Leo and Ralph 

Peter Carnavas 
University of Queensland Press 

From award-winning storyteller Peter Carnavas comes this stellar novel about space, starting over and the best friend you could ever imagine. 

Leo and Ralph have been best friends ever since Ralph flew down from one of Jupiter's moons. But now Leo's older, and Mum and Dad think it’s time to say goodbye to Ralph. When the family moves to a small country town, they hope Leo might finally make a real friend. But someone like Ralph is hard to leave behind... 

Peter Carnavas 

Peter Carnavas writes and illustrates books for children. His books have been published widely across the world and have won many awards, including a Queensland Literary Award and the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Peter lives on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, with his wife, two daughters, a dog and a cat.

Judges' comments

Author Peter Carnavas shares his kind and perceptive insights about young people who may not quite fit within the norm in Leo and Ralph, a potent illustrated children’s novel. Children who are quiet, curious or outside the ‘popular group’ may be in the majority but can sometimes be side-lined by confident extroverts.  

Leo doesn’t “fit neatly into the jigsaw puzzle of other kids”. He is bright, yet anxious, socially awkward and sometimes takes a little too long to gather his thoughts and speak in class. He brims with questions and ideas and compensates for the absence of like-minded companions by creating Ralph, an imaginary friend. Together they revel in the magnitude and allure of space. They even cleverly talk backwards using an invented language.  

Carnavas executes familiar themes of friendship, family and change (moving house, school and community) skilfully and ingeniously. This simple yet lovely, reflective and humorous writing forms the base that underpins Leo’s journey towards maturity and growing agency. The author-illustrator’s expressive black-and-white line drawings reflect Leo’s significant moments and milestones.  

Carnavas understands and champions children. He advocates for the importance and power of the imagination and the value of being different in a satisfying, age-appropriate way.  

A Leaf Called Greaf 

Kelly Canby 
Fremantle Press 

Bear is all alone and lonely until he finds the greenest, most beguiling leaf. A leaf called Greaf. Bear holds Greaf tight throughout the days and nights that follow. Bear can barely remember a time before Greaf. It is as if things have always been this way. Until one day, they aren’t. Greaf changes with the seasons and so does Bear. As Greaf leaves him, Bear feels a lightness and warmth that he had almost forgotten. Greaf has gone, but Bear knows its memory will hold a special place in his heart forever. 

Kelly Canby 

Kelly Canby is an award winning  Perth-based illustrator and author who brings heart, humour, and the occasional existential metaphor to children’s books. 

Before finding her rhythm in children’s literature, Kelly worked in graphic design and advertising, where her love of visual communication evolved into a passion for telling stories through pictures and words. Her first author-illustrated book, All the Lost Things (2015), brought that passion to life and set the tone for the kind of books she loves to make: curious, thoughtful, and just a little bit odd. 

Kelly’s books have received wide recognition for their originality and quiet complexity. In 2018, The Hole Story  won the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award for Writing for Children, with Littlelight  shortlisted for the same award the following year. Timeless  was awarded CBCA Picture Book of the Year in 2024, and her latest title, A Leaf Called Greaf, is currently shortlisted for the 2025 CBCA Picture Book of the Year. 

Kelly is also the illustrator behind Jaclyn Moriarty’s beloved Kingdoms and Empires  series — a five-book collaboration full of imagination, detail, and mischief. 

Judges' comments

Kelly Canby’s A Leaf Called Greaf is a tender and emotionally rich picture book that gently explores grief, memory, and healing. When a lonely bear discovers a vivid green leaf he names Greaf, he clings to it through the changing seasons, comforted by its presence. As the leaf fades, Bear is surprised to feel a returning lightness and the quiet joy of remembering.  

Rather than centring a specific loss, Canby captures the emotional reality and complexity of grief: its weight, comfort, and gradual transformation. Her understated text leaves room for reflection, while the soft, expressive illustrations deepen the emotional impact. The white outlines of three other bears in the images suggest the presence of love and memory with remarkable sensitivity.  

A Leaf Called Greaf is a quiet, powerful invitation to sit with sadness, offering young readers a gentle language for complex feelings and opening the door to meaningful conversations with adults. Subtle, lyrical, and beautifully illustrated, this is a book that will resonate deeply with anyone who has experienced loss, affirming the enduring power of love.  

