Ernest Scott Prize

This prize is awarded annually to the book judged to be the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or to the history of colonisation.

Emily Scott established the Prize in memory of her husband, Emeritus Professor Sir Ernest Scott Knight Bachelor, Professor of History at the University from 1913 to 1936, to commemorate his interest in the development of Australian historical studies.

Applications for the 2026 Ernest Scott Prize have closed. For further information please visit the Ernest Scott Prize page here.

Winners

2026

Winner

Charlotte Macdonald for Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire

The singular achievement of Charlotte Macdonald's Garrison World is its reframing of the history of colonial Aotearoa New Zealand by focusing on historical actors hiding in plain sight: British redcoat soldiers and bluejacket sailors. Situating New Zealand in the wider history of the nineteenth century British empire, the focus on empire’s foot-soldiers creates new ways of looking beyond the battlefield to the place of the garrison in building colonial communities. For Macdonald, the garrison was at once a group of people, a place or station, and an activity. From this perspective, she reimagines New Zealand as a garrison colony and shows how a permanent presence of soldiers in the formative years between 1840 and 1870 shaped the country’s economy, politics, society and culture. The book’s originality, apart from its sensitive rendering of a group more often maligned, erased or caricatured than understood, is to bring together the scholarship on soldiering and war, and histories of settlement, and in doing so, to transform them both. In Garrison World, the crucial role of imperial soldiers in both war and peace in establishing the ascendency of settler society and Pākehā civilian government comes alive in vivid prose, rich illustrations, through compelling characters and an unwavering account of what was at stake for Māori people.

Shortlisted authors

Emeritus Professor Erik Olssen for The Origins of an Experimental Society: New Zealand 1769-1860

In this erudite volume, Erik Olssen presents a European history of New Zealand as an intellectual experiment. Beginning with Cook’s voyages to these islands and ending with the outbreak of war in Taranaki in 1860, Olssen’s account brings fresh understandings to how Europeans viewed the remote antipodes. He examines in fine detail how their ideas were reshaped by the environment as they began to build new settlements. Drawing on humanitarianism and Enlightenment thought, the European settlement of New Zealand became an ‘experiment’ in multiple senses: an attempt to build a society on scientific principles as well as to stave off the racial conflicts that had featured so prominently in other British colonies. It is rare for studies of New Zealand to be told in terms of an intellectual history, and Olssen’s work, the first of a projected three volume project, makes an important contribution to rethinking New Zealand in the twenty-first century.

Professor Martin Thomas for Clever Men: How Worlds Collided on the Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948

In this compelling narrative of the Arnhem Land expedition of 1948, Martin Thomas introduces us to a cast of flawed, ambitious characters wanting to make their mark on science. Led by the entrepreneurial amateur ethnologist Charles Pearcy Mountford, the Arnhem Land expedition, made up of Australian and US scientists, was the last of its kind, a nineteenth-century hangover in an emerging Cold War context. This is a story of hubris and human foibles, of stealing and rapaciousness, as well as of unexpected friendships and self-realisation. It is a story of science, and the tensions between driven amateurs and anxious professionals. It is also the story of how outsiders misunderstood the changing and complex historical worlds of north Australia after World War II. Thomas’s long experience in the archives of the expedition itself and in the history and present of Indigenous Arnhem Land shines in his deft descriptions of these colliding worlds.

Judges

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2025

Winner

Dr Jane Carey for Taking to the Field: A History of Australian Women in Science

When molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn became the first Australian woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009, she was heralded as 'a pioneer for women in the field'. In this landmark and meticulously researched book, Carey challenges this pioneer status through uncovering a long and significant history of Australian women's scientific endeavours stretching back to the 1830s. Writing with clarity and elegance, she convincingly shows that women's contributions were indeed essential to the very foundation of Australian science. Until now, however, their histories remained untold; histories of science largely overlooked women, and women's histories focused on their exclusion or marginalisation in science. This book provides a wide-ranging exploration of the richness and diversity of women's engagement in Australian science over time, ranging from amateur science (natural history, botany and 'colonial anthropology'), to involvement in a range of scientific social-reform movements such as eugenics, to scientific occupations. It does not, however, suggest a continuous upward trajectory in science from exclusion to acceptance; with the post-Second World War era being one in which their contributions shrank markedly. Carey reveals the various forms of discrimination faced by women in science, and their lack of equal employment opportunities with men, evidenced by her interviews and surveys of over 300 women science graduates. This is a truly impressive and significant history contributing to women's history, the history of science, social movements, and to the history of colonisation. Challenging presumptions about women scientists, the story told here is core to promoting women in science in the future.

Highly commended

Dr Geraldine Fela for Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia's AIDS crisis

In this excellent work, Dr Geraldine Fela offers a new perspective on the history of the AIDS epidemic in Australia through the lens of nurses and their critical activism and care for HIV/AIDS patients. This lucid and engagingly written book is an important social, cultural and health history. Existing scholarship and popular narratives on the epidemic have focused primarily on the role and activism of community organisations, with nurses being largely invisible in the accounts. Fela uses oral history to explore broader themes balanced with personal stories, inevitably difficult and some heart-breaking but sensitively told. She deftly explains how AIDS nurses, some of whom were themselves from the LGBTQ+ community, helped to move public health strategies away from the traditional 'test and contain' medical model to infection control policies based on universal precaution regardless of suspected or confirmed infectious status. This advocacy and activism occurred within the context of existing LGBTQ+ activism in Australia, and through the close relationships that had developed between trade unions and social movements. Fela shows how nurses, their unions and affected communities worked together to argue that communities themselves should be given the knowledge, tools and resources to protect their health. This history has important policy implications for the future.

