The Stranger Artist: Life at the Edge of Kimberley Painting

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Hardie Grant Publishing

At a hinge-point in his life, artist and ex-gallerist Tony Oliver travelled to the East Kimberley, where he plunged into the crosscurrents and eddies of the Aboriginal art world. He would stay for almost a decade, working alongside a group of senior Gija artists, including acclaimed figures Paddy Bedford and Freddie Timms, to establish Jirrawun Arts, briefly one of the country's most successful and controversial Aboriginal painting collectives. 'The Stranger Artist' follows Oliver's journey and the deep relationships he formed, an experience that forever altered his life's trajectory. His story will draw readers close to what he came to know of Kimberley life: the immersion of culture and spirituality in the everyday; the importance of Law; the deep and abiding connection to country; and the humour and tragedy that pervade the Aboriginal world. Evocative and absorbing in equal measure, 'The Stranger Artist' tells not only of the connections that can be formed through the sharing of mutual interests and experiences, but of what it takes to live between cultures.

About the author

Quentin Sprague

Quentin Sprague is a Geelong-based writer who has worked variously as a curator, academic, art coordinator and artist. His essays and criticism have regularly appeared in publications including The Monthly, The Australian, Art & Australia and Discipline, as well as artist monographs and exhibition catalogues. Between 2007 and 2009 he lived on the Tiwi Islands and in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia, where he worked for Aboriginal arts organisations.

Judges’ comments

Amidst the scorched landscape of the East Kimberley, ancient and modern art worlds collide, coalesce and collapse in this searingly honest account of the rise and fall of Jirrawun Arts. Focussing on the relationship between Melbourne art dealer Tony Oliver, who travels to the Kimberley, and First Nations painter, Paddy Bedford, whose natural talent Oliver nurtures and refines, Quentin Sprague tells of an Indigenous artists' collective that began its work on an open-air concrete slab and ended up in a studio designed by a New York architect. This change was funded by the burgeoning commissions the artists earned under Oliver's guidance. Visiting art patrons from down south would sit out on the red dirt in the intense heat and watch the artists at work, before retiring to the best local accommodation for slap up meals. Despite the artists' commercial success: drunkenness, illness, and death haunt the collective and it ends badly, with the studio eventually reduced to a storage shed for rusting machinery. Sprague's hauntingly beautiful descriptions of country, his deep understanding of two cultures in collision, and his sumptuous descriptions of the act of painting, mark this work as a literary gem.

Flight Lines: Across the Globe on a Journey with the Astonishing Ultramarathon Birds

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Allen & Unwin

As the sun lowered and turned Gulf St Vincent fiery, they each called a high-pitched 'peeooowiii!', flashed their black wing-pits, spread their tail skirts and took flight.

Andrew Darby follows the odysseys of two Grey Plovers, little-known migratory shorebirds, as they take previously uncharted ultramarathon flights from the southern coast of Australia to Arctic breeding grounds. On these extraordinary flights they chance predators, typhoon weather and exhaustion before they can breed, and maybe return to familiar southern feeding grounds. But the greatest threat to these, and other long-distance migrants on the flyway, is China's dragon economy, engulfing their vital Yellow Sea staging spots.

The author meets the dedicated people working to save these intrepid birds, from Russia to Alaska, from the rim of the Arctic Sea to the coasts of the Southern Ocean. Out of their hard-won science he finds hope for the birds–a bright light for our times.

But his journey to understand this work and these birds almost ends when he is suddenly diagnosed with an incurable cancer. Then he finds science coming to his rescue too.

About the author

Andrew Darby

Andrew Darby is the author of 'Harpoon: Into the heart of whaling', and former Hobart correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age on environmental issues and Antarctica.

Judges’ comments

Andrew Darby takes a deep dive into the confounding science of migratory shorebirds, in particular the little-known Grey Plover, to understand and describe their 'ultramarathon' flights between Australia and their Arctic breeding grounds. Immersion in the world of research in the lab and in the field, including vivid firsthand reportage on bird behaviour, wrangling and habitats along the shores of Australia, China, and the United States (Alaska), brings a striking immediacy, power, and beauty to Darby's writing. The narrative device of tracking the previously uncharted flightpaths of two diminutive Grey Plover from the tidal flats of Gulf St Vincent in South Australia to Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast via the mudflats fringing the Yellow Sea contributes significantly to the book's success. The author's investment in the birds' aerial odyssey injects a compelling and sustained tension and focus into a work of drama and global scope that never loses pace. The spare, elegant text transitions seamlessly between documenting what is in many respects a personal journey, investigating avian aerodynamics, analysing flight data, and probing the environmental threats global warming and rapid economic development pose to biodiversity and the staging posts that support migratory shorebirds along their intercontinental route. Nature has rarely seemed so remarkable.

