Little Bones 

Sandy Bigna
University of Queensland Press 

A unique and lyrical verse novel for middle-grade readers that speaks to our childhood joy of collecting small, intriguing objects and creating connections in the most unlikely places. 

Since the accident, eleven-year-old Bones spends her time drawing animal skeletons and scavenging for dead things to add to her collection. She’s drifted away from her friends and doesn’t want to make new ones. 

One night, Bones wishes on a full moon and unintentionally resurrects the skeleton of a baby bird. Bird wants to return to his natural dead state, so Bones agrees to reverse the curse, not that she knows how. As she and Bird work out the secrets of the magic, Bones remembers what it’s like to have a friend. How can she let Bird go when she doesn’t want to say goodbye? 

With gorgeous greyscale illustrations of Bones’s collected items scattered throughout, this book is perfect for big-hearted readers of Karen Foxlee and Zana Fraillon. 

About the author 

Sandy Bigna is a passionate supporter of local children’s literature. She started up the Aussie Kids Books Instagram, which reviews Australian children’s and YA books. She has studied children’s literature at the University of Canberra and worked as a children’s librarian in a public library. She has been awarded two Varuna Residential Fellowships and her YA manuscript Exposed was shortlisted for the HarperCollins Australia Matilda Children’s Literature Prize in 2020. Little Bones is her debut novel. 

Judges' comments

Bones is grieving for Nico, her adventurous big brother, who died almost a year ago after falling from a tree. At school, her classmates see only a strange girl who collects skeletons: a tooth, a claw, the ribs of a snake, rat bones. They do not understand the loss beneath her fascination. 

When Bones finds an intact bird skeleton and wishes it alive, her wish comes true. The result is eerie and unsettling, because Bird wants to return to the silent place it came from. In Little Bones, Sandy Bigna’s debut verse novel, mystery and drama pulse through brittle, precisely placed lines that leave room for atmosphere. 

Rippling through this horror-tinged story is an affecting portrait of friendship between children on the margins. Bones lives with her Nona while her mother works away on the mines, and her father is barely a rumour. As her school friends keep their distance, the too-loud, too-bright Tenny moves into Bones’ block of flats in a rainbow-striped jumpsuit and soccer boots. The two outsiders become allies on a quest that means everything to Bones. 

Little Bones is spare, strange and emotionally resonant, holding grief, loneliness and hope in careful balance. 
 

Rain on the Rock

Jodi Toering and Valerie Brumby 
Hardie Grant Children’s Publishing 

Rising above the desert plain, Uluṟu stands, ancient feet planted deep within the dry red earth. For much of the year, Uluṟu bakes in the kuḻi. But on rare days when rain-song beats, waterfalls cascade down the rock, creatures stir, and Uluṟu and Kata Tjuṯa burst into life. 

Rain on the Rock celebrates the impact of rain on Uluṟu and the Kata Tjuṯa National Park. Told using vivid imagery, and in harmony with Aṉangu's connection to Country, Rain on the Rock depicts the unique beauty of one of Australia’s most iconic landscapes. 

About the author 

Jodi Toering was born in the Mallee, at Hopetoun, and grew up on a wheat farm outside a small town called Beulah. Jodi now juggles the roles of full-time teacher, mother, performer and author in Creswick, near Ballarat. Her first picture book, Mallee Sky (Walker Books), was an Honour Book in the 2020 CBCA Picture Book of the Year Awards 

Judges' comments

Rain on the Rock captures the immensity, energy and feeling of being at Uluru. The physical size of the book is wider than most picture books, and from the first spread it is as though the rock wraps around the reader. The broad pages make the eye scan, search and notice, while vivid blues and oranges layered with dots create a landscape readers almost feel in their bodies. 

Jodi Toering’s clear, direct text uses words from the Pitjantjatjara language, supported by Mutitjulu community elders, and the terms feel satisfyingly embedded in the prose. Valerie Brumby, who grew up west of Alice Springs and now lives near Uluru, creates double-page spreads that stand beautifully on their own while moving seamlessly through the drama of rain coming to the rock. 