Shortlisted authors

Dr Katie Cooper for Rēwena and Rabbit Stew: The Rural Kitchen in Aotearoa, 1800-1940

In this important and innovative book, historian Katie Cooper uncovers a century of dramatic change for both Māori and Pakeha, through changes in housing and architecture, cooking technologies, food production, mealtime rituals, and crucially gender dynamics. Meticulously researched, the book draws on a vast range of primary sources, including diaries and journals, autobiographies, guidebooks, oral histories, magazines and official publications; it also presents an extensive selection of photographs which in themselves tell stories. Waitangi Tribunal reports, along with those other sources, are employed to show not only the manaakitanga (hospitality) of Māori communities, but also their displacement from previous forms of land use, often leading to the cycle of poverty and a move to urban areas in search of work. The kitchen, Cooper convincingly argues, was at the centre of social relations, revealing commonalities as well as a diversity of experience and change over time. This book provides a novel, interdisciplinary approach and is beautifully presented.

Professor Noah Riseman for Transgender Australia: A History Since 1910

In this moving book Noah Riseman assiduously examines and reconstructs Australia's transgender history for the first time. Riseman writes lucidly with care and respectful self-reflexivity about a history that has been hidden for too long. Grounded in extensive oral history and wide-ranging archival work, the book offers finely crafted life stories and traces the genealogy of transgender discourse through the lens of popular culture, psychology, psychiatry, and sexology in the twentieth century. This is also a difficult story of prejudice, violence, and endurance and of lived lives, and marks a critical intervention in the telling of key aspects of queer and LGBTQ+ histories. It is a work of high significance.

Professor Angela Wanhalla, Dr Sarah Christie, Emeritus Professor Lachy Paterson, Dr Ross Webb and Dr Erica Newman for Te Hau Kāinga: The Māori Home Front during the Second World War

This is an important work of social and political history, revealing the distinctive contribution of Māori to the home front effort, including how communities negotiated with the state at this time on issues such as land, housing, labour, and other historic claims. Foregrounding Māori voices, and based on extensive archival research and a large team collaboration, this lively, excellent book is persuasively written. Crucially, it shows the political acumen of Māori leaders and everyday community in calling for equality, and directing and enduring political shifts during and after the war years. Beautifully presented with photographs and other illustrations, this is an excellent and highly accessible work of public history.

Judges

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2024

Winner

Dr Shannyn Palmer for Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station

Unmaking Angas Downs: Myth and History on a Central Australian Pastoral Station explores the histories and mythologies of Angas Downs pastoral station in the Northern Territory from the perspectives of the Aṉangu who lived there. She shows how a regional and truly place-based approach, and how understanding Aṉangu ways of seeing the world, together retell the history of colonisation, illuminating wider, mythologised landscapes and industries, and Aboriginal people’s extraordinary responses to the disruption and dislocation of invasion and pastoralism. Unmaking Angas Downs tracks the complex interplay of dreams, images and places over time and is a shining example of the power of slow history, of curiosity and asking new questions about forgotten places. It is built upon a tenacious dedication to listening carefully and patient ethnographic research that honours Aṉangu truth-tellers. Human-centred and written in mesmerising prose, this book demonstrates exhilarating new ways of researching and writing Australian history.

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Highly commended

Dr Alecia Simmonds for Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law

Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law is a startlingly original book. It plumbs the long-neglected archives of breach of promise cases brought to court in Australia over a century and a half, recovering a past that is strange but also familiar. Through detailed contextual research and sparkling, empathic prose, Dr Simmonds brilliantly reconstructs places and times, and the predicaments and passions of people who turned to the law to succour broken hearts and shattered dreams. These stories of private intimacy and public justice are the basis of Dr Simmonds’ deep and radical rethinking of entangled legal and emotional histories, opening exciting fresh directions for new kinds of interdisciplinary research and writing.

Dr Alexandra Roginski for Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand

Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand explores the long-discredited ‘science’ of phrenology as a marvellous portal into the lived world of the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand colonies. Dr Roginski traces the way scientific knowledge – or versions of it – permeated all levels of colonial societies, evolving in form and shaping popular knowledge and beliefs. Her keen and empathetic eye recovers how phrenology and its associated arts were remade, deployed, performed and circulated, from the bush to the burgeoning cities, often by people from the margins who travelled constantly and were as likely to be jeered as cheered. This rich, accomplished and beautifully written study places the so-called ‘edges of empire’ at the centre of enquiry, revealing how interwoven strands of gender, race and class intersected with science and power in the places where empire and colonies were actually made.

Shortlisted authors

Professor Linda Bryder for The Best Country to Give Birth? Midwifery, Homebirth and the Politics of Maternity in Aotearoa New Zealand 1970-2022

In The Best Country to Give Birth? Midwifery, Homebirth and the Politics of Maternity in Aotearoa New Zealand 1970-2022, Professor Linda Bryder has offered a fine work of contemporary history. It shows how a movement that emerged in Aotearoa New Zealand during the 1970s advocating women’s empowerment through homebirth gave rise to wider changes in maternity care provision in the decade that followed culminating in 1990 legislation allowing midwives to practice in the community. With the reduction in General Practitioners’ role, these changes represented a major transformation in how New Zealanders give birth. Professor Bryder deftly traces the variable impacts of these changes on different groups of New Zealanders, examines the cases made by both the advocates and critics, and argues that criticisms of preventable deaths associated with the transformed maternity care system have not received adequate official attention or remedial action. This is a brave intervention is a sensitive area of public policy by a historian who has engaged in deep research and reflection. The result is a meticulous policy history of formidable intellectual power.