The Details: On Love, Death and Reading

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Scribner Australia an imprint of Simon & Schuster

Tegan Bennett Daylight has led a life in books—as a writer, a teacher and a critic, but first and foremost as a reader. In this deeply insightful and intimate work, Daylight describes how her reading has nourished her life, and how life has informed her reading. In both, she shows us that it's the small points of connection—the details—that really matter: what we notice when someone close to us dies; when we give birth; when we make friends. In life's disasters and delights, the details are what we can share and compare and carry with us. Daylight writes with invigorating candour and compassion about her mother's last days, her own experiences of childbearing and its aftermath (in her celebrated essay 'Vagina'), her long admiration of Helen Garner and George Saunders, and her great loves and friendships. Each chapter is a revelation, and a celebration of how books offer not an escape from 'real life' but a richer engagement with the business of living. The result is a work that will truly deepen your relationship with books, and with other readers. The delight is in the details.

About the author

Tegan Bennett Daylight

Tegan Bennett Daylight is a writer, teacher and critic. Her books include the Stella Award shortlisted Six Bedrooms and the novels Safety and Bombora. She works as a lecturer in English and Creative Writing, and lives in the Blue Mountains with her husband and two children.

Judges’ comments

In the 'The Details, On Love, Death and Reading', Tegan Bennett Daylight has produced essays that are at once amusing, poignant and occasionally outrageously candid. The underlying theme: 'The words of great writers somehow enrich experience.' Daylight explores intimate tales of her own life, including her relationship with her own body and her husband, the death of her mother and the deaths of friends and their mothers. She explores the compelling detail of the writers and books that have most influenced her. Daylight has a deep regard of the writing of Helen Garner and in her own prose shows a similar capacity to enliven ordinary characters and events. Her eye for detail, first fostered by her mother Deborah, enriches the reflections of the author as teacher, daughter, mother, wife and friend. Just as her mother would provide a bored child a selection of books, Bennett Daylight invites the reader to be transported by her discrete yet superbly intertwined, eloquently written essays.

Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: Allen & Unwin

Cassandra Pybus's ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania, in the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn't know this woman was Truganini, and that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne.

For nearly seven decades, Truganini lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than we can imagine. But her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy. Now Cassandra has examined the original eyewitness accounts to write Truganini's extraordinary story in full.

Hardly more than a child, Truganini managed to survive the devastation of the 1820s, when the clans of south-eastern Tasmania were all but extinguished. She spent five years on a journey around Tasmania, across rugged highlands and through barely penetrable forests, with George Augustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary who was collecting the survivors to send them into exile on Flinders Island. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy—the so-called extinction of the original people of Tasmania.

Truganini's story is inspiring and haunting—a journey through the apocalypse.

About the author

Cassandra Pybus

Cassandra Pybus is an award-winning author and a distinguished historian. She is author of twelve books and has held research professorships at the University of Sydney, Georgetown University in Washington DC, the University of Texas and King's College London. She is descended from the colonist who received the largest free land grant on Truganini's traditional country of Bruny Island.

Judges’ comments

The story of Truganini, long believed by colonists to be the last surviving Aboriginal Tasmanian, has been remembered through a fog of mystery and folklore. Generations of Australians were told of the legend of an old woman who roamed the country of her clan in the 1850s and 1860s. When we look at photographs of her taken in the 1870s, we can only imagine how difficult her life must have been. That extraordinary life, marked by tragedy, defiance, struggle and survival, has now been given the focus that it deserves in Cassandra Pybus's 'Truganini'. For the author, this is a story that is, in part, personal. Her family received a free land grant that covered Tuganini's traditional lands of Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania. Pybus also draws on the diaries of George Augustus Robinson, the preacher and so-called 'Protector of Aborigines' who was responsible for exiling her people to Flinders Island, which gives a first-hand account of Truganini. This clash of cultures between colonists and First Nation's people is a complex story told with empathy and understanding, perceptive analysis and demonstrates a command of detail through extensive research. It is both a stirring and troubling story but also at times an uplifting and important one.