Raymaŋgirrbuy dhäwu When I was a little girl 

Kylie Gatjawarrawuy Mununggurr 
Magabala Books

Raymaŋgirrbuy dhäwu: When I Was a Little Girl  by Kylie Gatjawarrawuy Mununggurr is a profound example of how picture books can carry the weight of cultural memory and pride. Told in both Djambarrpuyŋu and English, this dual-language text is a testament to the resilience and continuity of Yolŋu culture. Through its pages, we witness everyday and ceremonial practices that hold deep cultural meaning—grinding ochre in the shade of a tree, hunting for guku (bush honey), painting ceremonial guku designs on their bodies (with special permission), performing the guku dance, and fishing under the full moon before sharing a meal by the sea. These acts are not just memories—they are living traditions that continue to connect generations.

It is an extraordinary act of generosity that this community has chosen to share their stories and language with us. Books like this should exist for every Aboriginal language. They open a doorway for all Australians to walk through—to learn, respect, and reflect. Language is more than communication; it is knowledge, connection to Country, and cultural sovereignty. Supporting and reading such works is an act of reciprocity, deepening our collective understanding of the First Peoples of this land.

Kylie Gatjawarrawuy Mununggurr 

Kylie Gatjawarrawuy Mununggurr was born in Darwin and moved to Gapuwiyak with her mother where she started school.  When a school opened on her grandmother’s country Raymaŋgirr Kylie went to school there. The language of Raymaŋgirr is Marraŋu but this story is told in Djambarrpuyŋu because everyone understands Djambarrpuyŋu in North-east Arnhem Land, although there are many other languages. 

Judges comments

A beautiful story of Kylie’s life on her grandmother’s Country, Raymangirr, a remote Yolŋu homeland in Northeast Arnhem Land in the Top End of Australia.  

This is a sweetly told story of the author’s experiences with her grandmother, sharing practices of grinding ochre and painting in the shade of a tree, hunting for bush honey (guku) and painting cermonial guku designs on their bodies (special permission was given to Kylie to paint this) for the guku dance, full-moon night fishing and cooking up a fish feast on the beach.  

Raymaŋgirrbuy dhäwu When I was a little girl came from the author’s expressed interest in developing her skills in writing and illustrating. With the support of Gapuwiyak Culture and Arts, a remote Art Centre in her homeland, Kylie developed the story with her mother and grandmother about the country, and cultural activities Gapuwiyak and in their Raymangirr homelands.  

We Live in a Bus 

Dave Petzold 
Thames & Hudson 

We live in a bus. She’s called Gracie Joy Rufus Bean (we couldn’t agree on a name). 

Gracie Joy Rufus Bean has six wheels and a door that opens when you push a button, tic-shhh! 

Join one family as they enjoy life on the road – camping under the stars, listening to nature, and making new friends along the way. 

Dave Petzold 

Dave Petzold is an author and illustrator living on Bundjalung Country in New South Wales. Dave's debut picture book, Seven Seas of Fleas, was released in 2020 with Starfish Bay Publishing. It was CBCA shortlisted for the New Illustrator Award in 2021. He also illustrated The Kindness Club, written by Kate Bullen-Casanova and released in 2022 with Bright Light Books (Hardie Grant Children's Publishing). Dave’s third picture book, We Live in a Bus, is to be published by Thames and Hudson in 2024. 

Judges' comments

We Live in a Bus by Dave Petzold is a picture book that celebrates the quintessential Australian road trip by following a young family as they take to life on the road in their bus. While the themes of a family road trip and the Australian landscape have been seen many times before in Australian literature, We Live in a Bus combines them in a way that is both original and timely.  

This gentle story provides a joyful, relevant consideration to modern challenges of housing, work-life balance, costs of living and even environmental issues. The text is warm, engaging and assured and brings to life familiar sounds of camping and exploring nature. It allows the vibrant, sophisticated illustrations space to truly shine.  

There is a freshness to illustrations that are at once familiar and inventive and deftly convey a sense of energy and space. The use of various perspectives also cleverly shows an environment that is intricate, expansive and connected. 

We Live in a Bus is a sensory feast with an important message - that we live in a land worthy of our time, wonder and respect, a land that demands our attention.  

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Tooth Fairy (And Some Things You Didn't) 

Briony Stewart 
Hachette Australia 

Every single minute, of every single day, a child somewhere loses a baby tooth. 