Professor Kate Fullagar for Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled

Both the men who form the subjects of Professor Kate Fullagar’s highly engaging double biography, Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled, Arthur Phillip and Bennelong, have a central place in the foundational narrative of settler Australia. In an experimental book that tells their story in reverse, Professor Fullagar invites us to rethink existing narratives and the very way that Western histories of empire and nation narrate historical time itself. The result is an account of the drama unfolding by the shores of Sydney Harbour – and a relationship between two men, one Yiyura (Eora) and the other British  – that is reinterpreted as just one episode in two long and complex lives that each expressed rich cultural and political contexts. In place of the language of ‘friendship’, ‘enlightenment’ and ‘tragedy’, we find two men each seeking creatively to advance diplomatic goals in the context of the injustice and violence of British imperial expansion in an age of war and revolution. This is an imaginative and accomplished historical work that presents both history – and the future – as inhabited by alternative possibilities.

Mavis Kerinaiua and Dr Laura Rademaker for Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up

A model of collaborative history-making, Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up – the work of Mavis Kerinaiua, Dr Laura Rademaker and a team of Tiwi historians – is a story of survival, resistance and story-telling itself. It is also a radical challenge to conventional colonial narratives of the history of northern Australia: familiar historical landmarks in the settler historiography either recede from view or appear in a different light, as we are invited to witness a history made, owned, mourned and celebrated by Tiwi Islanders. ‘Conversion’ – the traditional goal of white missionary endeavour – is revealed as something that also happens to colonisers and missionaries themselves, while Tiwi women shape history through creative use of spaces opened by the ambiguous power of the colonisers. This major contribution to our understanding of settler colonialism and Tiwi Islanders’ enduring defence of culture and Country will likely stand as an important benchmark for future historical work involving First Nations peoples in Australia.

Judges

2023

Winners

Emeritus Professor Alan Atkinson for Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm

In this meticulously researched book, Emeritus Professor Alan Atkinson tells a rich and wide-ranging social history of colonial Australia through the biographical portraiture of one of early New South Wales’ most influential couples, Elizabeth and John Macarthur. Written with  the author's signature capacity to range across a large historical canvas with seemingly effortless grace, this deeply scholarly work exemplifies how a close, contextualised reading of family history can illuminate a much larger history of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession. In its intimate account of the Macarthurs’ lives – of the economic and social lives they sought to build in the settler colony, of the European Enlightenment sensibilities they brought with them, and of their only dimly-perceived consciousness of the Indigenous peoples they supplanted – this magisterial work asks us to see afresh how colonial culture was made in a particular time and place.

Dr Rachel Buchanan for Te Motunui Epa

This beautiful book explores the journey of the Te Motunui Epa carved wooden panels across time, the meanings that have been attached to them, and the cultural continuity they represent. Accessibly written and richly illustrated, the book tells an important story of colonial plunder and cultural restoration that will resonate in other geographical and cultural contexts. The story of the theft and then the repatriation of a set of precious panels, Te Motonui Epa also plays with conventional historical method; it gives voice to the taonga themselves to successfully weave a distinctly Māori approach to writing history alongside oral history and careful documentary analysis. This book is partly a detective story, partly a public history, and also a crime narrative. Most importantly, this book demonstrates a deep engagement with a Te Ao Māori worldview and challenges orthodox views of perspective, voice and the narrative form itself. This book is an exemplar of modern history writing in Aotearoa New Zealand; it is also elegant and sophisticated and a cracking good read.

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Shortlisted authors

Dr Joel Stephen Birnie for My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania

In this powerful work of historical biography, Dr Joel Stephen Birnie weaves together the life stories of his ancestor Tarenootairer and her two daughters, Mary Ann Arthur and Fanny Cochrane Smith, to tell an often painful but continuous Indigenous account of the Tasmanian experience. Tracing the path of colonisation across the full nineteenth century through the lifespans of Tarenootairer and her daughters, Dr Birnie’s book reframes the story of Indigenous Tasmania from a familiar one of colonial destruction to one of cultural survival. Methodologically innovative and profoundly moving, My People’s Songs foregrounds the interlocking stories of three women to reclaim the history of Tasmania through an Indigenous voice.

Professor Frank Bongiorno for Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia

An ambitious and astute political history of post-colonised settler Australia, Dreamers and Schemers offers a large-scale yet wonderfully seamless account of how politics has ‘made’ Australian history, and of how political thought, movements and activism have characterised the Australian experience. Encompassing a long sweep of time, from the colonial era of self-government to the present era of covid-19, Professor Frank Bongiorno skilfully brings into focus a rich and deeply human history of the people, political institutions and often competing social visions that have shaped Australia’s political domain over nearly two centuries. His flair for capturing the diverse voices of leaders, activists and intellectuals and their influence on political culture over time has produced a masterful account of Australian public life, and of the changes and continuities that link the past to the present.

