Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

What Do You Mean by Your Country?
Sylvia Lawson, How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia: Stories and Essays. Sydney: University of
New South Wales Publishing, 2002.
Reviewed by Shirley Tucker.
Reading a collection of stories and essays by one author can be a bit like listening to an album by one
artist. There are tracks you routinely skip - not because they are necessarily inferior to the ones you
don't, but because they are simply not to your taste. Sylvia Lawson's provocatively titled collection,
How Simone de Beauvoir Died in Australia reminds me of such albums; albums that cover a vast array
of genres, styles and themes in an attempt to showcase the versatility of the artist and demonstrate their
mastery of everything possible in music.
It's not that Lawson isn't a great cultural critic and writer. Taken individually, each story/essay is
intelligent and engaging (except perhaps for 'Putting the books away with Jack' the one where she sorts
her books with her son according to various ambiguous disciplinary categories), and each story
investigates important questions of nation, identity, politics and culture. It's just that despite these
pressing Australian preoccupations, the overall sequence or continuity is somewhat incoherent because,
I think, the integration of these themes into each story/essay is so elusive. It's hard work making the
connections but you can't help responding to the not quite concealed demand that you bloody well
make the connections.
Perhaps the book's suggestive cover, with a title that promises the
fantasy of Simone, albeit dead in Australia, positioned above an
Aboriginal art graphic, perfectly contextualises the vast array of
genres, styles and topics within. The overall organising principle for
this collection is announced in the epigraph to the Introduction
where an interviewer asks Noam Chomsky whether the time might
come when we are no longer ashamed of our country and Chomsky
replies 'it depends what you mean by your country'. The ensuing
investigation of 'our country' provides an interesting, if not unusual,
journey into the thoughts and observations of Lawson.
Using a mix of fact, fiction and autobiography, Lawson investigates
the extent to which increasingly repressive ideological conformity
has eroded any sense of social democracy. While the tone is
optimistic rather than gloomy, she is clearly concerned about the
disappearance of the dissenting voice as she moves us through a
wide range of settings; Alice Springs, East Timor, Indonesia, West
Papua, Britain and France, to emphasise this point. Despite the
many problems she observes as a consequence of this loss of critical voice, she manages to maintain
positive about the future through her own good faith in people generally. For example, though she
explains that our nation-building efforts (characterised by corroboree, Snowy River horse riders in
Akubras and Drizabones, and the lawnmower ballet at the opening ceremony of the 2000 Sydney
Olympic Games) are largely symbolic, she argues that we read symbols accurately and we 'know full
well what we're doing when symbolic action is called for' (5). Thus the meaning of Cathy Freeman's
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