But what happens to all those teeth? 

They are collected by the tooth fairy, of course! Or the tooth fairies - because there is more than just one tooth fairy. In fact, there are millions! Like us, they are all different. 

And now there is an informative and fully illustrated guide that's jam-packed with answers to every child's tooth fairy questions, like: What do tooth fairies eat? Where do they live? How do they collect your tooth - and what on earth do they do with it? 

Find out everything there is to know about the magical (and sometimes just a little bit gross) world of the tooth fairy! 

Briony Stewart 

Briony Stewart is an award-winning author and illustrator of children's books. In 2022 she won the Prime Minister's Literary Award in the category of Children's Fiction for her work with Sheryl Clarke on the verse novel Mina and the Whole Wide World. She is the author and illustrator of the award-winning Kumiko and the Dragon series and We Love You Magoo, which was a CBCA Early Childhood Honour Book for 2020. Briony lectures on children's literature at university and conducts talks and workshops with children across Australia. She loves live drawing challenges, daydreaming and discussing dragons, bunnies, and how to tame lions.

Judges' comments

In Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Tooth Fairy, Briony Stewart blends imagination with information to answer the many questions children often ask about the tooth fairy. Framed through a question-and-answer structure, this book offers a satisfying and engaging blend of fact, fantasy, and folklore.  

This complete guide to the inner workings of the Tooth Fairy universe reveals the secrets of advanced sneaking techniques, the science of shrinking, flying, and floating, and the magical portals fairies use to visit homes around the world. Stewart’s playful illustrations will be returned to time and time again to examine details and to enjoy the layers of humour and enchantment showing fairy homes, magical mishaps, and playful spells.  

Stewart cleverly weaves in factual content and cultural insights, touching on everything from global traditions to why rewards may vary, and even what happens to teeth with cavities.   

This is an imaginative, fact-filled romp through fairyland that satisfies young readers’ curiosity while celebrating the enduring magic of childhood rituals. Playful, thoughtful, informative and utterly enchanting.  

The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems 

David Brooks  
University of Queensland Press 

David Brooks' longstanding concerns for justice and the relationship between human and non-human animals infuse and enliven his work. Wise, lyrical and timely, The Other Side of Daylight distils a long and honoured poetry career with a marvellous selection from his five previous volumes and The Peanut Vendor, a collection of forty-eight luminous new poems. 

David Brooks  

David Brooks is the author of six poetry collections and several novels and works of short fiction. The Book of Sei was heralded as the most impressive debut in Australian short fiction since Peter Carey’s  The Fern Tattoo was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Until 2013 David taught  Australian Literature at The University of Sydney. In recent years he has devoted his writing 
increasingly to animal advocacy. He lives with rescued sheep in the Blue Mountains. In 2014 he was 
awarded a 2015/16 Australia Council Fellowship for services to Australian and international literature.

Judges' comments

Combining new work with selections from a career spanning more than four decades, David Brooks’s The Other Side of Daylight: New and Selected Poems offers the deep satisfaction of a lifetime’s commitment to poetry. Its abundance of finely observed poems about rural life in the Blue Mountains burn with a passionate conviction for animal welfare and environmental conservation. In his attunement to the rhythms of non-human life Brooks reveals the singular potency of his art form. The myriad mammals, birds and even insects encountered in these pages serve as a call to a responsive sensibility, and one that is fundamentally nonhierarchical. Among Brooks’ most impressive achievements, then, is the way his poems expose the façade of human exceptionalism while simultaneously honouring the human capacity for connection, intimacy and meaning-making.  

The poet’s quest for authenticity and truth in his co-existence with the land and its fellow inhabitants is conveyed in an unadorned voice whose blend of directness and subtlety proves uniquely rewarding. It is a voice of considerable range, capable of passionate anger and erotic love, but also of whimsy, wit and delicacy. Eschewing ostentation for something more patient, nourishing and substantial, Brooks is a poet of great ingenuity whose contribution to Australian poetry is proven, via this volume, to be indispensable. 

Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions 

Peter Boyle  
Vagabond Press 

Luminous and profound, Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions is the eleventh collection of poetry from one of Australia’s most respected and celebrated contemporary poets and translators. Over five sections, Boyle offers a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to be human, moving from the personal to the social and political, from the immediacy of the writer’s home to a traveller on a train to Shanghai or a French pianist performing Ravel, as seen on YouTube. 