The Altar Boys

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Non-fiction

Published by: ABC Books an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Proud altar boys, Glen Walsh and Steven Alward, were childhood friends in their working-class community in Newcastle. Steven went on to become a journalist, Glen a priest. But their lives came to be burdened by secrets kept and exposed. Glen's decision to give evidence of a cover-up of clerical abuse ended in tragedy, while Steven fought to overcome a traumatic past. Shortlisted for the 2020 Walkley Book Award, this is an explosive exposé of widespread and organised clerical abuse of children in one Australian city, and how the cover-up extended to every echelon of the Church.

About the author

Suzanne Smith

Suzanne Smith is a six-time Walkley Award and two-time Logie award-winning journalist. Her 27-year career in journalism includes senior editorial roles at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, including on Foreign Correspondent, Background Briefing, Radio National, ABC News, and Radio Current Affairs. She was the senior investigative reporter and producer at Lateline on ABC TV reporting stories on the cover up of clerical abuse, which helped trigger the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia. She has also written for Crikey and The Australian, and held various roles in the commercial media.

Judges’ comments

Andrew, thirteen years old, suicided. He was one of more than sixty males born between 1959 and 1980 from the Newcastle-Maitland area who suicided, all sexually abused as children by clerics. 'The Altar Boys' charts the criminal conspiracy to commit and cover up clerical abuse. Told from inside the lives of communities, families, and individuals impacted by these crimes, it is a story we only thought we knew: the mother who was lied to, the senior broadcasting executive driven by his secret, the decent priest persecuted by others. Despite the tragedy of otherwise successful lives ended in despair, it is also a story of resilience and courage. In forensic detail, Smith sets out the breathtaking betrayal of a whole community by hundreds of criminal predators and institutional conspirators who knowingly denied all liability. The two great underlying themes of the book are misplaced trust and undeserved arrogance. The work of those who unravelled the crimes and conspiracies—insiders, police and journalists—and the time it took to reveal these, is woven through the lives of the betrayed. These are the ones the book quietly celebrates, and to name some—Andrew, Daniel, 'Brendan', Steven and Glen. This is a compelling account written with style and care.

When Rain Turns to Snow

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Lothian Children's Books an imprint of Hachette Australia

A runaway, a baby and a whole lot of questions...

Lissa is home on her own after school one afternoon when a stranger turns up on the doorstep carrying a baby. Reed is on the run—surely people are looking for him? He's trying to find out who he really is and thinks Lissa's mum might have some answers. But how could he be connected to Lissa's family—and why has he been left in charge of a baby? A baby who is sick, and getting sicker ...

Reed's appearance stirs up untold histories in Lissa's family, and suddenly she is having to make sense of her past in a way she would never have imagined. Meanwhile, her brother is dealing with a devastating secret of his own.

A beautiful and timely coming-of-age story about finding out who you are in the face of crisis and change.

About the author

Jane Godwin

Jane Godwin is the highly acclaimed and internationally published author of many books for children and young people. Children's Publisher at Penguin Books Australia for many years, Jane was the co-creator with Davina Bell of the Our Australian Girl series of historical fiction for middle readers. Jane's books include 'Falling From Grace' and 'As Happy as Here' (a CBCA Notable Book), and picture books 'Go Go and the Silver Shoes' (illustrated by Anna Walker), 'The Silver Sea' (with Alison Lester and patients at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne) and 'Watch This!' (with designer Beci Orpin and photographer Hilary Walker).

Judges’ comments

Lissa has a lot on her mind: fractured family, a tenuous and inscrutable social life, a brother who harbours secrets that render him all but silent, and that's all before the boy Reed turns up, bringing with him his own crushing family pressures that Lissa hopes won't intersect with her own, and something far more precious and demanding of urgent attention. It all feels like way too much.

The suffocation and growing desperation—and at times almost unbearable tension—of Lissa's situation is reflected in the weather. Set in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, and in the shadow of the Dandenong Ranges during the week of the Winter Solstice, the darkness, dampness and unrelenting cold seeps throughout the novel, making the furtive glances through doors left ajar and the hurried visits to the back shed to tend to what is too great a responsibility for any child to have to bear, not to mention the enormous weight of a family and social network spinning out of orbit, all the more relentless and oppressive.