With the rain comes flourishing animal life: cockatoos hanging upside down, frogs surfacing from deep within the sand, rockpools teeming with tadpoles, and bush tucker blooming and thriving. Brumby’s command of colour is as thrilling as the unfolding weather, and the book brings the rock and its spreading landscape into close contact with young readers. Rain on the Rock is an outstanding picture book, a loud song of joy. 
 

The Wondrous Tale of Lavender Wolfe 

Karen Foxlee
Allen and Unwin 

Lavender Wolfe is a clapperdudgeon and pickpurse, with a magical secret. She is all alone on a wharf when she is snatched by Big Agatha and thrown into the galley of a pirate ship, The Good Marchioness. 

Disguised as a boy, for only boys may live in the galley, and renamed Hans Whitby, Lavender has to make her home among the kitchen rats. However, The Good Marchioness is no ordinary ship. Captained by Odyessia Pleasant, a fierce pirate with long blonde hair, violet eyes and a bird's wing in place of an arm, the crew are on a desperate voyage to find and return stolen treasure before all those who sail within the cursed pirate ship are turned to sand. Lavender included. 

Lavender is quick-witted and sharp as a tack, and as her magic starts to be revealed she finds herself coming under the arresting gaze of Captain Pleasant. Will Lavender help break the curse? Or will she be just another victim of this story within a story, her true identity lost to the sands of time?

About the author 

Karen Foxlee is an Australian author who writes for both children and young adults. Her multi-award-winning books include Ophelia and the Marvellous Boy, A Most Magical Girl, the Miss Mary-Kate Martin's Guide to Monsters series, Lenny's Book of Everything and Dragon Skin. Karen writes and lives in Queensland with her daughter, cats and parrots. She loves books, swimming in the sea, planning holidays she can't afford, and baking cakes whenever she has more important things to do. 

Judges comments

Wondrous is exactly the word for Karen Foxlee’s piratical tale of spells, sorcery and courage. Lavender Wolfe, hungry and exhausted, waits on the harbour steps while her mother searches for food. When she falls into the water, she is hauled out by Big Agatha, and before long she is swept onto the high seas. 

The Wondrous Tale of Lavender Wolfe is a classic seafaring hero’s quest. Lavender, now called Hans, sails aboard The Good Marchioness, a cursed ship whose crew will turn to sand if the curse cannot be lifted. Treasure may be lost and honour shamed, but Agatha believes Hans possesses a magical gift: the power to know the winds. 

Foxlee creates a memorable cast and orchestrates them with rare narrative skill. Seafaring slang, used with age-appropriate exuberance, carries readers into the pirate’s den, while action, danger and human drama are braided into a thrilling whole. The novel is ambitious, but its energy, language and emotional force are held in balance. The Wondrous Tale of Lavender Wolfe succeeds on every level. 
 

Song of a Thousand Seas 

Zana Fraillon
University of Queensland Press 

A lyrical verse novel of homecoming and friendship by Zana Fraillon, the multi-award-winning author of The Bone Sparrow and The Way of Dog.

Houdini the octopus lives in an aquarium, but she misses her home in the wild Sea. She doesn’t like the visitors who bang on her tank. Or the way she can’t feel the sun on her skin or the wind rippling the water. It’s a dull existence for a creature with nine brains. 

Then one day she meets someone who is different to the other visitors. Juno’s busy brain buzzes with so many questions and thoughts that Houdini’s skin tingles with wonder. 

But the singing of the Sea is growing stronger and harder to resist. Can Houdini make Juno understand what she needs before it’s too late? 

About the author 

Zana Fraillon (she/they) is an internationally acclaimed, multi-award-winning author of books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in over fifteen countries and is in development for both stage and screen. She has a doctorate in creative writing, and degrees in history and teaching. Zana’s passion for empowering young people to find their voice is a feature of both her books and her work with writers of all ages. 

Judges' comments

In Song of a Thousand Seas, Zana Fraillon transforms a visit to an oceanarium into a vivid, briny verse novel that asks readers to consider their place in the natural world. The octopus at its centre, called Houdini by the keeper, is not simply an object of curiosity. Gifted at camouflage and sharply observant, it studies the humans looking in and longs to escape tank life. 