This mingling of inner and outer realms continues in dream narratives that sit alongside political poems, such as ‘Our World’, and final haiku-like poems that return us to the vision of our small place in a world filled with other-than-human presences. This is a work of deep imagination and subtle humour, a generous sharing in the sometimes magical, sometimes uncertain and unsettling experience of being human. 

Peter Boyle  

Peter Boyle is a poet and translator of poetry living and working on Dharug land. He has ten books of poetry published and eight books as a translator of poetry from Spanish and French. His most recent collections are Ideas of Travel  and Notes Towards the Dreambook of Endings (2022 and 2021). In 2020 his book Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness  won the New South Wales Premier's Award for Poetry. 

His book Ghostspeaking  also received the New South Wales Premier's Award in 2017. Other prize-winning books include Apocrypha (2009), The Blue Cloud of Crying (1997) and Coming Home from the World (1993). He has performed his poetry at International Poetry Festivals in Colombia, France, Venezuela, Macedonia, Canada, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Spain. His poems have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Macedonian, Vietnamese, Korean and Russian. 

As a translator his books include Anima by Cuban poet José Kozer, The Trees: Selected Poems of Eugenio Montejo and Three Poets: Olga Orozco, Marosa Di Giorgio and Jorge Palma. In 2013 he was awarded the New South Wales Premier's Award for Literary Translation. He holds a Doctorate in Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney. 

Judges' comments

A dazzling work of the imagination by a mature poet working at the height of his powers, Peter Boyle’s Companions, Ancestors, Inscriptions is a book that ‘light[s] the darkness at both ends’. Its central sequence of narrative prose poems transports us to a wondrous archipelago of ancestral spirits who ‘sleep outside the folds of their own skin’, grow transparent at different times of day and ‘hold their bodies together’ only by ‘an enormous act of will’. Conveyed upon a ‘river / that carries night under the earth’, our journey is however no mere escapist fantasy to a dreamlike otherworld but brilliantly illuminates the mysteries of this one.  

Imbued with hard-won wisdom and displaying exceptional creativity, Boyle’s poems are as alive to ‘the thought-fibres of language’ as to the condition of silence and ineffability. A testament to poetry’s unique capacity for ‘thread[ing] the line of human story’ as ‘it fractures into wild deviations’, this collection re-imagines selfhood as mutable and relational rather than fixed and singular—as always already incorporating one’s forebears and companions, human and nonhuman. An elegant book of poetic transformations, it is also one in which ‘very slowly you transform into yourself’. 

rock flight 

Hasib Hourani  
Giramondo Publishing 

rock flight is a book-length poem that, over seven chapters, follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.

Hasib Hourani  

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on Wangal Country in Sydney. His work has been published in Meanjin, Overland, Australian Poetry  and Cordite, among others. He is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme and his 2021 essay, ‘when we blink’ was shortlisted for The LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction prize and published in their 2022 anthology, Against Disappearance. His debut book is rock flight  (Giramondo 2024). 

Judges' comments

Lebanese-Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani’s rock flight is a work of unflinching metaphor — a rock is a rock, a box is a box, torture is torture. On the flat plane of the page, Hourani lays bare what must be said when people are no longer seen as people. This is a generative, urgent work that speaks for generations subjected to attempted and ongoing dispossession and erasure. 

Bursting from mind, tongue, hand and page into our three-dimensional world, every image is re-presented, unfolded, refolded, and reclaimed. At once scientific, literal, colloquial and visceral, rock flight suspends stereotype and refuses euphemism. Its tension is deep, its effect: arresting. This is poetry that panics, beauty that hesitates—brave, necessary words that strip the phrase ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ of its false comfort. 

Stylistically singular, Hourani lets language become thing, then returns it to itself—writing to rock to ruin to writing. List as poetry. Essay as poetry. rock flight is full and furious—a book with its heart on its sleeve, and a stone in its hand. 

