Sylvia Lawson was an intellectual and writer who helped revive the Australian film industry in the 1960s and establish the Sydney Film Festival. A passionate believer in serious and engaged journalism, she devoted her life to exploring and interrogating politics and culture, and their intersection, through her witty, acerbic and beautifully crafted writing.

Sylvia was born on November 12, 1932, in Summer Hill, Sydney, and grew up in Ingleburn, at that time a semi-rural settlement beyond the urban fringe. The eldest of six daughters, she went to Homebush Intermediate High School, then Fort St Girls' High School, before studying arts at Sydney University. It was there she became involved in the causes that would preoccupy her for the rest of her life, notably film aesthetics and film culture.

Sylvia Lawson won the non-fiction category for The Archibald Paradox, 1984. Credit:Fairfax Media

After university, she worked as a cadet journalist at the Sydney Morning Herald where she was frustrated, as many female journalists were then, at being confined to "women's issues". On her marriage in 1955, she was forced to leave the Herald and went to work for the Daily Mirror, where she was similarly frustrated.

In 1958 Lawson began to write for Nation, an independent publication founded by Tom Fitzgerald in 1954. With colleagues such as George Munster, who acted as a mentor for Lawson, Nation provided an opportunity for robust and independent commentary. Here her campaigning for Australian cinema began, notably in a scathing review of the Fred Zinnemann version of The Sundowners - writing "it's horrifying that we should have to be so touchingly grateful to Warners Brothers for giving this continent a pat on the head, for throwing a few pink galahs on to the screen…"