Sylvia Lawson

Sylvia Lawson is an award-winning and highly respected essayist and film critic. Her subject matter, though generally Australian, is also concerned with our nearer neighbours and with the culture and politics f the world beyond. The theme of this new collection is resistance to oppression in seven parts of the world.

Don’t be fooled by this book’s splendid appearance; it’s not to be left on the coffee table. It is an excellent compendium of cultural, political and social history, complementing Philip Drew’s The Masterpiece (2001) and Françoise Fromonot’s superb study, Joern Utzon et l’Opéra de Sydney (1998).  It also establishes Anne Watson as a distinguished historian, both in her own contributions and in her orchestration of others. She has understood that there can be many sides to such a story; the way politics and culture have been entangled in this building’s history gives rise to questions worth unpacking indefinitely.   

Rupert Murdoch is the Napoleon of our times. He has gone on conquering largely because certain governments – Bob Hawke’s among them, in early 1987 – have persistently acquiesced, changing or moderating regulations as his battle plans required. It was once possible to view him as bound, in George Munster’s phrases, ‘on a random walk … [on which] despite the ever greater accumulation of means in his hands, he contributed more and more to the spreading confusion about ends’. That was written more than twenty years ago; Munster’s great book, A Paper Prince (1985), remains valid as a rigorous and witty account of Murdoch’s rise, and as an exemplary study of the relations of media, money and politics. But that walk is not so random now.

Bob Brown tells us the worst: ‘Half of the planet’s forest and woodlands are already gone’; every year, forest areas twice the size of Tasmania vanish from the map. At the same time, ‘There is a thin green line round the world’ – more than seventy Green parties contend for votes everywhere from Scotland to Mexico, Mongolia to Kenya. Jacques Chirac is trying to change the French constitution in favour of the environment; Les Verts have been doing pretty well in the European elections. Labor lassoes Peter Garrett. Even John Howard, while giving much aid and comfort to the fossil fuel industries, tries to sound as though he really supports renewable resources.

It had to be the black metaphor of the season. On Boxing Day, Radio National ran a short, sharp-edged conversation on Australia’s changing relations with the Pacific island-states. One contributor, Professor William Maley, said that the Australian government’s bribery of the destitute statelet of Nauru made him think of ‘the caddish squire seeking out the most wretched prostitute in the village’. Responding. Richard Ackland commented that those who devised the appalling Pacific Solution seemed extraordinarily unconscious of the connotations that still attend that word ‘solution’.

Sylvia Lawson is a distinguished cultural critic and essayist. Her award-winning The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship was published in 1983, and her collection of essays, How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia, won the 2003 Gleebooks Prize for literary and cultural criticism. In selecting the latter volume among my best books of 2002 for the Sydney Morning Herald, I claimed that it was characterised by ‘complex, spacious, committed, convincing, intellectually riveting speculations and reflections’. Many of these qualities may be found in The Outside Story.

Sylvia Lawson’s How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia warrants a second reading to be properly appreciated. The seven pieces in this collection are intricately connected, so that the messages are cumulatively conveyed. The book manifests its author’s ambitious desire to raise the consciousness of her readers. For me, however, the question remains: who is the intended audience?

As an ‘imagined community’, Australia ‘imagined imagining needs more that community’, most strenuous imagining than most. Post-colonial? Not really – we are recolonized over and over. Wall Street shivers, the Australian dollar gets pneumonia; Japan revises its shopping-list, and our coal industry verges on collapse. Britain’s hold began to loosen after World War II, but our cultural colonization by the United States was probably effective at least sixty-five years ago, by the time Australian cinema outlets had been secured for Hollywood, and closed off for local producers, through the nefarious block-booking system. With film and television, there never was much political will to defend ourselves; nor was there any, a year ago, to prevent the powerful American magnate Rupert Murdoch from taking over two-thirds of the press in what used to be his own country. There are moments and areas where it still seems reasonable to promote cultural nationalism, l not positive xenophobia.