Makarra 

Barrina South  
Recent Work Press 

The poems in this collection were written over the past few years in various locations: riverbanks; hospital corridors; writers retreats; oceans; in the leaf litter photographing fungi; by the fire with my two dogs; hotel rooms on business trips. Barrina writes: ‘I am inspired by all the poets that have walked beside me and have written words to fuel the fires for positive change and peace. Yellow Tailed Black cockatoos have just flown over and, as always, I run to catch a glimpse. My dogs have learnt their cry and join me on the back deck. These birds often arrive marking key episodes in my life, including this last piece of writing for this collection. Makarra is reflected in my poems, rain nourishes my words, water cleanses my thoughts and refreshes the path of the life journey ahead of me.’ 

Barrina South  

Barrina South is a Barkindji woman living on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country. As well as being an emerging poet, she is a visual artist and academic committed to Aboriginal women’s autobiographical narratives. She has facilitated several workshops on her visual art and academic research arising from her MA (Hons) Sociology and BA Visual Arts.

As well as being widely published, Barrina is an established curator with a long career in both Federal and State cultural institutions, with experience in collection management, curatorial and public programs. More recently she has held senior roles in the New South Wales Public Service protecting and conserving Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal heritage, including the repatriation of ancestors back to Country.

Currently, Barrina is a member of the Canberra Critics Circle, establishing herself as a critic, as she believes there is an urgent need for more Aboriginal voices who can review and critique Indigenous written works, as well as those of non-Indigenous people. As a critic Barrina writes regularly for the Canberra City News and Arts Hub.

Barrina is passionate about politics and in her pursuit to effect positive change, stood as a candidate in the 2024 New South Wales Local Council elections for the Queanbeyan-Palerang local government area.

She acknowledges the many opportunities she has worked hard for, but particularly values the experiences she enjoyed as Artist in Residence at the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates and Swarovski Crystal World, Wattens, Austria.

Judges' comments  

A debut collection written for Country and the resilience of its people, this poetic conversation holds a duality between the natural world and South’s observations of the modern. Makarra means ‘rain’ in the Barkindji language of the Darling River Basin. The strength of this book is as nourishing as rain, offering with rich clarity an uncomplicated testimony for readers of every capability to access and immerse.  

The careful placement and role of First Nations language words reveals Barrina South's existence within her contemporary and cultural life. Many of the forty-two poems are windows to natural and eternal observations that implore to be seen. In the poem ‘Long Weekend’ the reader rides a storm of imagery situated between earth and sky: 'with a feather you scoop the stars from the night sky and place them in my hair’. As a Barkindji woman, South's poetic realm treks from the banks of the Barka (the Darling River) and beyond, offering a curious gleaning of worth undisturbed beneath native foliage. 

There is an unpretentious dialogue with silence here—a refusal to participate in omissions of truth, and a quiet strength in bearing witness. These poems attune the senses to the ambience of the natural world and the upwelling of memory held in the poet’s body. In ‘Gathering’, she reminds us that:

silence ... heals us at our most vulnerable ... the learnings and thoughts of this moment ... to draw on later. 

Fused with her love of Country, these poems move with the pulse of the Barka—a continuous flow with the power to stir, comfort, and provoke. 

Within its pages, Makarra marks the arrival of a fresh and original poetic voice, accompanied by four illustrations by her brother John. In this collection, as in life, family is always present. 

That Galloping Horse 

Petra White  
Shearsman Books 

Written at first in Melbourne and then while resident in London, Berlin and Belfast, these poems are haunted by place. Thirteen elegies take personal grief as their starting point, and travel widely, mediating anguish through a delight in language and the physical world. Rich in their variety and tones, these elegies are inhabited by proximity to the Ukraine War, the nature of modern work, and domestic life in the reality of planetary demise. 

Petra White 

Petra White was born in Adelaide in 1975 and now lives outside London. She is the author of six poetry  books, the most recent being That Galloping Horse, which was a finalist in the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards. 

Judges' comments

This impressive book shows Petra White pursuing the themes of her earlier books – childhood and its counterpart, parenthood; love; work; and death - in newly evolving modes. One of these, fitting for a life which has recently become peripatetic, is the journal-poem which first appeared in her previous book. Another is a restatement of a classical myth – here in the poems ‘Zeus on a Weekday’, ‘Leda’ and ‘Daphne’ – in which White works her own themes rather than conventional pieties. But the most powerful part of That Galloping Horse is the last quarter, made up of thirteen elegies.  