Fraillon’s agile eight-line poems are tuned to the rhythms of water, the creature’s gliding movements and its restless intelligence. The choice of a non-human viewpoint gives the story an original and compelling voice. Juno, the daughter of keeper Paul, adds an emotional layer, while Aviva Reed’s illustrations enrich the reading experience with ecological sensitivity. 

Song of a Thousand Seas is written with depth, heart and care. Alongside astonishing facts, it creates mystery, tension and a sensual aquatic world that feels alive on the page. The story moves toward an exciting and liberating conclusion in which the protagonists are changed, and so are readers. Fraillon is a writer who keeps searching for new horizons, daring readers into unfamiliar territory. With Song of a Thousand Seas, that daring is richly rewarded. 
 

Bored

Felicita Sala
Hardie Grant Children's Publishing  

Rita is bored. So, so, so bored. 

Flopped in her bedroom, limp and tragic, Rita tries everything to cure her malaise. But time drags on, and there she remains: catatonic with boredom. 

If only there were a special place, a non-boring place just for bored people … 

From award-winning creator Felicita Sala comes a slyly brilliant ode to boredom and imagination, and a guaranteed antidote to the doldrums. 

About the author 

Felicita Sala is an illustrator and author of picture books. She was born in Rome, grew up in Perth, Western Australia, and now lives and works in Italy.  

Felicita’s books include Lunch at 10 Pomegranate Street, Arno and His Horse (written by Jane Godwin) and Your Birthday Was the Best (written by Maggie Hutchings).  

Judges' comments

Rita is bored. So bored that her brain feels like a fuzzy rock. From this simple, familiar feeling, Felicita Sala launches Bored into a wonderfully inventive picture book journey, as Rita begins to wonder how many other bored people there might be in the world. 

The magic of the book lies in the secret it quietly reveals: boredom can sit at the heart of creativity. Sala’s illustrations, with their soft palette and smooth rounded edges, create a fluid, floating mood that draws readers into a world of playful possibility. The slightly dreamy visual atmosphere gives each leap of imagination room to expand. 

The text’s rhythm never misses a beat; there is not a syllable out of place. Sala’s steady pulse of comic storytelling allows the pictures to work their magic, matching every improbable turn with a visual world no less absurd and no less perfect. Growing up in Perth before studying philosophy, Sala seems to know exactly how to take an idea for a walk. In Bored, that walk becomes completely captivating. 
 

Kontra 

Eunice Andrada 
Giramondo Publishing 

In KONTRA, a collection by the multi-award-winning Filipina-Australian poet Eunice Andrada, characters reckon with the constraints of the past in order to claim a future of their own making. 

Composed in the form of a narrative triptych,  KONTRA enacts a poetics of clashing decadences, testing the tightrope between ‘feminine’ goodness and deviance, desire and refusal, reverence and repulsion. It casts a female gaze on the kontrabida, a Filipina soap opera villain stuck in a rise-and-fall cycle. The poet reimagines the kontrabida as a figure driven not by revenge, but by wild desire. Oscillating in and out of character, Andrada navigates the tension between poet and persona. Alongside the shapeshifting, spectral force of the kontrabida, the poet invokes a chorus of voices to trace a lineage of opposition and the alternate futures it holds. 

About the author 

Eunice Andrada is a poet and educator. Her first poetry collection Flood Damages (Giramondo, 2018) won the Anne Elder Award and was a finalist for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. Described by poet Ellen van Neerven as ‘one of the most important poetry releases in years,’ her second poetry collection TAKE CARE (Giramondo, 2021) gained several honours as a finalist for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, Stella Prize, Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and two NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. KONTRA (Giramondo, 2025), her third collection, was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for Poetry. 

Judges' comments

Eunice Andrada's powerful third collection, KONTRA, takes us into the tropical gothic world of female saints, the telenovela kontrabida, actresses, beauty queens and divas: a reliquary devoted to 'what women know' and the force of colonial allegories of sexual destiny and vengeance. 