Associate Professor Anna Clark for Making Australian History

This work builds on and extends Associate Professor Anna Clark’s significant contributions to Australian history and historiography by demonstrating how each ‘moment’ in history has a context that can be unpacked, explored and interrogated. Working through a series of historical moments, signalled in key published texts including literary works and visual arts, along with documentary records, Associate Professor Clark offers a fresh history of Australia by showing how history is ‘made’ (and re-made) in practice. Making Australian History is a timely and thoughtful critique of the key themes, debates and tropes that characterise Australian scholarly history. With its innovative and fresh methodological approach, it will find a wide general readership, and particularly with scholars and students of Australian history.

Dr Ned Fletcher for The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi

This is undoubtedly an important and substantial book. An extensively researched work, The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi is sure to become a landmark text in Treaty of Waitangi and international treaty scholarship. Focussing specifically on the English language version of the agreement signed between te iwi Māori and the Crown in February 1840, Dr Fletcher employs a legal historical approach to posit that the Māori and English language versions were not worlds apart in purpose and intent and did not imagine contradictory futures for the Treaty partners. Taking a meticulous forensic approach to exploring the original purpose and intent of the English text, Fletcher maps out in detail the contextual conditions of mid-century colonial relations under which it was produced, its broader influence in the history of Crown dealings with Indigenous peoples, including Māori, and its ongoing meanings for contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand.

Judges

2022

Winners

Dr Lucy Mackintosh for Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

This beautifully produced, absorbing book is a treat to read. Through a combination of evocative prose, clarity of argument and well-chosen images, Dr Lucy Mackintosh delivers immersive deep histories of three Auckland sites and its peoples with care and compassion. Landscapes, the built environment, and other ‘wordless’ records are Mackintosh’s archives. She brings places into life from multiple perspectives, arguing that material and human worlds are agents of history. In Shifting Grounds, Auckland’s landscapes are saturated with power and domination as well as delicate human stories that reveal histories of connection across deep time.

Emeritus Professor Janet McCalman for Vandemonians: The Repressed History of Colonial Victorians

The Vandemonians were the generation of ex-convicts who crossed Bass Strait to lose themselves in Port Phillip and Victoria, seeking to escape their ‘demonised’ past. Emeritus Professor Janet McCalman draws on ‘the paper panopticon’ (the administration of the penal system), digital newspaper archives, court records and the techniques of prosopography and historical demography to weave a tapestry of secret and intimate histories. The convict experience is analysed in the full context of the life-course of individuals, singularly and in a crowd. This lucidly written historical study carries important lessons for our treatment today of the poor, the unwell and the disabled, the unprotected, abused and unloved.

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Shortlisted authors

Professor Bain Attwood for Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People

Empire and the Making of Native Title is a rigorous and conceptually expansive comparative history written with precision and clarity. Focused on Victoria, South Australia and New Zealand, Professor Bain Attwood offers a historiographically robust and archivally rich account of how native title was made through treaty-talk by colonial politicians, humanitarians, the New Zealand Company and later, by historians. In doing so, Attwood poses questions about the role and duty of the historian to the past and to ‘truth’, what he calls its ‘messy complexity’. His answer is a multi-layered comparative approach to illuminate how property rights and sovereignty were dynamic and contested ideas in the colonies and in London.

Dr Lucy Mackintosh for Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

This beautifully produced, absorbing book is a treat to read. Through a combination of evocative prose, clarity of argument and well-chosen images, Dr Lucy Mackintosh delivers immersive deep histories of three Auckland sites and its peoples with care and compassion. Landscapes, the built environment, and other ‘wordless’ records are Mackintosh’s archives. She brings places into life from multiple perspectives, arguing that material and human worlds are agents of history. In Shifting Grounds, Auckland’s landscapesare saturated with power and domination as well as delicate human stories that reveal histories of connection across deep time.

Emeritus Professor Janet McCalman for Vandemonians: The Repressed History of Colonial Victorians

The Vandemonians were the generation of ex-convicts who crossed Bass Strait to lose themselves in Port Phillip and Victoria, seeking to escape their ‘demonised’ past. Emeritus Professor Janet McCalman draws on ‘the paper panopticon’ (the administration of the penal system), digital newspaper archives, court records and the techniques of prosopography and historical demography to weave a tapestry of secret and intimate histories. The convict experience is analysed in the full context of the life-course of individuals, singularly and in a crowd. This lucidly written historical study carries important lessons for our treatment today of the poor, the unwell and the disabled, the unprotected, abused and unloved.

Professor Mark McKenna for Return to Uluru 

Return to Uluru tells the story of the shooting and killing of an Aboriginal man, Yokununna, by a white policeman Bill McKinnon in a cave at Uluru in 1934. Because of where the tragedy unfolded, the narrative becomes a powerful parable about death and redemption in the heart of Australia. McKenna’s brilliant storytelling and delicate exploration of the ethics of cross-cultural research make this a luminous and compelling narrative. His research leads to revelatory conversations with the descendants of both protagonists and to disturbing archival and museum discoveries. Return to Uluru is an exhilarating performance of the historian’s craft, an exposition of what truth-telling might entail in the time of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Professor Henry Reynolds for Truth-telling: History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement

Truth-telling elucidates the full majesty and historical depth of the Uluru Statement and places it in the context of more than two hundred years of history and law. Professor Henry Reynolds draws on his lifetime of pioneering scholarship to expose and examine the denial at the heart of Australia’s foundation. He argues that the choice not to pursue treaty-making in Australia laid the ground for a much more violent frontier. He also directs attention to the second phase of conquest when colonists pushed above the Tropic of Capricorn, observing that this was not a British imperial project but an Australian one, scripted into the identity of the nation. Written with clarity, insight and moral power, Reynolds brings timely perspective and understanding to current debates about constitutional reform.

