My Lives

Christine Stewart was a woman of many parts, and all of them accomplished. She was a lawyer and politician, an anthropologist, a poet, novelist, and essayist. She owned her own cattle station in outback Australia - and, more importantly, worked it on her own, aided by no-one except her dog Tappet. In the 1960s, while still an undergraduate, at a time when the "white Australia" policy was still law, and most Australians tried to pretend their country was nearer to England than to Asia, she developed an interest in Australia's South Pacific neighbors. First in Indonesia and then in Papua New Guinea, she learned local languages, lived in local villages, and, as one of the Pangu party's few expatriate members, helped the party to win independence for Papua New Guinea. Graduating with the University of Papua New Guinea's first class of lawyers, she went on to draft some of that nation's most important legislation. She went back to school, many years later, in her 60s, obtaining a Ph.D. in gender studies. The book that came out of that, Name Shame and Blame, chronicles with her usual impeccable scholarship and humanitarian vigor, the ways in which society enforces its personal norms by criminalizing consensual sex that deviates from those narrow strictures. The book will stand as one of her monuments, already widely influential both in anthropological circles and as a primer for activists. She would have had more lives and made many more contributions but for the idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis that increasingly debilitated her, eventually confining her to a wheelchair and then to her bed, but not quelling either her indomitable spirit or her sharp and questioning intellect. Her last essays - as penetrating and timely as all her others - were about the failures of nursing care facilities to treat their aged residents with dignity and the unfathomable antipathy of the New South Wales government and courts to elective death. She often said she could not write a memoir, because she had led too many lives. Instead, she produced what she preferred to call a Scrapbook, because it covers many, if not all, of those lives. She was a woman of strong opinions, infinite talent, and exuberant enthusiasm for life, all of which shine through these pages.