The 2010–2011 Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History has been shared between two books, A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W K Hancock by Jim Davidson and Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny and Murder in the Great War by Peter Stanley. The two winners each received an embossed gold medallion and a tax-free grant of $40 000.
Four other works were also shortlisted;
- The Unknown Nation; Australia After Empire by James Curran and Stuart Ward;
- Beersheba: A Journey through Australia’s Forgotten War by Paul Daley;
- A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty by Kirsten McKenzie; and
- Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia by Penny Russell.
As runners-up, Paul Daley, Kirsten McKenzie and Penny Russell each received a grant of $5000 and James Curran and Stuart Ward each received $2500. The Advisory Committee’s Judging Comments on all six shortlisted works are provided below.
2012 Prize
The Prize for Australian History will become part of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards from 2012 and nominations have opened. Entries for the 2012 Prize for Australian History can be film or radio documentaries, websites, DVDs, or other forms of multimedia. Producers of works that document Australian history in any format are encouraged to enter the Awards. To be eligible, history works must be first published, produced or broadcast between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2011. Entries close on 1 February 2012 and the shortlist will be announced in May. For more information visit www.arts.gov.au/pmliteraryawards
Judges’ Comments, 2011-2011 Prize Shortlist
A Three-Cornered Life: The Historian W K Hancock, Jim Davidson, University of New South Wales Press, 2010
In his mid-life memoir, Country and Calling, Keith Hancock explained how his vocation as a historian took him from his native land to the centres of scholarship in England - and from a colonial to an imperial perspective. This biography follows Hancock on that intellectual journey and in doing so it attests to his stature as a historian of remarkable span, and acuity. Drawing on a large body of material scattered across the countries in which his subject worked, Jim Davidson takes the measure of Hancock’s achievement. More than this, Davidson reconstructs the values and assumptions that Hancock brought to his vocation as an imperial historian and the ways that he responded to Australian aspirations after he returned here in the 1950s. Shrewd in judgement and deft in its literary artistry, this is biography at its best.
Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny and Murder in the Great War, Peter Stanley, Murdoch Books, 2010
As we near the centenary of Anzac Day in 2015, the reality of the Australian soldiering experience in World War One seems to recede further from view. At a time when the Anzac diggers have passed into folklore, this book is a bracing and fascinating corrective to some of the popular myths. Peter Stanley provides a compelling reminder of the more prosaic reality of military life for Australian soldiers, telling the stories of some of the ‘bad characters’ who malingered, refused to salute, contracted venereal diseases, gambled, stole, went AWOL, and committed numerous offences in the course of fighting and winning the war. The larrikin tradition is often used to excuse the excesses of the Australian troops, and Stanley shows how some of these excesses far surpassed that. One of our leading military historians, he excavates the records to provide a salutary corrective to the romanticisation of the digger.
The Unknown Nation: Australia After Empire, James Curran and Stuart Ward, Melbourne University Publishing, 2010
The upsurge of a new and more assertive nationalism in the late 1960s and 1970s has often been celebrated: it was then that Australia threw off its reliance on great and powerful friends, scrapped the White Australia policy and abandoned the cultural cringe. This book challenges the assumption that Australians chose to fashion a new national identity at this time as a spontaneous assertion of greater independence; rather, it argues that the new nationalism was forced upon Australia by Britain’s changing priorities, which cast us adrift. James Curran and Stuart Ward provide a series of illuminating and entertaining case studies of the Australian response, such as the story of the naming of our decimal currency, the attempt to find a new national anthem, and the argument over how to present ourselves to the world at Expo ’67. This book sheds new light on the political, cultural and intellectual history of the post-war period in Australia.
Beersheba: A Journey through Australia’s Forgotten War, Paul Daley, Melbourne University Publishing, 2009
Paul Daley tells the story of the final cavalry charge by the Australian Light Horse in 1917 and the role the Australians played in the capture of Beersheba, then an important strategic position in the Ottoman Empire and now part of Israel. While this story has been told before, Daley brings it alive for a new generation, emphasising the complexity of the relationship between the past and the present. Daley is alive to the competing claims of memory, national identity, and myth: he tells us not only what happened in the past, but what it means to different people in the present. Contestations over ownership of the Australian story of Beersheba, the fallibility of memory, and the dark truth of an Australian-led massacre that is revealed at the end of the book, make this an outstanding, engaging military history that speaks to present-day concerns.
A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty, Kirsten McKenzie, University of New South Wales Press, 2009
This book tells the story of an impersonation and suggests its implications for social relations in Britain and the Australian colonies in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Britain, marked by hierarchies of birth and status, the opportunities to lay claim to the identity of a superior were restricted. In the colonies, a place of newcomers, the possibilities of passing yourself off as someone else were greater. Kirsten McKenzie plots her case study of an audacious impersonator and swindler to heighten the mystery and uses it to shed new light on the ambiguities of social relations in the penal colonies. Her close attention to the British and imperial as well as the Australian aspects of her story, reminding us that colonists looked back as well as forward, does much to break down the conventional view of Australian history as a story of linear progress.
Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia, Penny Russell, University of New South Wales Press, 2010
Penny Russell’s entertaining study is an exemplary cultural history. Russell uses manners as an entry point into the colonial period, taking things we might regard as strange and making them resonate with meaning. The codes of behaviour illuminate human relationships between men and women, Aborigines and Europeans, and members of different classes. The early chapters announce her theme by showing that colonists framed their early contact relations with Indigenous people in an understanding of savagery and civilization, a theme that is taken up in a series of fine-grained studies that challenge the egalitarian interpretation of colonial society. Widely and carefully researched, and written with an often playful tone, Russell persuades the reader of the significance of what might appear at first glance to be an arcane subject. She adds new depth to our understanding of our colonial past. This is an enjoyable, sophisticated history.
Advisory Committee
Members of the Advisory Committee for the 2010-2011 Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History are:
- Chair - Professor Stuart Macintyre, Ernest Scott Professor of History, University of Melbourne, current President of the Academy of Social Sciences and member of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) Curriculum Advisory Panel on History.
- Dr Michelle Arrow, Senior Lecturer, Department of Modern History, Macquarie University, an historian of popular culture, who was a presenter on the ABC TV series Rewind.
- Dr John Hirst, Emeritus Scholar, La Trobe University, a scholar of Australian social and political history with particular interests in convict society, federation and the history of Australian democracy.
- Adjunct Professor Margo Neale, Senior Research Fellow, Senior Curator and Principal Advisor to the Director on Indigenous matters at the National Museum of Australia; and Adjunct Professor, Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Australian National University.
2009 Prime Minister’s Prize