Judges

2021

Winners

Dr Hirini Kaa for Te Hāhi Mihinare - The Māori Anglican Church

Hirini Kaa has written a compelling book demonstrating the dynamic nature of Indigenous cultures and the agency of colonised peoples. Engagingly and dramatically written, Kaa carries the reader with him as he traces the complexities of Māori history as well as the intricacies of Anglican structure and liturgy. This is insider history – and indeed family history: Hirini Kaa has grown up within the Māori Anglican church, becoming a minister himself. Some of this history concerns the decisions which his father, Hone Kaa, took in his own role as an Anglican clergyman. This allows Hirini Kaa to bring the warm insight of his Māori community knowledge to the book, but he has made the decision to take a meticulous analytical approach to the archival and oral evidence. The result is a convincing study of Māori determination to remake Anglicanism into a faith consistent with the central values of Māori culture, while at the same time exploring new ways to be Māori within the changing political and cultural world of New Zealand today.

This book is enriched by its use of te reo Māori – the written form of Māori language – with Kaa’s insider translations allowing insights into Māori debates and innovations which have seldom been possible in comparable investigations in Australia. No longer can it be assumed that colonial missionaries determined the terms of conversion or the content of the new forms which emerged. Hirini Kaa’s book demands that the agency of colonised peoples is recognised as central to the emergence of new ways to understand faith.

Professor Grace Karskens for People of the River

People of the River is a beautifully written and moving book which offers a very new way to understand the complexities of Dyarrubin. Highly informed as Karskens is about the climate science, hydrology and geology shaping the Hawkesbury and Nepean Rivers, it is the people of these rivers who come most powerfully into view. Karskens rescues from erasure not only the local Aboriginal people  –  and indeed the river itself – but the convict and early emancipist farmers whose presence has so often been denigrated. She writes vividly about the material culture of the past, analysing both the deep time archaeology of the river and the objects of post-settlement working people’s popular spiritual beliefs, like pierced coins and burial grounds.

It is a crucial strength of this book that Karskens’ fundamental assumption in all her writing about Aboriginal people is that they were exercising agency: although undoubtedly mourning losses, they were at every point also making strategic decisions and taking action to survive.

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Shortlisted authors

James Keating for Distant Sisters

This important book not only brings new perspectives to the interactions between Australia and New Zealand in the international arena of women’s suffrage but offers a methodology for comparative transnational analyses. Distant Sisters focuses on the Adelaide and Auckland branches of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) over a period for which there has been little analysis – the decades from the late 1880s to the outbreak of World War One. While Keating challenges more celebratory views of the early Australasian contribution to the international women’s movement, he does so constructively, offering a valuable approach to comparing Australian and New Zealand activism.

This book is important for the attention it gives to ethnocentrism – particularly in the Australian women’s organisation – but evident throughout this early suffrage movement, for which the comparative ‘layered network’ methodology is particularly valuable. Finally, the book is important in its meticulous analyses not only of the correspondence of individual activists, of Branch dynamics and of international conferences but of the women’s advocacy press across all suffrage organisations.

Kama Maclean for British India, White Australia

British India, White Australia brings the important perspective of the whole of Empire to the investigation of Australian history, rather than viewing Australia only as a ‘settler colony’. Despite the erasure of the presence of South Asians from Australian history, there had been significant numbers of Indians present from the very earliest days of British occupation. Kama Maclean’s familiarity with research into and interpretation of images underlie two of the great strengths of the book: first, the investigation of press cartoon imagery, invariably satirical and denigratory about Indians and, second and importantly, an extensive section on the everyday Australian photography of South Asian travelling hawkers in rural areas.

The extensive body of photographs show quite different relationships of familiarity and confidence – even occasionally of trust and friendship. Maclean uses images effectively to demonstrate the diversity of interactions between white Australians and South Asians, whatever the myths. Maclean’s work documents the views expressed within India as well as in Australia and charts the failure of successive Australian governments to respond. Her work offers an important challenge to today’s Australians about the urgency of listening.

Noah Riseman and Shirleene Robinson for Pride in Defence

Pride in Defence is a disturbing and powerful book, showing how conservative institutions work and change – especially those shaped on gendered ideologies in the midst of intense social pressure. It explains the process of change in such institutions which, although separate from their wider societies, are nevertheless regarded as emblematic and admirable. The authors draw meticulously on archival research and extensive oral history interviews with both men and women, officers and troops. Pride in Defence does not see the military as isolated from but as interacting with general culture and politics. So, as homosexuality became more visible and more tolerated in line with the growing public liberalisation during the 1970s-90s, military and political figures insisted that the military had adopted a policy of 'sympathy' and 'discretion'. Yet the result in practice was intensifying repression and stigmatising witch-hunts with demands to ‘name names’, all in the interests of ‘discretion’ or ‘sympathy’.

Change towards a more genuinely supportive policy has been halting and bumpy – led by courageous people inside the institutions. Yet those within the armed forces persisted with their demands for real change. Some of these people have been damaged as they persisted in their calls for respect; some have been damaged irreparably. In bringing their stories to light, Pride in Defence not only explains their tenacious demand for recognition, but it makes a valuable theoretical contribution to oral history methodology. By considering the silences in narratives, the authors are able to explore more deeply both the difficulties of change processes and the pain suffered by the narrators. The book demonstrates effectively the dissonances between documents and memory and draws analyses from what is remembered and what is forgotten or passes unnoticed by some.

