The Best Australian Essays 2015 Read Free

which will endure as long as there are readers left to wonder, ‘How did he do that ?’ The accompanying image shows holograph notes for his final, unfinished essay on Saint Peter, on which he was still working on the day of his death – and which Pierre’s splendid and indefatigable widow, Hanfang Ryckmans, generously lent me to read. I only wish I could have included the work in its entirety.
    Geordie Williamson

Confronting the Unthinkable in Goya’s Art
    Sebastian Smee
    There are many dimensions to the art of Francisco Goya, as ‘Goya: Order and Disorder’, an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, goes to great lengths to remind us. With their slicing and dicing and reconfiguring of Goya’s career – mixing media, discarding chronology – Stephanie Stepanek and Frederick Ilchman, the show’s curators, have emphasised the range and unpredictability of this astonishing artist.
    But as the show comes to a close, I find myself returning repeatedly to what feels almost too obvious about Goya – so obvious, in fact, that one hesitates to dwell on it, for fear of falling back on platitudes.
    I am talking about Goya’s insistence on the stupendous, the monstrous, the scarcely creditable stupidity of human beings.
    Revisiting the show, and leafing through copies of the catalogue and of Goya’s great print series at home, I find myself wondering: Is it permissible, today, in an enlightened, pluralistic society, to insist so vehemently on this stupidity, and in particular on the stupidity of violence?
    Aren’t we supposed to understand violence, the better to get to grips with it? Shouldn’t we be more reasonable and tolerant, more enlightened than simply to insist on its senselessness? After all, there’s always a cause.
    Even in the most horrendous cases, isn’t violence usually understandable, perhaps even forgivable, when we see it outside of a chillingly deadpan news report, a shocking photograph, or a black-and-white print – that is to say, when we see it in context?
    I don’t know. A recent scenario, one of hundreds on offer, springs to mind. I could say, ‘ Yo lo vi ,’ as Goya wrote (and used as a title for one of his prints): ‘I saw it.’ But the events in question, which unfolded in my hometown of Sydney, were in fact ‘covered’ by CNN, and what we all saw was very limited. And maybe I’m grateful for that. (Goya didn’t actually see most of the atrocities he depicted either. But you can be fairly sure they happened.)
    So: a man with a record of criminality and religious fanaticism, big chips on his shoulder and delusions of grandeur walks into a cafe in central Sydney. He takes the customers and staff hostage for sixteen excruciating hours. He uses his hostages as human shields. He wears a headband inscribed with the words ‘We are ready to sacrifice for you, O Muhammad’.
    He demands, among other things, the flag of the organisation calling itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant to be delivered to him, and asks to conduct a conversation with the Australian prime minister on live radio. He forces several of his hostages to record demands that they must then post on social media.
    The world waits. In the sudden and bizarre denouement – God knows what exactly happens in there – two people are killed. One, a 38-year-old barrister, was the mother of three children under ten and the sister of an old college friend of mine. The other was the 34-year-old manager of the cafe.
    For what? Precious lives, nurtured and built, through love and luck and great labour, summarily undone by a pathetic, muddle-headed fool.
    Is that what he was? It is always hard, of course, to find apt words for such narratives. Even harder, perhaps, to find words for the Boston Marathon bombing, the insane massacre of 132 school-children that took place in Pakistan on the same day as the two deaths in Sydney, the