A poetic exploration of ekphrasis, the representation of representation, structures the volume's intermediation of female scenes, typologies, scripts and genealogies across different times and places in fulfilment of its guiding axiom: 'The truth of the lyric moment/is in the execution/of the lyric moment'. 

The doubleness of 'execution' - severance and deadly technique - underwrites KONTRA's reckoning with desire, fate and eloquence. The stakes are high in this gripping poetic melodrama. 

Unafraid of taking aesthetic risks, Andrada assembles her materials with acuity, precision and striking diction, enveloping her reader in a heady sensorium that is impressively formally controlled: 'Close this book to join the girl wound/to the woman wound. Open these pages/to split the wounds apart.' 

KONTRA moves skilfully between realist and symbolic registers, wielding the language of historic judgement, disobedience and vengeance in the name of righteous love: 'Unveiled and unclouded/may my wrongs create'. 
 

The Rot 

Evelyn Araluen
University of Queensland Press

The scorching, much-anticipated new book from the winner of the 2022 Stella Prize for Dropbear. 

The Rot is a recalcitrant study of the decaying romances, expired hopes and abject injustices of the world. A liturgy for girlhood in the dying days of late-stage capitalism, these poems expose fraying nerves and tendons of a speaker refusing to avert their gaze from the death of Country, death on Country, and the bloody violence of settler colonies here and afar. Across sleepless nights, fractured alliances and self-destructive coping strategies, The Rot is what happens when poetry swallows more rage than it can console, quiet or ironise. This book demands you ready yourself for a better world.

About the author 

Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, editor and researcher. Born and raised on Dharug Country and in the broader Western Sydney Black community, she now lives on Wurundjeri Country where she is a lecturer at the Wilin Centre for Indigenous Arts and Cultural Development, a co-editor of Overland Literary Journal and Chairperson for the Board of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies. Her debut poetry collection, Dropbear, won the 2022 Stella Prize and the Australian Book Industry Award’s 2022 Small Publisher’s Adult Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the premier’s awards of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria. Her work has also received the Nakata Brophy Prize for Young Indigenous Writers, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize and a Melbourne Prize Career Development Award.  

Judges' comments

The poems in Evelyn Araluen's collection The Rot speak with an authentic, forceful voice that stands in solidarity with the oppressed, resists injustice and struggles against the world as it is. 

Poetry becomes a tool of denunciation written from the margins. It exposes abuse and the suffering caused by colonialism, stolen land, and the racism that continues to shape our realities and politics. 

Readers can better understand and appreciate Araluen's work by recognising her command of language and the depth with which she moves beyond conventional poetry, offering a revolutionary poetic manifesto that blends verse, prose and non-fiction. 

In Holdings, the poems are direct and grounded in the poet's position; in Fragments on Rotting, poetry and prose become more fractured and chaotic, with erased words and broken lines forming fragments of political denunciation. 

The Unfoldings invites readers to approach each poem with love, a search for justice, and a critical awareness of the pain caused by atrocities such as genocide in Palestine-Gaza, colonial violence and racism, both globally and here at home. 

The Rot calls for us to change how we live and to confront oppressive realities. It invites readers to engage with the poet's voice, strength and vision of another world, a world that poetry helps us to imagine. 
 

Two Hundred Million Musketeers 

Ender Başkan   
Giramondo Publishing 

Ender Başkan’s debut poetry collection depicts the intensity of life as a parent of young children. It maps the shifting trains of thought which go with the experience of being a new parent, when one’s attention is drawn in many different directions. Work, friendships, social life and creative practice are all altered. The poet reflects on his own childhood, and his grandparents’ exile from Turkey, to which he returns several times over the course of the book with his own young family. 

Most tellingly, Başkan is subsumed in the flood of language as it emerges from the mouths of his youngsters, indeed from his own mouth as he talks to them. The imagination of children lends its own wonder and surrealism to that of the poet. His writing is direct, playful, absurd and political. In these respects, Başkan follows in the footsteps of the previous generation of Australia’s poets of migrant background: Pi.O., Chris Mann, Antigone Kefala and the late Ania Walwicz, his close friend and mentor. 