This is a fine book written with great confidence and deft handling—tempered by a sense of hope—of tough subjects, a strong awareness of the endless variables in family life, and a keen ear for the patois and internal monologue affectations of a teenager growing up in 2021. The fact that the main character in this young adult novel is in Year 8 is testament to how much earlier our young people are being forced to grow up, and the complexity of the challenges they face. But perhaps that is the point, even if it's not the 'message'; being a teenager today is harder than it's ever been.

Metal Fish, Falling Snow

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Text Publishing

Dylan and her adored French mother dream of one day sailing across the ocean to France. Paris, Dylan imagines, is a place where her black skin won't make her stand out, a place where she might feel she belongs.

But when she loses her mother in a freak accident, Dylan finds herself on a very different journey: a road trip across outback Australia in the care of her mother's grieving boyfriend, Pat. As they travel through remote towns further and further from the water that Dylan longs for, she and Pat form an unlikely bond. One that will be broken when he leaves her with the family she has never known.

'Metal Fish, Falling Snow' is a warm, funny and highly original portrait of a young girl's search for identity and her struggle to deal with grief. Through families lost and found, this own-voices story celebrates the resilience of the human heart and our need to know who we truly are.

About the author

Cath Moore

Born in Guyana, Cath Moore is of Irish/Afro-Caribbean heritage. Though raised in Australia she has also lived in Scotland and Belgium. Cath is an award-winning screenwriter, teacher and filmmaker. She holds an MA in screenwriting and a PhD in Danish screenwriting practices. 'Metal Fish, Falling Snow' is Cath's first novel. She lives in Melbourne.

Judges’ comments

Dylan is lost. In her own words, she 'could be anywhere'. The child of an Afro Caribbean father and a French mother—the girl who was predicted to be a boy—this fourteen-year-old whirlwind rages against a world which always seems set to move against her with cold, dispassionate certainty. As Dylan battles to understand and negotiate this world, her rage is fuelled by a single question: how can she possibly survive without knowing where and how she belongs?

'Metal Fish, Falling Snow' is a richly metaphoric tale of a character's dualised search: how to come to terms with the loss of her beloved mother and her own role in that loss; and how to interpret and align her mixed heritage identity. The strengths of the novel lie in the protagonist Dylan's fierce and uncompromised voice, and in the originality of the aesthetic. Moore writes with the technical skill and linguistic panache of an author who is in complete control of her material. Her take on the 'road trip' novel is replete with irony, compassion, humour and near-tragedy, and is further distinguished by Dylan's ability to move between the known and unknown worlds, a device that allows Moore to explore the entanglements of other lives more fully.

'Metal Fish, Falling Snow' is concrete and lace, a multi-layered, poetic work which delves hard and often surgically into the hearts of its characters and allows readers significant insight into the interplay of despair and hope that characterises being human.

The F Team

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Giramondo Publishing

Meet Tariq Nader, leader of 'The Wolf Pack' at Punchbowl High, who has been commanded by the new principal to join a football competition with his mates in order to rehabilitate the public image of their school. When the team is formed, Tariq learns there's a major catch—half of the team is made up of white boys from Cronulla, aka enemy territory—and he must compete with their strongest player for captaincy of the team.

At school Tariq thinks he has life all figured out until he falls for a new girl called Jamila, who challenges everything he thought he knew. At home, his outspoken ways have brought him into conflict with his family. Now, with complications on all fronts, he has to dig deep to control his anger, and find what it takes to be a leader.

In confronting and often hilarious situations, Tariq's relationships with his extended Lebanese family and his friends are tested like never before, and he comes to learn that his choices can have serious consequences.

About the author

Rawah Arja

Rawah Arja is a writer and teacher from Western Sydney. Her writing has featured in Arab, Australian, Other, SBS Voices and at the Sydney Writer's Festival. She has received a fellowship from WestWords Varuna Emerging Writers' Residential Program, is a member of the Finishing School collective of women writers, and teaches creative writing at schools and workshops.