These are Rilkean in tone and sophisticated in their meditative complexity, but the material is very much White’s own. They enable her to think, once more, about her childhood and the house where it occurred and the parents and siblings who were involved, especially looking at the block where her childhood home – ‘the brittle green house’ - had once stood and picturing herself there. They also enable her to focus on the transition from child to parent-of-child, and from solitary person to wife and mother.  

White has always written brilliantly about conventional work – the ‘galloping horse’ of the title – but the most memorable of these poems are those that deal with death and the dead who inhabit the piece of land where their house once stood, ghosts ‘among the cabbage moths in the yellow field’. But the poems go farther to imagine the moment when we too die and the living butcher us with their inaccurate memories, unable ‘to remember us quite as we were’. These elegies are probably the most satisfying form White has so far found for her distinctive and consistent poetic material. 

Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia's AIDS crisis 

Geraldine Fela  
NewSouth Publishing 

HIV and AIDS devastated communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. Amid this profound health crisis, nurses provided crucial care to those living with and dying from the virus. They negotiated homophobia and complex family dynamics as well as defending the rights of their patients.

Bringing together stories from across the country, historian Geraldine Fela documents the extraordinary care, compassion and solidarity shown by HIV and AIDS nurses. Critical Care unearths the important and unexamined history of nurses and nursing unions as caregivers and political agents who helped shape Australia’s response to HIV and AIDS. 

Geraldine Fela

Geraldine Fela is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University. Her research and teaching traverses histories of gender and sexuality, labour, social movements and medicine. She has been widely awarded for her work examining the role of nurses during Australia’s HIV and AIDS crisis and has appeared in both scholarly and popular outlets. 

Judges' comments

Critical Care examines Australia’s response to the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s from the perspective of health care practitioners and patients. Written with empathy and narrative flair, it takes the reader inside remote Indigenous communities, regional areas, and city hospitals. Built on interviews with over thirty nurses and many of those who survived HIV, Fela maps the human response to a public health emergency with compassion, insight, and an acute eye for telling detail. 

Fela draws attention to the largely collaborative response of governments to the crisis, and expertly traces the intersections between public health policy, frontline care, and the wider impact of AIDS. The voices of nurses and patients always remain at the forefront of her narrative, showing how they coped with the illness and managed the complex terrain of social anxieties and prejudice that came with it. 

This inspiring history of progressive public health strategy should be cause for national pride. Characterised by a collaborative, community-based education approach – rather than isolating and controlling patients – nurses played an important role, centring the rights of affected communities. 

In the age when public health is a matter of urgent concern, Critical Care is both an original and revealing history of Australia’s response to AIDS and a valuable source of guidance for the future. 

Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook, and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People 

Darren Rix and Craig Cormick  
Scribner Australia, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Australia 

For the first time, the First Nations story of Cook’s arrival, and what blackfellas want everyone to know about the coming of Europeans. 

Both 250 years late and extremely timely, this is an account of what First Nations people saw and felt when James Cook navigated their shores in 1770. 

We know the European story from diaries, journals and letters. For the first time, this is the other side. Who were the people watching the Endeavour sail by? How did they understand their world and what sense did they make of this strange vision? And what was the impact of these first encounters with Europeans? The answers lie in tales passed down from 1770 and in truth-telling of the often more brutal engagements that followed. 

‘Warra Warra Wai’ was the expression called to Cook and his crew when they tried to make landfall in Botany Bay. It has long been interpreted as ‘Go away’, but is perhaps more accurately translated as ‘You are all dead spirits’. 

Darren Rix 

Darren Rix, a Gunditjmara-GunaiKurnai man with Ngarigo bloodlines, grew up in the tin huts and tents of ‘Silver City’, South Nowra, with his eleven siblings. His family later got their first house in the Bega Valley, and he attended school in Bega. At fourteen, Darren moved to Ngunnawal country – Canberra – to which he has songline ties through his Ngarigo bloodlines. He has worked as a radio reporter for the Brisbane Indigenous Media Association, and with the Ngunnawal people as a cultural sites officer in Canberra. Darren is an accomplished musician, as was his uncle, Archie Roach. He has appeared in the TV program Rake. Darren has six children and twelve grandchildren.