About the author 

Ender Başkan is a Melbourne-based poet, novelist, small-press publisher and bookseller. The winner of the 2021 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, his poems have been published in HEAT, Meanjin, Cordite, Unusual Work and Best of Australian Poems. He has also published a novel, A Portrait of Alice as a Young Man. He is the co-founder of Vre Books press, Agog poetry readings and Study experimental space. His debut poetry collection Two Hundred Million Musketeers will be published by Giramondo in November 2025. 

Judges' comments

Ender Başkan's Two Hundred Million Musketeers is a timely and exquisitely crafted exploration of the arcs of love, joy and communion that guide us through our everyday lives, despite the precarities of the modern world. 

These poems reveal a curiosity about the complexities of our many and varied human relationships: with family, friends, neighbours, communities, colleagues, new acquaintances and strangers. Yet at the centre of this brilliant debut is love and care for two very young children who appear and reappear throughout the poems, fortifying a collection that chatters and hums with the wonder of new language. 

These are big-hearted poems that pull us close to the 'I' to witness the motions, mundanities and marvels of daily living, from navigating domestic responsibilities to enduring the repetitiveness of paid work, negotiating difficult neighbours to visiting his grandparents' homeland with his young children. 

Cognisant of the creeping ruins of a world stultified by corporate greed and injustice, Başkan's lines nevertheless gambol across observation, documentation and reflection with an expansive tongue, as if to set in motion a truly activist poetics, one that builds towards another possible, big-hearted world. 

As he writes, 'how do we imagine other worlds if we only speak commodity?' Indeed, taking cues from his children's curious tongues, Başkan's poems stretch through play with word, line and language, as if attempting to build a lexicon derived from origins of intimacy rather than ownership. 

This book is an invitation to play and to listen, to explore what might be possible if a line were to stretch between one person and another. In a world where there is much to be angry about, Two Hundred Million Musketeers greets despair with the full force of wonder and reciprocity. It is a book whose 'bigness makes other people feel bigger'.
 

How to Emerge  

Jill Jones 
Vagabond Press 

How To Emerge, the latest collection from award-winning poet Jill Jones, is filled with visions and ghosts, doubles and shadows. It also explores the living and damaged body, as it dances with humans, birds, animals, leaves, the weather, digital assemblage, sound and song, the elements and the planet. Within this, a self grows into its moment and continues moving beyond itself. Questing and agile, these poems mingle in the world’s imperilled present and its past and future emergencies and losses. 

About the author 

Jill Jones lives on Kaurna land. One of her most recent books Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems was shorted listed for the 2024 South Australian Literary Awards, longlisted for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal and commended in the 2023 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. Other recent books include Wild Curious Air, winner of the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, and A History Of What I’ll Become, shortlisted for the 2021 Kenneth Slessor Award and the 2022 John Bray Award. In 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Her work is widely published in Australia and internationally. An entry on her poetry is included in the current edition of The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English. She was, from 2008-2022, Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide. She previously worked in senior positions in the Australia Council for the Arts, and NSW Ministry for the Arts. She has also been a film reviewer, journalist, and book editor. 

Judges' comments  

Jill Jones' How To Emerge is a finely chiselled book of phenomenological lyrics, the latest in a distinguished, cohesive oeuvre. 

Divisible by three, these poems trace the conditions of existence through mysterious collaborations of self, other and language, 'slightly off-key', 'barely here'. In her exploration of the poetics of emergence, Jones is galvanised by inexorable process and the persistence of contradiction: 'I understand what I don't about some of this'; 'An endless dream escapes me'. 

How To Emerge is quietly preoccupied with the lyric subject as an oxymoronic 'empty space of thinking/a mode of nothing' whose poems are proof of a disquieting, ongoing encounter with aliveness, an 'animal gist'. 

This space of poetic emergence offers a map of 'Desire most of all', made manifest in daily observance of intensities, affects and moving parts; a lifelong practice in which 'Nothing's effortless' and 'What is the same is never the same'. 

Advancing by non-propositional proposition, chances and crossings, How To Emerge is an absorbing, elegant collection of poetic numbers operating at the threshold of the personal and the impersonal. In its richly suggestive representation of worldly entanglement, it solicits readers willing to enter into a pact of mutual attention and unpredictable exchange. 
 