Ian Smith for Pākehā Settlements in a Māori World

In this important book, Ian Smith combines his long and intensive involvement in archaeological research with his thoughtful, well-informed historical analyses to bring to life the first decades of interaction between Māori and Pākehā New Zealanders. Crucially, the book is set in the Māori world. Before 1860, Pākehā settlements were few and literally far between – scattered, precarious and struggling to survive. The book challenges the myths about the immediate impact of British settlers, despite the eventual destruction caused by colonial rule. The material evidence from these early decades, brought vividly into view in Smith’s writing and maps and his use of paintings and photographs, shows that Māori and Pākehā interacted and reshaped each other. He demonstrates how archaeology allows us to see how ordinary people lived day to day.

Just as important, the material evidence of the years before 1860 offers us ‘entangled objects’ which speak to the interactions between Māori and Pākehā. Smith brings to life not only daily practices but the relationships which emerged, using both archives and objects to show the shared lives that some Māori and Pākehā lived in marriages or common law partnerships. Smith confirms through the ‘entangled objects’ of the archaeological evidence the recent analyses of historians of gender and emotions like Angela Wanhalla, that such relationships were ‘a combination of love, comfort, politics and pragmatic need’. Ian Smith has brought to readers everywhere a very different basis on which to understand the relationships which underlie New Zealand today.

Judges

2020

Winner

Professor Michelle Arrow for The Seventies: The Personal, The Political and the Making of Modern Australia

In her intensely immediate and relevant history of the 1970s Michelle Arrow brings to light the astonishing politics of a remarkable decade. Using sources such as evidence to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships – an inquiry almost unthinkable in the contemporary political climate – Arrow illuminates how ‘the personal is political’ was a transformative and revolutionary catch-cry in Australian society. Far from nostalgia for an era of collective activism, Arrow reminds us of the achievements of those deeply committed to social change and does not shy away from the deeply painful, difficult and personal divisions of the identity politics of the time.

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Shortlisted authors

Bettina Bradbury for Caroline’s Dilemma: A Colonial Inheritance Saga

Bettina Bradbury brings career-long expertise in nineteenth-century women and the law to bear on Caroline Kearney: a woman about whom almost nothing would have been known had she not been married to a tyrant determined to govern her life from beyond the grave. Caroline’s Dilemma is two stories. One of an English child-immigrant who married a pastoralist, moving between colonies, bearing and raising her children before being widowed and finding herself the subject of dramatic demands laid out in her husband’s will. The second story is that of a historian and her craft in the face of a complete absence of sources produced by Caroline herself, and yet with a story that demanded to be told. The result is a compelling book.

Annabel Cooper for Filming the Colonial Past: The New Zealand Wars on Screen

Annabel Cooper’s wonderfully written and beautifully produced book guides the reader back and forth across time, illustrating deftly how the past remains alive in its re-telling. It is at once a history of a century of producing and watching cinema, television and music videos in New Zealand, a fascinating glimpse into Māori-Pākehā relations in the creative arts, and an illustration of the deep and still-visceral impact of the wars on iwi. A decade in the writing and well worth the wait, Cooper’s book prompts us to take popular culture seriously as a vehicle for history-making and history-knowing.

James Dunk for Bedlam at Botany Bay

It’s the history of New South Wales, but not as we know it. The names are familiar, as are the events – Macarthurs, Wentworths, Blaxland, Bligh, rebellion, inquiries, select committees – but by paying close attention to the ‘strong personalities’, ‘eccentricities’ and ‘unfortunate endings’, Dunk puts us in the mirror house, where all that was familiar now feels strange and illuminating of quite a different colony. This is more than a collective biography, a history of whitefella madness, or the bureaucratic and jurisdictional journey to self-government. Dunk’s book reminds us that there is nothing inevitable about how things turn out: this is a rare feat in history-writing.

Judges

2019

Winner

Billy Griffiths for Deep Time Dreaming

Australian archaeologists have been relatively slow to focus on home soil but Griffiths argues for the urgency of a policy review. The 'slow shift in national consciousness' has been provoked by the continuing assertion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity and the new phenomena of an Australian interest in the subject. Beautifully and evocatively written it encourages the general reader to embrace their country anew.

Shortlisted authors

Roger Blackley for Galleries of Maoriland: Artists, Collectors and the Maori World 1880-1910

Steeped in the knowledge of artistic practice feeding a domestic and imperial market, Blackley's work provides a powerful insight into a disturbing world. While artists and subjects often collaborated, collectors and exhibitors often did the opposite. Blackley's analysis is clear eyed and unromantic; a magnificent account of the era that set the foundation for the major galleries and museums of the modern era.

Judith Brett for The Enigmatic Mr Deakin

In an age when respect for politicians has been shredded by the politicians themselves, this is a compelling book. Deakin is such an unlikely head of state. Kind, learned, erudite, humorous at times and loving, his vision is the thing that carried him through the scrum of political life. Reading his views on Indigenous Australia shows the cruel limitation of that vision but Brett is such a compassionate witness and her prose so beautifully composed that the unfurling ribbon of the story draws the reader into the heart of the drama and an Australian political and social era.