Judges’ comments

Smart, cocky Tariq Nader is sure of his place in his large, lively family and within Punchbowl's tight-knit Lebanese community. He is also the leader of The Wolf Pack, four boys who comfortably fit the threatening Arab hothead stereotype of the western world. Tariq and boys like him exist on the fringes of mainstream Australia and only make an appearance when their beloved school, Punchbowl High, is featured on the national news for student violence. With the arrival of new principal Mr Archie, however, Tariq is pushed outside his comfort zone and into the fold of Cronulla's Anglo-Australian society, where he must compete on and off the football field to transcend his anger and his own prejudices, and give himself permission to carve a life beyond the limitations of societal stereotypes.

Tariq's voice is raw, intelligent and strikingly honest. 'Do you know what it feels like to wake up and read the stories in the news about how there's no future for boys like us … how little parts of us believe them when they say we're nothing?' he says at one point, exposing his vulnerability. Arwa's characters are unique, flawed and authentic. Take loyal and selfless Uncle Charlie who lives in a shed in Tariq's backyard and covers his grey hairs with his niece's mascara, or eight-year-old 'Bob the Builder' Amira who is sharp, wise and dresses like a tradie. Rawah's characters peel back the many layers of Australian society and bares our flaws, our strengths and our heart on the page. They humanise people from marginalised communities who are not widely represented in young adult literature yet make up an important part of the cultural landscape of modern Australia.

'The F Team' is a powerful, relevant and timely book that questions what it means to be a man, what it means to be human and what it means to be Australian.

Loner

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Text Publishing

Lona has dropped out of art school and no one is quite sure why, least of all Lona. It's just that nothing in her life seems to make sense anymore, including art. She spends her days sneaking into the darkroom at her old school to develop photographs and her nights DJ-ing at the local roller disco.

Her aimlessness terrifies her, but everyone else appears oblivious to her fears: her parents are bewildered by her sudden lack of ambition, her brother is preoccupied with his new girlfriend, and her best friend Tab seems to be drifting away. Even a budding relationship with a bass-playing, cello-shredding med student isn't enough to shake her existential angst.

Lona knows it's up to her to figure out what she wants to do with her life: the problem is, she has absolutely no idea where to start.

About the author

Georgina Young

Georgina Young is a writer and designer from Melbourne. She has previously had her work published in Voiceworks magazine, as well as in Branches, an anthology published by the Bowen Street Press. 'Loner' won the Text Prize for an unpublished Young Adult manuscript in 2019, and is Georgina's first novel.

Judges’ comments

'No one says anything to Lona. It's like they're scared to. There's this assumption that she knows what she's doing and that no one should question it. She really wants someone to question it. So she can yell at them and tell them they're wrong.'

Lona has dropped out of art school. Vulnerable on the inside and prickly on the outside she doesn't know what's next; she can't find joy or meaning in things she used to do, she's questioning everything, trying to find language to understand the paradox that is her life, and she's stuck. In short 'She doesn't want anyone to tell her how to live. She's begging for someone to tell her how to live.'

Lona examines the minutiae of her life and the people in it with sharp clarity, endearing honesty, dry humour and a vivid peppering of literature and pop culture references, laying bare the contradictions of her existence. Working casual jobs at the supermarket and the roller-skate rink, and to escape everyone asking what her plans are for the rest of the year, Lona takes her single bed and moves into her first share house, falling into a relationship with a cello-playing med student. Her best friend Tab seems to be drifting away from her, and Lona finds it impossible to express how she feels. How Lona navigates this time is as painful as it is hilarious, and we cheer her on as she pushes through to find a way back to herself.

This debut novel is memorable because of the spiky, intelligent, honest, witty, exasperating and endearing voice of Lona. Cleverly written, in short sharp chapters, it captures the false bravado, the awkwardness, the misunderstandings, the inability to say how you feel: it is a snapshot of what life is like for so many late teens and 20-somethings, who are beset with anxiety, aimlessness, unable to move forward or move back. The novel leaves you wanting Lona to see, in the best possible way, that she really is on the path to become her full creative, idiosyncratic self.

The End of the World is Bigger than Love

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Young adult literature

Published by: Text Publishing

She said we didn't know what the world out there had become. We had been alone there so long on that tiny island, in that tiny church.

But in the night, I couldn't bear it.

My chest beat like wings.

Identical twin sisters Summer and Winter live alone on a remote island, sheltered from a destroyed world. They survive on rations stockpiled by their father and spend their days deep in their mother's collection of classic literature—until a mysterious stranger upends their carefully constructed reality.

