personal essay, an experience which weaves from an understanding of his father towards an understanding of himself. Sophie Cunningham, in her award-winning essay on walking, likewise comes to an understanding of self.

Compassion is a common concern in most of the essays, but this compassion is not always about people. Rebecca Giggs writes an intimate geological essay where the focus of her care is the preservation of heritage and environment. In his foreword, Geordie Williamson describes Giggs as one of the most ecologically literate younger essayists in Australia. Young or old, I have to agree. Giggs sensitively and thoughtfully pairs the economic lives of mining and construction workers with her sadness for the loss of landscape and story. Such losses also feature in Felicity Plunkett’s biography of Gurrumul Yunupingu. Plunkett describes a quiet man who mourns for culture, but rather than end with sadness she offers a metaphoric bridge of hope.

Perhaps if I have any criticism at all, it is the relative absence of essays regarding our growing consciousness towards health. One of my favourite pieces in the volume is Karen Hitchcock’s article on medicine’s trend towards a diagnosis-and-pill sensibility, but it almost stands alone. Hitchcock raises important points on the nature of medicine in this consumption-driven world, and argues that medicine and alternative therapies can each do more to improve the wellbeing of their patients. Hitchcock’s argument resonates with me, and I suspect, given the number of stories in Lohrey’s volume which take health as a departure point, others might feel the same. Broken up from time to time with review and literary criticism, the essay collection, as with the story collection, is a pleasure to read. What is particularly nice is the realisation that there are so many accomplished writers taking the time to care.

Maria Papas writes fiction and creative non-fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in Griffith Review, Review of Australian Fiction, Axon Journal and The Letters Page. In 2011 her play ‘Arbour Day’ won the Maj Monologues award. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia.

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