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A Country in Mind: Memoir with Landscape

‘Arid places are where I feel most at home’ writes Saskia Beudel in her book, A Country in Mind, as she takes us on a journey through the heart of Australia. The book includes narrative memoir that enables the writer to draw on history, anthropology and ecology in order to tease out the social and environmental aspects of various landscapes, primarily those within the Australian desert. Beudel started her career as an artist in the early 1980s, following in her father’s footsteps as an amateur photographer, but in time, writing took over from her paintbrush (207). Beudel’s artistic eye is evident throughout. She draws on the visual and as such, the writing reverberates throughout the mind and senses. For Beudel, an exploration of arid places brings to life other landscapes, interior and exterior, including the landscapes of her memory. She circles back on her family history to demonstrate the ways in which ‘displacement reverberates with and shapes our lives’ (33). Beudel believes, and there is much evidence to support this view, that ‘violence, dislocation and dispossession in this landscape’ as held in living memory and in memory handed between older and younger generations and in the landscape itself, alters the landscape and our view of it (30). Beudel prefaces her book with a glimpse of her father towards the end of his life. He was a troubled and creative man whose experience as a child in a POW camp in Japanese occupied Sumatra prior to World War II, and his later repatriation after the war to Holland as a young man and eventual resettlement in Australia, compounded the personal damage wreaked through war and displacement. For Beudel, ‘the land acts as a memory prompt or catalyst for the telling of multiple narrative threads’ (292). She thereby links her father’s experience in Indonesia to a time when her own life hung in the balance. She had travelled Life Writing, 2015 Vol. 12, No. 1, 113–115, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2015.957799