Craig Cormick  

Dr Craig Cormick OAM is an award-winning author and science communicator. He has published many more books than he has children and grandchildren (and he has four and three of those respectively). He was born on Dharawal Country – Wollongong – and has lived in the Blue Mountains and Queensland. He currently lives on Ngunnawal land in Canberra. He has been Chair of the ACT Writers Centre, co-host of the literary podcast Secrets from the Green Room, and has edited several magazines and books. He is drawn to stories of people whose voices have been hidden from history. Find him at www.craigcormick.com

Judges' comments

After more than 250 years of histories that have eulogised James Cook’s ‘discovery’ of Australia, Warra Warra Wai  finally turns the tables on the brilliant navigator from Yorkshire. For the first time, we follow Cook’s journey along the east coast of Australia between April and August 1770 from the vantage point of First Nations people. As the Endeavour sailed north, it was observed by Indigenous Australians from at least nineteen different language groups, its progress breathlessly announced as it moved from one Nation’s territory to the next. As Craig Cormick and Darren Rix follow Cook’s journey along the continent’s east coast – from Gunnaikurnai Country in the south to Kaureg in the north – they offer a genuinely new perspective on one of Australia’s most recognisable foundational stories. 

While much has been written about the need for more collaborative histories in Australia, Warra Warra Wai provides an absorbing and powerful template. By centring Indigenous voices and oral histories rather than the journals of Cook or Joseph Banks, Cormick and Rix allow the reader to ‘see’ Cook’s voyage from multiple perspectives – how the Endeavour and its crew were observed by First Nations people in 1770 and incorporated into their kinship systems, how Indigenous Australians were misunderstood by Cook and how they have remembered him over time. Instead of the ossified figure immortalised in countless statues around the nation, Cook becomes eternally present, a figure of profound importance for all First Nations Australians, wherever they reside.    

Warra Warra Wai demonstrates the validity and revelatory nature of Indigenous oral history and shows how truth-telling is built on patient and careful listening.  

The Wild Reciter: Poetry and Popular Culture in Australia 1890-2020 

Peter Kirkpatrick  
Melbourne University Publishing 

Just over a century ago poetry was all the rage in Australia. Newspapers and magazines published it, entertainers and elocutionists performed it on stages across the country, and ordinary Australians recited it in schools, local halls and suburban parlours. Yet this communal experience of poetry has now largely disappeared. In The Wild Reciter Peter Kirkpatrick examines how this change occurred by exploring the shifting relationships between poetry and popular culture, and particularly the arrival of new media, taking the reader from 'penny readings' and vaudeville to slam and Instapoetry. 

Many extraordinary yet wholly forgotten works are brought to light, while some well-known poems and their authors receive a critical makeover. This pioneering study reimagines the history of Australian verse to arrive at a more expansive notion of poetry. 

Peter Kirkpatrick  

Peter Kirkpatrick has published widely in Australian literary studies and cultural history, and is an honorary associate professor in the discipline of English and Writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of three poetry collections. 

Judges' comments

With the Commonwealth government’s announcement of Australia’s inaugural poet laureate imminent, Peter Kirkpatrick’s The Wild Reciter is a timely reminder of poetry’s long-standing capacity to touch every aspect of the nation’s culture. Rather than write a historical survey of poetry on the page, Kirkpatrick takes the reader through an entertaining and surprising social history that uncovers the full gamut of poetry’s cultural significance – from the poetry of railway workers to celebrity doggerel and iconic figures like Clive James and Dorothy Porter.

Determined to challenge stereotypical views of poetry as an elite literary art form read by a handful of devotees, Kirkpatrick moves beyond its textual dimensions to explore the oral and performative aspects of poetry’s popular appeal over time. With a natural gift for storytelling and a wry sense of humour, he examines everything from poetry recitations accompanied by magic lantern slides to ‘Balmain readings’, pub poetry, the lyrics of 1960s singer-songwriters and poetry ‘slams’.  

Kirkpatrick’s lively coverage of the astonishing breadth and diversity of poetry in popular culture is what makes the book so engaging. Yet another strength is his ability to reveal poetry’s connections to other art forms and its ready adaptability in the face of technological change. Whether it was the advent of radio and the gramophone, the introduction of television, or the arrival of the internet and mobile phones, Kirkpatrick’s ‘wild reciters’ have found ever more ingenious ways to enchant Australian audiences through poetry. 

