Poet Jazz Money wins Kate Challis RAKA 2025 Award
The Faculty of Arts is delighted to announce that Wiradjuri poet and artist Jazz Money has won the 2025 Kate Challis RAKA Award for their poetry collection mark the dawn.
The Kate Challis RAKA Award was established by Professor Emeritus Bernard Smith in memory of his late wife and was first awarded in 1991. Every year since, the award has advanced the recognition of Indigenous artistic achievements. It was one of the earliest awards for Indigenous artists in Australia and is administered by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. RAKA, which means 'five' in the Pintupi language, is awarded annually to an Indigenous artist for a work in one of five categories: creative prose, poetry, script writing, drama and visual arts.
In bestowing the Award, the selection committee praised Money's writing for mark the dawn, describing it as "alive and cinematic", offering "not just testimony but genuine aesthetic innovation.
"mark the dawn connects through relationality rather than sequence: a constellation-like structure where poems speak to one another, guided by feeling.
"Money's careful shaping of text through space, silence, and rhythm instructs us how to read, creating pacing that moves from intimate tenderness to furious political energy.
“mark the dawn speaks to grief, care, and love with poise that never diminishes its emotional force.
“Complex art with a heartbeat, formally sophisticated yet immediately felt. The collection's intimacy touches without sentimentality.
Money's work spans installation, digital, performance, film and print. Their writing has been widely published nationally and internationally and performed on stages around the world".
In accepting the award, Money said:
"I am deeply honoured to receive the 2025 Kate Challis RAKA Award. Thank you to the family of Professor Bernard Smith and Kate Challis who continue to recognise and celebrate First Nations creative practice and uphold this remarkable legacy.
"I would like to thank my writing and artistic peers whom I am grateful to work alongside. The abundance and brilliance of First Nations poetry that has been published in the past five years has been astounding and I am very humbled that mark the dawn has been recognised with this esteemed award.
"mark the dawn was written as a way to begin to understand the sweep of time that we find ourselves in, and how we locate ourselves amongst our ancestors and descendants at this moment.
"I am curious about how we honour oral histories within the confines of the page, and many of the poems in this collection were spoken first.
"Thank you to Ellen who edited this collection, and to UQP for their continued support of my writing. And to my family, my wife and our darling daughter who fill my life with poetry".
Full citations and past winners of the Kate Challis RAKA Award can be found on the Faculty of Arts website.