Ghost of Myself  

John Kinsella
University of Queensland Press 

From the internationally revered Australian poet John Kinsella comes this exceptional new collection that traces the ghosts of this country’s violent and destructive history through the marks left on the land, in language and in ourselves. 

Ghost of Myself explores who we are when we write, how we embody what has come before us and what we will leave behind. These poems consider the ghostliness of colonial legacy and the impact of pastoralism and conventional farming on the land, and are concerned with the ‘pith’ of language: the way the new might come out of the compressions and controls of formal syntax and vocabulary. Deeply imbued with observations of the natural world, these poems contemplate how we witness, record and leave marks. Each poem is a ghost of itself, too, and offers an opportunity for addressing the wrongs committed to country, environment and history. 

About the author 

John Kinsella is the author of over forty books. His many awards include the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the John Bray Poetry Award, the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Poetry (three times). His latest books are the three volumes of his collected poems, The Ascension of Sheep (UWAP, 2022), Harsh Hakea (UWAP, 2023) and Spirals (UWAP, 2024), and the story collection Beam of Light (Transit Lounge, 2024). He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Western Australia. He lives on Ballardong Noongar land at ‘Jam Tree Gully’ in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. In 2007 he received the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry and in 2024 he was inducted into the Western Australian Writers Hall of Fame. 

Judges' comments

John Kinsella has long established an unmistakable poetic voice and Ghost of Myself needs no defence of its originality. In this work, the poet confronts the ghosts of colonial oppression through a powerful poetic account of the destruction of Mother Earth and the stolen land where he lives and writes. 

The poems offer readers a critical view of a world shaped by multinational corporations, media power, and systems that concentrate resources among the wealthy who control the land. 

Kinsella's voice moves beyond ordinary reality, speaking not only from the perspective of ghosts but from a poetic struggle grounded in love, compassion, justice and life itself. 

Kinsella's verses suggest that the poet's physical presence is almost unnecessary; instead, the poet's ghost emerges, opening a meditation on the liberation of the self. This idea develops across the collection and culminates in 'the last line', where Kinsella enters into dialogue with Dante and moves from the ghost of the self toward an existence beyond the poet's final breath. 

Ghost of Myself also reveals a deep sensitivity to the dialogue among nature's creatures and to their quiet struggle for survival. Once again, questions of existence, land, valley and breath become central to his work, shaped by a landscape marked by destruction and colonial history. 
 

First Tasmanians: A Deep History 

Shayne Breen 
Melbourne University Publishing 

The history of the First Tasmanians is a story of ingenuity, adaptation and resilience. In First Tasmanians, historian Shayne Breen traces the 40,000 years of Aboriginal exploration, land settlement, hunting practices and controlled burning on the island.

In thirty short years of the nineteenth century, this carefully nurtured collective life was destroyed by an imperial power, to be replaced by a narrative of Aboriginal resistance, struggle and protest. Multiple genocidal policies left contemporary First Tasmanians with a complex legacy of historical grief, chronic disadvantage and intergenerational trauma, a legacy that endures to this day.

First Tasmanians is the first interdisciplinary account of Tasmanian Aboriginal history told in three movements: the deep hunter-gatherer past; the collective life at the time of the British invasion; and the recent past. A story of courage, continuity and an unwavering commitment to revitalising connections between country, culture and community.

About the author 

Shayne Breen is an interdisciplinary historian who has worked closely with Tasmanian Aboriginal people for 35 years. During the 1990s he helped lead the introduction of Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania. In 2001 he received a University of Tasmania Vice-Chancellor's Teaching Excellence Award.  

Judges' comments

First Tasmanians is an ambitious and deeply researched work that places Aboriginal experience at the centre of Tasmanian history across an extraordinary span of some 40,000 years. Drawing on archaeology, environmental history, cultural anthropology and genocide studies, Shayne Breen presents the first Tasmanians not as a primitive or declining people but as a sophisticated, adaptive society whose expert management of country shaped the landscapes encountered by European colonisers. 