Australia in 100 Words 

Amanda Laugesen  
NewSouth Publishing 

Bonzer. Arvo. Tucker. Sickie. Pash. Illywhacker. 

There are plenty of words to choose from to tell the story of Australia – from iconic Australianisms like mateship, fair dinkum, and bogan to drop bears, budgie smugglers, and bin chickens. 

And while you aren’t likely to hear crikey, cobber, or wowser walking down the street, you will hear no worries, mate, and yeah nah. Words underpin myths and stereotypes of Australian identity; they have also obscured harsh realities and inequalities. Together, these words shine a spotlight on our culture, past and present. 

Historian and Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre Amanda Laugesen brings us an innovative linguistic history of Australia. 

Amanda Laugesen 

Amanda Laugesen is a historian, lexicographer, and author. She is director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre at ANU and chief editor of the Australian National Dictionary: Australian words and their origins. She has published extensively on US and Australian history. Her most recent book is Rooted: An Australian history of bad language (2020). 

Judges' comments

At first glance, the idea that Australia can be successfully encapsulated in 100 words might seem overly ambitious, even impossible. But historian Amanda Laugesen, Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, has based her spirited and penetrating selection of Australian words and phrases on more than fifty years of research carried out by the Dictionary’s staff at the ANU. Her book brilliantly combines a fascination with the origins and shifting meanings of words with an expert knowledge of Australian history.  

Every word Laugesen unpacks becomes a portal to Australia’s history – war and migration, democracy and racism, sex and sport, climate and environment, and First Nations histories and cultures. Readers encounter Australia’s egalitarian and democratic instincts (‘mateship’ and the ‘fair go’); its long history of racism (‘blackbirding’ and ‘White Australia’); its suspicion of difference (‘new Australian’); its disdain for ‘tall poppies’ and high achievers (‘nation of knockers’); and its dry, mischievous sense of humour (‘do a Harold Holt’). The book also has several valuable short essays on a range of language issues, such as Aboriginal English, or words from the convict era. 

In Australia in 100 Words Laugesen skilfully distils years of painstaking research on Australian words into sparkling vignettes, exploring the many nuances, contradictions and enduring themes of Australian history and culture. 

Ṉäku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy 

Clare Wright  
Text Publishing 

In 1963—a year of agitation for civil rights worldwide—the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land created the Yirrkala Bark Petitions: Ṉäku Dhäruk. ‘The land grew a tongue’ and the land-rights movement was born. 

Ṉäku Dhäruk is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the trailblazers who made it. It is also a pulsating picture of the ancient and enduring culture of Australia’s first peoples. 

And it is a masterful, groundbreaking history. 

Clare Wright’s Democracy Trilogy began with The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka and continued with You Daughters of Freedom. It concludes with this compulsively readable account of a momentous episode in our shared story. 

Clare Wright  

Clare Wright is an historian who has worked as a political speechwriter, university lecturer, historical consultant and radio and television broadcaster. Her first book, Beyond the Ladies Lounge: Australia’s Female Publicans, garnered both critical and popular acclaim and her second, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, won the 2014 Stella Prize. She researched, wrote and presented the ABC TV documentary Utopia Girls and is the co-writer of the four-part series The War That Changed Us  which screened on ABC1. 

Judges' comments

This remarkable book tells the story of how in 1963, the Yolngu people of Yirrkala responded to the Commonwealth government’s grant of a mining lease on previously protected Aboriginal land. They presented to parliament four barks, each with a central section containing a petition on paper written both in English and Yolngu, surrounded by paintings on bark in a traditional manner asserting Yolngu ideas and spirituality. The petitions protested at the lack of negotiation with the Yolngu people themselves and insisted on government acknowledgement of their land rights.  

These bark petitions have long been recognised as a representing a critical stage in the land rights movement and the relationship between Indigenous people and federal parliament. Two are now on permanent display in Parliament House. In Näku Dhäruk, Clare Wright tells the story of who made these remarkable petitions, and how and why, in much more detail than anyone has done before, and sets this specific event within a very wide historical and interpretative frame. 

On the basis of extensive research, she evokes a tale of greed and of challenges to that greed, of structural racism, and of political and artistic rebellion and expression. She has woven an account that pays close attention to the Yolngu and their supporters as well as to mining interests, missionary bodies, and governments. The book is written in an informal and engaging way, using everyday Australian language to explore and illuminate our complex history.