At first, Edward is a welcome distraction. But who is he really, and why has he come? As love blooms and the world stops spinning, the secrets of the girls' past begin to unravel and escape is the only option.

A sumptuously written novel of love and grief; of sisterly affection and the ultimate sacrifice; of technological progress and climate catastrophe; of an enigmatic bear and a talking whale—'The End of the World Is Bigger than Love' is unlike anything you've read before.

About the author

Davina Bell

Davina Bell is an award-winning author of books for young readers of many ages. She writes picture books including 'All the Ways to be Smart' and 'Under the Love Umbrella', junior fiction 'Lemonade Jones' and middle-grade fiction the 'Corner Park Clubhouse' series. Davina lives in Melbourne, where she works as a children's book editor.

Judges’ comments

This novel is an ode to the love and connection of twin sisters, the coping mechanisms we create in order to deal with trauma and loss, and the ingenuity and strength two young girls find in their quest to survive a world that is 'greying'. In an eerily possible future, the girls create an almost idyllic lifestyle on a remote island without power or the distractions of other people or modern life, reeling from the death of their mother and challenged after their scientist father disappears from their 'safe haven'.

The 'seasonal' twins Winter and Summer, create a somewhat magical existence between them, reading their mother's books to each other and end to end several times over as an act of solace, familiarity and identity. A secret is uncovered about their father's role in the earth tilting off its axis, both metaphorically and physically with dire consequences for their family, and the rest of the human race.

When a stranger comes along, they are forced to save themselves, mortified to discover betrayal and lies … and yet hope prevails. In the end the girls' connection and love, as well as that of their parents is what saves them both, as the ever-nearing end of the world approaches.

This beguiling story leaves you with many unanswered questions and a distressing window into what may lie ahead, into the things that could make the world stop turning, and the things we are willing to sacrifice, in order to save ourselves and the people we love. 'The End of the World is Bigger than Love' will linger in your mind, as you consider what becomes of Summer and Winter in the many layers of this magical tale.

People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia

WINNER

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Australian history

Published by: cover

Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, is where the two early Australias—ancient and modern—first collided. 'People of the River' journeys into the lost worlds of the Aboriginal people and the settlers of Dyarubbin, both complex worlds with ancient roots.

The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half-a-world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain's felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier; a community that nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism; and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.

The Aboriginal people had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years. Their history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from this river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin's Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.

The Hawkesbury-Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south, and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.

About the author

Grace Karskens

Grace Karskens is author of The Colony, winner of the 2010 Prime Minister's Non-fiction Award, and of The Rocks, winner of the 1998 NSW Premier's History Award. She is Emeritus Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales.

Judges’ comments

By researching widely in the humanities and sciences, Grace Karskens has crafted an epic history of the Hawkesbury-Nepean River. Like the river itself, this engaging work twists and turns, sometimes switching back on itself, to capture the complex interplay between the waterway and its environs, the people who have called it home for millennia, and those who have arrived over the last 230 years. Unlike some recent fictionalised works suggesting that a single massacre by Europeans soon after their arrival, wiped out the Aboriginal people of the river, Karskens' meticulous scholarship reveals a far more intricate story of interdependence. This includes the sharing of Commons land and crops, bushcraft and tracking, and a mutual love of horse racing. As Karskens says, 'massacre history implies that there were no battles, no resistance and no survivors', an implication that is patently false. Throughout the text, Karskens generously acknowledges her fellow historians, as well as Aboriginal knowledge-holders, and experts in the fields of ecology, geology, soil science, flood and fire risk, linguistics, anthropology and archaeology. However, in drawing on those who have preceded her, Karskens has created a work that is fresh, vibrant and all-encompassing.

The Convict Valley: The Bloody Struggle on Australia's Early Frontier

ortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Australian history

Published by: Allen & Unwin

In 1790, five convicts escaped Sydney by boat and were swept ashore near present-day Newcastle. They were taken in by the Worimi people, given Aboriginal names, and started families. Thus began a long and at times dramatic series of encounters between Aboriginal people and convicts in the second penal settlement in Australia.