The book’s three-part structure moves eloquently from deep prehistory through collective Aboriginal life to the colonial period and its aftermath, culminating in an account of cultural revival and resilience that is genuinely moving. Breen skilfully weaves together diverse disciplines to produce a vivid and authoritative portrait of a people who, as he concludes, represent a triumph of human resilience. His long engagement with Tasmanian Aboriginal communities lends the work both scholarly rigour and deep personal commitment. Accessible to the general reader while meeting the highest standards of historical scholarship, First Tasmanians is a landmark contribution to Australian Indigenous history and to our understanding of this nation’s past. 
 

Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism and Body Politics 

Judith Brett 
Text Publishing 

‘Beatrice Faust’, said Helen Garner, ‘is not scared of anybody.’ 

Faust was the transformative feminist activist, writer and intellectual who founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Melbourne in 1972. She campaigned for abortion law reform, and thought, talked and wrote about sex and feminism, from the sexual revolution of the 1960s through to the neoliberal 1990s, always with her own demanding body as her guide. She was a force to be reckoned with. 

She also endured a miserable childhood and suffered chronic ill health as well as a later-life addiction to prescription drugs. Her letters reveal a complex, troubled inner life that belied the confident charisma of her public persona. 

Fearless Beatrice Faust celebrates, explains and questions her struggle to change both herself and her world. Drawing on public records and private writings, award-winning biographer Judith Brett creates a compelling and psychologically nuanced portrait of a gifted, argumentative woman who refused to be a victim. 

About the author 

Judith Brett is a political historian and biographer and emeritus professor of politics at La Trobe University. Among her books are Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People: Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, which won the 2018 National Biography Award, and From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. 

Judges' comments

Judith Brett’s biography of Beatrice Faust is a scrupulously researched and illuminating account of a provocative, creative feminist intellectual and activist. Working from diaries, family papers, correspondence and notebooks, Brett reconstructs Faust’s life with fine detail, intellectual sympathy and rich insight. One of the book’s great strengths is the way it integrates Faust’s private life with her public commitments, tracing the importance she attached to bodily experience and connecting this to her activism on abortion, sex and drug addiction. 

Brett places Faust’s ideas within Australian and transnational contexts, paying rewarding attention to the research and debate that shaped her thinking. She refuses to smooth away Faust’s contradictions, engaging thoughtfully with her controversial views and blind spots while still producing a compelling and deeply human portrait of someone who never swam with the tide. With an engaging narrative and enviable distillation, Fearless Beatrice Faust chronicles a life at the forefront of public debate and draws attention to the labour of social transformation: thinking, writing, arguing, organising and agitating. It is a book of sharp focus, compassionate insight and intellectual rigour. 
 

The Southern Frontier  

Rohan Howitt
Melbourne University Publishing 

A history of Australia's connection to Antarctica. 

Antarctica looms large in the Australian psyche as a place of science, adventure and peril. Our romantic entanglement with this unique environment is deep and enduring. 

The Southern Frontier traces Australia's Antarctic obsession from its origins in the nineteenth century to the creation of the Australian Antarctic Territory and a permanent national Antarctic program in the 1930s and 1940s. It reconstructs Australian ideas, beliefs and anxieties about the Antarctic and shows how Australians came to imagine their nation as having a natural right, perhaps even a destiny, to explore, exploit and control the world to their south. By examining how and why Australia relentlessly pursued the acquisition of its Antarctic Territory, Rohan Howitt recovers a forgotten way of thinking about this region: as one frontier of an Australian Empire stretching from the equator to the South Pole. 

About the author

Rohan Howitt is a lecturer in environmental history at Monash University. His research focuses on the interconnected histories of Australia, New Zealand, Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. His work has been published in leading scholarly journals such as Australian Historical Studies, History Compass, and The Journal of Global History. The Southern Frontier is his first book. 

Judges' comments

In this erudite and beautifully written history, Rohan Howitt shows that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries Australia aspired to be more than a federated nation. It imagined itself as an empire stretching from the Equator to the South Pole, from nearby islands to Norfolk Island, Macquarie, Heard and McDonald Islands and the Australian Antarctic Territory. Australia’s claim to Antarctica rested on geographical proximity, scientific and climatic utility, imagined economic opportunities, national security and maritime connection. 