Samia Khatun for Australianama, The South Asian Odyssey in Australia

Highly original, Khatun offers a new basis for storytelling, knowledge and history. Bringing together South Asian and 'Australian' histories in what she terms the 'knowledge relation' Australianama shines a brilliant light on desert, mosque, Aboriginal, South Asian and British peoples. What emerges is a beautifully crafted new stage for historical understanding, fresh actors and a wholly new language of vision.

Rebe Taylor for Into the Heart of Tasmania

Taylor stirred the possum of national conscience with her earlier book, Unearthed, which examined the Australian reluctance to accept anything but a 'settler' history. She writes beautifully and is a great storyteller, something rare in the territory of academic writing. This is a book for everyone, a gentle and lyrical reminder to resurrect curiosity and, maybe, empathy and justice. The book begins with the destruction of a cultural site to build an arguably unnecessary freeway at Launceston. The story then follows the work of two men, Plomley and Westlake, rare Tasmanians who showed an interest in the history of the island prior to the British invasion. The fascinating part of Taylor's book is how the author reveals that even these rare humanists were blinded by their assumed superiority over the subjects they studied. It is a flaw fundamental to Australian scholarship and Taylor’s revelation is a sobering reminder of how the victor writes history.

Judges

  • Professor Charlotte Macdonald, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
  • Bruce Pascoe, award-winning Australian writer, editor and anthologist

2018

Winner

Michael Belgrave for Dancing with the King: The Rise and Fall of the King Country, 1864-1885

After its defeat in the Waikato War in 1864, the Kīngitanga, the Māori King movement, withdrew to the territory that settlers called the King Country. It was a de facto Māori state, and 'opening it up' to settlement was a longstanding goal of the colonial government. Michael Belgrave’s book traces the decades of negotiations between the crown’s agents and the Kīngitanga’s leaders. The extended, sophisticated arguments about land and power over many years are pieced together with insight and sensitivity. Belgrave reconstructs these negotiations from a wealth of source material in English and te reo Māori. The book's immediate sources are accounts of hui and court hearings recorded in official documents and recently digitised local newspapers, but the achievement of Dancing with the King also rests on decades of intimacy with New Zealand history.

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Shortlisted authors

Shaunnagh Dorsett for Juridical Encounters: Māori and the Colonial Courts, 1840-1852

This is an outstanding work of legal history that illuminates the wider process of colonization. Its subject is Māori before the courts in New Zealand’s crown colony period (1840-1852). This is an important period in New Zealand history, and the experiments in legal pluralism that it gave rise to have made this moment in New Zealand history of significance to scholars of law and imperialism generally. Dorsett combines an authoritative grasp of the jurisprudence of jurisdiction with magnificent empirical research. Drawing on resident magistrates’ court records and fragmentary reports of cases in the early superior courts, Dorsett is able to present a comprehensive accounting of Māori appearances before the courts in this period. She uses this evidence to analyze Māori encounters with the colonial legal system, civil as well as criminal, and to make broader arguments about the relative legitimacy of British law and how its usefulness to Māori in certain circumstances helped establish the settler order at a time when the coercive powers of the state were weak.

Paul Irish for Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney

Paul Irish's book is a triumph of historical and archaeological research that brings into relief the enduring Aboriginal communities of the coast in and around Sydney. Hidden in Plain View challenges assumptions that few locally affiliated Aboriginal people continued to live around Sydney’s littoral after the first stages of colonisation, or that if they remained they no longer followed recognisably Aboriginal customs and ways of life. After the effective end of armed Aboriginal resistance in Sydney, Indigenous people continued to develop cross-cultural relationships with European individuals and families on their own terms. Irish vividly evokes the relations between Indigenous people, missionaries, and settlers along the coast, mapping Indigenous people's travels around the Sydney region and through the slums of the city as well as its rivers and beaches and showing how Aboriginal people forged ways of coexisting with the rapidly expanding city over the course of the nineteenth century.

Tim Rowse for Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901

This book's straightforward title is, remarkably, entirely accurate. A book of amazing scope, Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901 examines the place of Indigenous Australians in all the major aspects of the purported 'single field of life' (W. E. H. Stanner's phrase) that the Commonwealth sought to call into being from 1901 onwards. Tim Rowse examines not just policy, but also more or less ordinary people's experiences; he manages to combine informative overviews with arresting interpretations at the same time. This is a synthesis grounded in decades of deep research and a career of voracious, uncompromising reading, but it is much more than a survey. Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901 combines the conceptual and the concrete, and there is a real zest to Rowse's reflections, both on the past, and on present-day history. There is much in it to unsettle. This is a book that everyone working in twentieth-century Australian history should read and reckon with.

Judges

2017

Winner

Tom Griffiths for The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft

This wonderful meditation for historians is a beautifully written homage to the craft of writing history as a discipline and a passion. We are invited to join the author as he visits a selection of his most cherished predecessors and associates, a journey that tells us much about Australian historians and their craft, a community with a vibrant past and future. This book speaks also to anyone who is engaged in history research and who seeks to better understand the interplay of familiarity and otherness that shape the historian’s craft and the mysteries of time. This is a generous and important book.

Shortlisted authors

Barbara Brookes for A History of New Zealand Women

In this splendidly illustrated and lively book, the author brings us a wonderful study of breadth and depth ranging from the famous to unknown. Its pages are filled with new insights into the lives of women in New Zealand and their many histories, skilfully combining an extraordinary range of complexities and interactions among a diversity of women of Indigenous and settler society. With great skill, she draws from feminism, gender studies, racial politics, domestic and affective relationships, medical history and migration to create a richly engaging history that asks us to reflect on how and why social change has occurred, and thus what it will take to continue into the future. Thoroughly researched and richly supported by photographic as well as other archival material, this tour de force is a resource for our times.

