And perhaps that explains, at least in an elementary way, why a troika of stories and essays with the title Secrets is intrinsically enticing. The word itself lures you back into childhood magic and memories of rites that were completely engrossing, mythical habits of mind that we never really relinquish and which anchor us in ancient narratives, draw us again into the temples and caves and rocks where human beings have had their dealings with the gods. But secrets don’t lie just in the past. Notions of time become very elastic in the vicinity of mystery. ‘Time has collapsed’ notes the ever-sceptical but always curious Robert Dessaix, as he walks towards what he calls the vortex of mystery in the mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut in Egypt. Immanence can’t be assigned a date any more than can absence.

So, Secrets is a powerful gathering title; its ripple effects keep these three very different pieces of writing different in style, genre, set of mind, coordinated and speaking to one another. Which is important, because they are not natural companions. Drusilla Modjeska’s framed narrative is a novel poised to escape. You want to know more of the closely bound characters fathers, wives, daughters, and lovers she deploys in a story that has some of the schematic power of biblical narrative. But Modjeska has always been a writer who twangs the boundaries of genre. In this piece there is also a reflective, even a moral impulse at work (a breath of Samuel Johnson?) which, while it chimes with the analytical and speculative tone of the pieces by both Lohrey and Dessaix, leaves Modjeska’s characters striding a little stiffly in what might otherwise be a gossipy mystery novel. The narrative is driven by the rhythms of ‘and then … and you won’t believe it, but then …’. But there are other, not always scrutable, impulses at work too.

All three writers take their subtitles from W.H. Auden’s wicked, whimsical verse:

At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the teacups and in the square the tongue has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there’s never smoke without fire.

The line that prompts Modjeska is ‘The delicious story ripe to tell’. And delicious her story is: New Guinea tribal art purloined from Lake Sentani by French Surrealists earlier in the century turns up in Australia to shadow the lives of her intermarried, interrelated, alternately loving and betraying cast. There are tribal masks and social masks, one interrogating the other. There is a first-person narrator and an author, both ‘I’.

‘I’ is a slippery creature, says Modjeska in her author’s note, ‘much given to ambiguity and prone to an almost chronic state of contingency. This too is in the nature of secrets, and increasingly I find that it suits me well.’ That may be, but it can also leave the reader impatient. Modjeska has such interesting things to say that you wish sometimes they were not so enfolded in fictional guise or in other devices, and therefore beyond the hooks of dispute.

Amanda Lohrey’s piece, ‘The clear voice suddenly singing’ (taken from Auden’s second stanza) is a more straight­forward work, blending essay with dramatic reportage, about the very best terrestrial out-of-body experience: singing. Lohrey also uses a first-person narrator, but without mask. In fact, her writing is concerned with a particular kind of unmasking, if inhibition is one of the masks that humans wear. She investigates and probes the techniques and the mysteries – the secrets if you like – of music and its making in the human body: ego, muscle and spirit all concerted. She talks about ecstasis – being taken out of the body – an experience singers understand but can’t explain in purely physiological terms. ‘Getting yourself into a state of grace’, Lohrey calls it. Sounds lofty, but she is gritty and honest enough to give back conviction to the phrase. In fact, her writing is profoundly moving precisely because she so straightforwardly locates herself in it, in her own vulnerability. As a singer she has trouble getting out of her own way, she says. Her body holds back the voice. Literally. And metaphorically? It is that knowledge and the powerful desire for a different state of being, which she may not attain, that gives the writing its extraordinary plangency.

Robert Dessaix’s way of being creatively vulnerable is different from Lohrey’s, but as exacting and exciting. The eternal traveller, he takes himself to three great sites: Hatshepsut’s tomb in Egypt, Eleusis in Greece, and to the Aboriginal territory west of Cooktown. He wears the hat of suburban metaphysician and gossip, with flourish. This is the seeker who ‘won’t stop. He believes he’s on to something’. And he is.

‘At last the secret’ is the line he takes from Auden. Characteristically, it is both a tease and the expression of hope. Dessaix does not, of course, learn ‘the secret’ in any of these once or still sacred places. And he does a lot of debunking. ‘Disenchantment is common-sense’ he remarks close to the end of the extraordinary sequence in Kwinkin country. But he also sniffs ‘some kind of intentionality embodied in creation’ in the bush air of Cape York.

It is powerful, and exhilarating to read, this sceptic’s ability to allow the rational mind to play across paradox, to mark all its demurs and yet revel – revel outrageously – in what is still to be discovered and understood.