This sense of the essay as a means of examining ‘diverse and changeable events’ and ‘irresolute fancies’ – a vessel shaped to contain our contradictory natures and a world in constant flux – remains startlingly modern in aspect. The Renaissance nobleman who wrote on everything from penis size to nature in the poems of Propertius would fit easily with the incorrigibly discursive bloggers of the digital present.

Viewed from this perspective, then, The Best Australian Essays is less a cathedral of words than a dosshouse for vagrant minds. In these pages, the best of our noisy national conversation is excerpted for the public Hansard. Here, too, are portraits of the most eloquent, urgent, and garrulous among us: fixed, mid-grimace or grin, in simple black and white.

The editor’s role in such an undertaking is twofold. He or she must be as expansive as possible when choosing on the basis of subject matter, and thoroughly exclusive when inclusion is down to literary merit. Robert Drewe has managed the well-nigh impossible task of doing both simultaneously, mainly through a clever strategy of bait-and-switch. Take Les Murray’s contribution, a personal history of his affection for the Macquarie Dictionary that reveals a long-standing interest in matters philological – Australian English and its tangled relations with region, race, and caste – rather than poetry’s pure and disinterested pleasures.

Likewise, David Malouf’s essay ‘The States of the Nation’ is a non-fiction survey containing ideas, about place and its shaping effect on culture, say, or the long domestic shadow cast by overseas conflict, which have more often been explored through imagination’s agency, in his novels and short stories. Out of the senior ranks of Oz Lit included here, only Alex Miller directly engages with art, literature, and the mysterious wellsprings of human creativity.

Drewe has also cannily double-dipped when it comes to matching parochial subjects with supranational concerns. The volume opens strongly with Clive James on Peter Porter, an encomium in which the critic approvingly notes how most obituaries have hailed Porter ‘not as an Australian poet, but as a poet of the English language’.

He had spent much of his career caught in a fork, punished in Australia for trying to please the Poms, and punished in the UK for being an Aussie expatriate with a frame of reference above his station. Later on, he won acceptance in both camps, and by the time of his death he was a living example of the old country’s culture reinforcing itself with the energy of the new, and of the new country’s culture gaining scope from an expanded context.

One of the 2010 volume’s standout pieces, David Marr’s ‘Patrick White’s London’, arrives at a similar conclusion. Returning in this year’s Menzies Lecture to his 1991 biography of the author, Marr details White’s relationship to London – city of his birth, site of his artistic awakening, apocalyptic metropolis of his dreams – and comes to appreciate how significant the interplay between imperial centre and antipodes was for his writing:

He brought all he had learned of the human heart in war and peace on Ebury Street, in Belgravia and the West End. He saw himself as a man of understanding in a country that did not understand. Though he felt both immediately at home and a stranger in Sarsaparilla, he was – like so many figures in the novels that were to come – the stranger in the know.

If Kylie only spent more time in Ramsay Street than in the glitzy empyrean where global celebrities dwell, Peter Conrad’s teasingly profane hagiography of the Minogue sisters would no doubt have observed a similarly charged circuit between here and abroad.

Back on home ground, however, some centres are not holding. Sunil Badami’s ‘Country and Western’, a droll recollection of childhood spent in the outer Sydney suburb of Greystanes, observes a hardening of the arteries in the best-known precincts of our oldest and largest city. He makes a strong argument for Parramatta, in Sydney’s West, its streets ‘alive with exotic aromas and unheard-of dialects’, as the city’s new ‘demographic and geographical heart’.

Further north in ‘The Angry Country’, Melissa Lucashenko’s admirably balanced account of the schoolyard death of Mullumbimby High School student Jai Morcom, the essayist ponders the fraying of old social contracts that once governed rural and regional Australia. In their place she finds violence and paranoia, abetted by a narcissistic and ethically unmoored media and sporting culture. And, in a monstrous tropical inflation of the same phenomenon, Nicholas Rothwell visits Elcho Island at the tip of North-East Arnhem Land, an isolated repository of traditional knowledge where the stresses of Western modernity – drugs, Kava, domestic violence – have pushed ritual conflict into murderous territory. With characteristic élan, Rothwell describes the situation there as ‘an arms race of traditional medicine’ in which even mobile phones are employed by malevolent doctors to bewitch from afar.

Galka magic has gone from being a force wielded by a handful of well-known individuals to being a noxious, terrifying mood in the social landscape, a state of generalised fear that keeps men and women locked indoors in fright.

But, just as Virginia Woolf’s antidote to Hazlitt’s elegant gloom was the ineffable lightness of Charles Lamb, several of the finest personal essays here transmute dark materials into something glittering and bright. Gerard Windsor’s lugubrious paean to Sydney’s beachside Waverley Cemetery, for example, site of his own ‘pre-mortem’ arrangements:

The view you get from Waverley, for example, is so sunny and fresh-aired and teeming with melodious ghosts that you can’t help thinking ‘It is good to be here now’ – and that delight spontaneously overflows into ‘It will be good to be here in future.’ ... The sex or the holiday might be disappointing, but that doesn’t nullify all the excitement that preceded them. Ditto for lying in the grave.

Lorna Hallahan’s ‘On Being Odd’ (co-winner of the 2010 Calibre Prize), another essay which manages optimism in metaphysical extremis, gets my vote for the best Australian essay in The Best Australian Essays. The theologian and social worker takes Montaigne’s ‘sprawling rave “Of Cripples”’ as the starting point of investigation into her own damaged, ‘stareable body’, a vessel that obliges those who gaze upon her to confront ‘the ghastly certainty that life is fragile, easily wrecked and fleeting’. What thrills here is the precarious balance of opposites: the philosophically austere learning evident everywhere, knocked askew by subversive reference to P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster or Montaigne’s shocking honesty; and the blending of personal experience with the impersonality of the self that watches that experience unfold:

Wondering at my new form, shocked and interested, repelled and compelled to gaze again. It was like that. I did not go out; I took the body out. The internal body frame no longer matched the one I saw. I had to learn how to look anew at myself.

The joy of Hallahan’s essay is the joy of all Montaigne’s, too: knowledge of the world, drawn from the point where the body’s pleasures and pains meet the abstract wisdom of other bodies in time: reanimating them through the necromancy of eloquence and insight. The contemporary writer’s clear-eyed examination of her difference returns us to the original oddness of Montaigne’s essayistic enterprise. Both writers can count deformity among their graces.