The fertile valley of the Hunter River was the first area outside the Sydney basin explored by the British, and it became one of the largest penal settlements. Today manicured lawns and prosperous vineyards hide the struggle, violence and toil of the thousands of convicts who laid its foundations. The Convict Valley uncovers this rich colonial past, as well as the story of the original Aboriginal landholders. While there were friendships and alliances in the early years, in the later scramble for land in the 1820s—as the Valley was opened to free settlers—tensions rose and bloodshed ensued.

With fascinating stories about convicts, white settlers and the Aboriginal inhabitants that have long been forgotten, 'The Convict Valley' is a new Australian history classic.

About the author

Mark Dunn

Mark Dunn is a public historian and former chair of the Professional Historians Association of NSW and ACT. He is descended from convicts who settled in the Hunter, and he has spent two decades investigating the history, heritage and archaeology of the region.

Judges’ comments

'The Convict Valley' is a study of the colonial invasion of the Hunter Valley in NSW. Known today for its vineyards, horse studs, cattle and coal mines, it stretches northwest from Newcastle to the escarpment overshadowing Murrurundi. Until a boatload of convict escapees from Sydney washed ashore near Port Stephens in 1790, this was the traditionally managed, undisturbed country of the Worimi, Kamilaroi, Wonnarua, Birpa and Awabakal people, a landscape richly endowed with food resources and imbued with a culture evident in numerous rock art and ceremonial sites.

Mark Dunn's narrative history traces, in large part, the interplay between Aboriginal people, convicts, and free settlers from their earliest peaceful encounters to the bloody struggle that accompanied the land rush of the 1820s. Importantly, he restores to centre stage the valley's original inhabitants and defenders, and the convicts whose labour laid the foundations for the industry and wealth characterising the Hunter today.

Beautifully written and finely researched, Dunn successfully balances multiple perspectives in a nuanced work that never loses sight of the fundamental role played by Aboriginal people, whose 'skill, knowledge and bushcraft' many colonists relied on, but who were 'excluded from the very economy they had helped establish'.

Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930–1970

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Australian history

Published by: Bloomsbury Publishing

'Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930–1970' offers a rethinking of recent Australian music history. Amanda Harris presents accounts of Aboriginal music and dance by Aboriginal performers on public stages. Harris also historicises the practices of non-Indigenous art music composers evoking Aboriginal music in their works, placing this in the context of emerging cultural institutions and policy frameworks. Centralising auditory worlds and audio-visual evidence, Harris shows the direct relationship between the limits on Aboriginal people's mobility and non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal culture.

This book listens to Aboriginal accounts of disruption and continuation of Aboriginal cultural practices and features contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson as personal interpretations of their family and community histories. Contextualising recent music and dance practices in broader histories of policy, settler colonial structures, and post-colonising efforts, the book offers a new lens on the development of Australian musical cultures.

About the author

Amanda Harris

Amanda Harris is a research fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Director of the Sydney Unit of digital archive PARADISEC. Her research focuses on gender, music, and cross-cultural Australian histories. She is editor of 'Circulating Cultures: Exchanges of Australian Indigenous Music, Dance and Media' (2014) and co-editor of 'Research, Records and Responsibility' (2015) and 'Expeditionary Anthropology' (2018).

Judges’ comments

Amanda Harris's 'Representing Australian Aboriginal Music and Dance 1930-1970' is an unusual book that manages to take what sounds like an academic exercise and weave it into a charming, thoughtful and utterly compelling narrative about mainstream Australia's slow 20th century awakening to Aboriginal culture. Harris, a research fellow at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, shows how Aboriginal music and dance developed to the point where both sit now at the centre of the nation's cultural agenda. With contributions from Aboriginal scholars Shannon Foster, Tiriki Onus and Nardi Simpson, the book tracks the development of government policies, the history of the struggle for Indigenous rights and the media and general public's increasing engagement with Aboriginal music and dance. The artists and performers come alive in its pages. From the hymns written by Shannon Foster's influential great grandfather Tom Foster to the velvet smooth singing of Jimmy Little this really is a fascinating read.

Pathfinders: A History of Aboriginal Trackers in NSW

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Australian history

Published by: NewSouth Publishing

There are few Aboriginal icons in White Australia history.

From the explorer to the pioneer, the swagman to the drover's wife, with a few bushrangers for good measure, Europeans play all the leading roles. A rare exception is the redoubtable tracker. With skills passed down over millennia, trackers could trace the movements of people across vast swathes of country. Celebrated as saviours of lost children and disoriented adults, and finders of missing livestock, they were also cursed by robbers on the run.