Penelope Edmonds for Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings

A moving and intelligent comparative study of settler colonial histories and their present that interrogates the politics of reconciliation shared among them. Through a compelling investigation of Indigenous performances of colonisation, the author uncovers acts of reframing by which key moments in foundational state histories of reconciliation are revealed at their limits. This timely study contrasts state-initiated reconciliation with the ongoing effects and experiences of colonial history performed through imaginative acts of resistance staged by Indigenous communities. Bringing together a range of these performative acts staged, the author draws our attention to the vital role that affective re-enactment can play in reconfiguring foundational settler colonial histories. This book sets a new agenda.

Hannah Robert, Paved with Good Intentions: Terra Nullius, Aboriginal Land Rights and Settler-Colonial Law

This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of the legal and moral history of colonization and alienation of Aboriginal Land. Paved with Good Intentions is a detailed, exceptionally clear analysis of historical discourses surrounding three interconnected themes—law, economics and humanitarianism. Very well structured in argument, this book builds on, yet is critical of, earlier analyses and the result is an engaging and intellectually rigorous study of South Australia and the Port Phillip settlement which challenges the reader to shift their lens regarding Indigenous concepts particularly in relation to land holding. Moreover, the author argues astutely that humanitarianism was part and parcel of the processes of colonisation taking place on the ground, rather than being external or compensatory to its workings.  A wonderful resource for teachers, legal scholars and the general readers alike, this study provides new insight into the abiding contradictions embedded within the settler colonial project in Australia.

Judges

2016

Winner

Stuart Macintyre for Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s

Stuart Macintyre’s account of Australia’s engagement with the prospects of post-war reconstruction through the 1940s is masterful in coverage and assured in the narrative. An account of complex policy formulation and political debates, the book remains driven by a close attention to the personal investments in, and experience of, the profound uncertainties of wartime and unprecedented opportunities to address entrenched social and economic concerns. Rising above the polarity of ‘ideals vs pragmatism’, Macintyre evokes a nation and a diverse corps of people – politicians, officials, business and community leaders, academics, populists among them – that would be tested by those prospects for reform as much as they would embrace or debate them. The central theme of leadership running through this book is treated with admirable subtlety and balance. That approach, in addition to a comprehensive account of the times, will be among the enduring contributions of Australia’s Boldest Experiment.

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Shortlisted authors

Tony Ballantyne for Entanglements of Empire

Entanglements of Empire is a smart, engaging and intelligent new work, which carefully blends New Zealand historical research with new theoretical readings inspired by international scholarship. Pushing disciplinary boundaries, its novel approach in reading the early Missionary-Maori dynamic in a new light makes this book a new spin on an ‘old’ topic. Employing new frames of reference, guided by a focus on spatial interaction and physical embodiment, this book will invite further re-readings of the early colonial encounter period in New Zealand. Elegantly written, grounded in solid primary research, Entanglements of Empire is focused on re-thinking the history of early colonial New Zealand.

Frank Bongiorno for The Eighties: The Decade that Transformed Australia

This is a book of impressive range and judgement, and marks a fresh path for political history in Australia. Bongiorno moves deftly between broad themes of political transformation and an evocation of specific moments, personalities, styles, scandals and symbols. A tight political narrative is illuminated by passages of delicate observation and contrast. While the focus of his account is on the particularities of a decade, Bongiorno draws on a breadth of perspectives to underscore the significance of change and continuity. The synthesis that informs his account encompasses all areas of cultural production, celebrity, sport, sexuality and personal relationships, commentary and consumption, ceremony and emotion, always seeking connecting themes rather than imposing interpretations. This fusion of social, cultural and political history is a distinctively Australian contribution to ‘big histories’ that combine accessibility and scholarship.

Joy Damousi for Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War 

This book makes a vital contribution to re-energising the history of immigration in Australia, insisting on the multiple layers of politics in immigration and resettlement processes. Damousi explores the ways in which the conflicts of World War II not only shadowed the post-war immigration of Greeks but were actively lived long after their arrival. Oral histories are handled with a sensitivity to the gendered and generational dimensions of testimony and memory, and balanced by a fresh analysis of assimilationist advocacy, of the national and international institutional frameworks for Australia’s immigration program, and of the familial and community relationships. ‘Origins’ and ‘destinations’ are kept in a constant dialogue in this account, which also offers critical reflection on issues of historical judgement and method. Memory and Migration highlights the extent to which the trauma arising from displacement, war and political struggle must be incorporated into understandings of Australia as a nation of immigrants.

Julia Martinez and Adrian Vickers, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network

A beautifully written and comprehensively researched new history, this book throws light on the complex and little-known transnational labour networks across and around northern Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arguing that Indonesian-Indigenous labour was critical to the survival of the lucrative pearl industry, The Pearl Frontier traverses cross-national boundaries, showing that the success of the network was premised on solid labour systems, risky endeavour and the constant negotiation of cultural spaces. The book demonstrates that this frontier zone was fluid and dynamic, while challenging assumptions around notions of impermeable labour markets. This approach not only opens up new fields of study, but also ruptures our reliance on constructs like ‘nation’ and invites further re-readings of this porous and fluid encounter zone in a dynamic and under-studied part of Australian history.

Judges

More past winners