This highly original book combines environmental and political history with the histories of science, culture and settler colonialism. Based on extensive archival research, The Southern Frontier moves through telling episodes from the 1840s to the 1930s, revealing popular Antarctic fascination, amateur and learned scientific curiosity, and private and government-sponsored expeditions. With amusing vignettes, gripping narrative and lucid argument, Howitt compels us to see national history as exceeding the continent and immediate surrounds. His significant scholarly accomplishment is to show that the Australian nation was born with a sense of territorial rights extending much further south. 
 

Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood 

Emily Gallagher
Black Inc.

This groundbreaking book is a history of children's play and imagination in Australia between 1890 and the Second World War. It is a story about the generations that grew up at a time when nation and empire were being reimagined amid the globalising currents of war, technology and trade. Theirs were faces that would remain forever young in monochrome film, and whose thoughts and dreams would be preserved between the timeless blue lines of the modern school exercise book. 

Playtime is built around six imaginative worlds: amateur journalism, bird loving, war and adventure, dolls, the future, and monsters and fairies. It brings these worlds, and the voices of children, to life, exploring an incredible array of children's artefacts and seeing the social history of Australia through a new lens.

About the author 

Emily Gallagher is a historian at the Australian National University. Her PhD thesis was awarded the Lyndall Ryan Thesis Prize in Australian Studies and the Serle Award in Australian History. 

Judges' comments

This is a striking and often delighting work of cultural history. Playtime draws together a vast array of artefacts and sources, from stories and poems to sketches and letters, some published and some disinterred from farm sheds, school rooms and historic homesteads, to explore the imaginative worlds of children between the 1890s and late 1930s. Emily Gallagher extends to these sources a warm, empathetic attention that yields insights into how children liberated themselves from the humdrum and became heroes of whole worlds. 

Meticulous in its approach and elegant in expression, Playtime links its subjects seamlessly to broader fields, offering new ways of seeing familiar material and the influences at work on successive generations of young people. Studies of birds, children’s journalism, dolls, time travel, monsters and fairies are characterised by Gallagher’s eye for evocative detail, contradiction and contextual connection. This assured and often original work encourages readers to look anew at a formative stage of life too often overlooked or downplayed, and to reflect on its lingering power and resonances. 
 

The Australian Wars 

Rachel Perkins, Stephen Gapps, Mina Murray and Henry Reynolds 
Allen & Unwin

It is estimated up to 100,000 people died in the frontier wars that raged across Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all Australians killed in foreign battles to date. But there are few memorials marking these first, domestic wars. The Australian Wars was conceived by Rachel Perkins following her award-winning documentary series produced by Blackfella Films for SBS and edited along with Stephen Gapps, Mina Murray and Henry Reynolds. This is the first book to tell the story of the continental sweep of massacres, guerrilla warfare, resistance and the contests of firearms and traditional Aboriginal weaponry as Indigenous nations resisted colonial occupation of their lands, territory by territory. At stake was the sovereignty of an entire country. Black and white writers tell the stories of these battles across three crucial time periods and all the states and territories.

Judges' comments

The Australian Wars powerfully challenges assumptions that frontier conflict was not warfare. Bringing together a cohort of historians and experts, this edited collection covers the entire continent, Tasmania and the Torres Strait Islands to demonstrate that planned and coordinated warfare shaped the whole of Australia. First Nations warriors resisted British invaders in pitched battles and innumerable guerrilla skirmishes that, taken together, constituted war for control of the continent from the late 18th to the early 20th century. 

Drawing on printed and private documents, photographs, drawings, maps, oral Indigenous knowledge and a large body of scholarship, the book makes an original and compelling case for publicly recognising and memorialising ‘the Australian Wars’ fought in establishing the nation. Many episodes are shocking. The book contributes to Australian history by showing how genocidal campaigns, unequal warfare, land dispossession, martial law and segregated reserves were interconnected components of British and Australian victory over First Nations warriors and communities who fought tenaciously and strategically.