Trackers live in the collective memory as one of the few examples of Aboriginal people's skills being sought after in colonial society. In New South Wales alone, more than a thousand Aboriginal men and a smaller number of women toiled for authorities across the state after 1862. This book tells the often unlikely stories of trackers including Billy Bogan, Jimmy Governor, Tommy Gordon, Frank Williams and Alec Riley.

Through his work on native title claims, historian Michael Bennett realised that the role of trackers—and how they moved between two worlds—has been largely unacknowledged. His important book reveals that their work grew out of traditional society and was sustained by the vast family networks that endure to this day. 'Pathfinders' brings the skilled and diverse work of trackers not only to the forefront of law enforcement history but to the general shared histories of black and white Australia.

About the author

Michael Bennett

Michael Bennett has worked as an historian in native title since 2002, preparing evidence and writing reports for claims throughout NSW. It was through conducting research for native title claims that he first realised the extent to which the NSW Police relied on trackers for their expert skill. He grew up in Dubbo where he first learned of the exploits of Tracker Alex Riley.

Judges’ comments

Michael Bennett's 'Pathfinders' profiles Aboriginal trackers and explains the contribution they made to law enforcement in New South Wales. This is an important but neglected aspect of our history. This book draws on extensive archival research, oral history interviews, secondary sources and field work. But it is the author's flair for storytelling that brings this history vividly to life. This book explains how Indigenous customs and traditions, learned over 60,000 years, were intrinsic to their work whether it was catching bushrangers, finding lost children or missing farm animals. These trackers were highly skilled and a rare example of Indigenous skills transferable to the colonial economy. Tracking was more than just following a trail of footprints; it was understanding human behaviour, how to navigate rivers and landscapes, knowledge of plants and animals, and being able to negotiate with communities. These skills were passed on from generation to generation and remain valuable today, including in native title recognition. This book also grapples with terrible interactions that many Indigenous Australians had with law enforcement. Some Indigenous Australians were hostile to those men and women who cooperated with police. These trackers were invariably treated as heroes and saviours, and dreaded by criminals. This book is well researched and written, and makes a substantial contribution to better understanding our past.

Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection

Shortlist year: 2021

Shortlist category: Australian history

Published by: State University of New York Press

'Ceremony Men' investigates the significance of one of Australia's greatest collections of Indigenous song, story, and ceremony—the collections of the linguist and anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow. By critically interrogating Strehlow's collection in partnership with contemporary Arrernte and Anmatyerr people, the book challenges the centrality asserted by Strehlow in the making of 'his collection'. Gibson restores balance by highlighting the instrumental role played by the many Aboriginal people that guided and educated Strehlow over four decades and illuminates the depth of cultural knowledge maintained by their descendants.

About the author

Jason M Gibson

Jason Gibson is an anthropologist and historian who has worked extensively with Aboriginal custodians throughout Australia on history, museum, and heritage related projects. He has contributed to some of the biggest and most important Australian repatriation and community engagement initiatives, including two public online repositories of Indigenous cultural heritage. He has served as a Repatriation Curator with the Melbourne Museum, taught Indigenous Studies at Monash University and is currently an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University.

Judges’ comments

An old man in the Strehlow Research Centre at Alice Springs watches himself on film made years earlier by Strehlow. He quietly explains fine points of the ceremony and begins an excited conversation with his family. From the 1930s, Central Australian men invited Strehlow to record performances and gave and sold him ceremonial objects. They did this for their own reasons and the resulting collection is a collaborative effort. Decades later the author began journeying on country with Anmatyerr men through the film and recordings from the collection. Individuals recognised their fathers and places and the archive gained further meaning. Strehlow, born on country and fluent in local language, believed he was preserving a past. Anmatyerr responses to the archive reveal social memory and a living present. They assessed Strehlow as a 'high school' man, not a ceremonial leader. No one had earlier thought to ask 'the informants' what they thought of the anthropologist. The Ceremony Men are the ritual owners, experts in the complex relationships between people, place and Dreaming. Their tradition is dynamic. The 'beautiful and dangerous' archive has contemporary relevance. The museum-men may be integrated into ritual as ceremonial assistants sharing responsibility for this remarkable archive with the ritual experts.