2008 W.K. Hancock Prize Shortlist
The Australian Historical Association is pleased to announce the shortlist for the W.K. Hancock Prize. A total of 32 entries were received. The quality of the field led the judges to make a fairly long shortlist. They commented:
The books submitted this year included several highly impressive pieces of work, and the shortlist selected by the judges is perhaps longer than usual. Moreover, besides the winner, one other book seemed to be worthy of special mention, as 'highly commended'. Exploration of the moral complexity of Australian race relations drives some of the best works, and as whole the books submitted make a very substantial contribution to current historical understanding.
Included in the shortlist, in alphabetical order are:
Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
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This book examines the Pacific islander labour trade and islanders' experience in Queensland between the 1860s and the first years of the twentieth century. It focuses especially on the question of violence, and it makes very thorough and scholarly use of original sources in the area, including some not hitherto used, in exploring the significance of violence for the larger processes of colonisation. It shows excellent understanding and control of theory in building upon existing scholarship.
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Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937
(Lincoln; University of Nebraska Press, 2006)
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This is a splendid comparative history, looking at marriages between white women and indigenous men in Australia and in the United States. Finely written, it is a highly original and at the same time sensitive work, and it makes an important contribution to the burgeoning international scholarship on 'the intimate face of colonialism'. Its focus on inter-racial marriages provides new insights particularly into the adoption of 'biological absorption' as a solution to the 'Aboriginal' or 'Indian problem', and thus to understandings of the broader project of Indigenous assimilation.
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Melissa Harper, The Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia
(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007)
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This is a beautifully written and produced book about the history of bushwalking in Australia, from experiences of walking for leisure during the early colonial period to contemporary bushwalking culture. Harper's wide definition of her subject and the ease with which the argument moves from one period to the next pose large and intriguing questions about the engagement of European Australians with the rural landscape. Bushwalking is vividly located within the broader processes of European claiming and conquest, militarism and the cults of nature and the body, and, in the end, the mastery of nature emblematic of western imperialism and of Australian national identity.
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Robert Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathaniel Pepper and the Ruptured World
(Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2007)
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This book tells the story of Nathaniel Pepper, a man of the Wotjobaluk people in the Wimmera, north-western Victoria, who was baptised in 1860 by Moravian missionaries. Pepper's celebrity as a successful convert and evangelist, at a time when the Aboriginal people were beginning to be seen as a race providentially doomed to extinction, is a leading theme throughout. The deeply-rooted antiquity of European ideas is frequently explored, but so too is the Aboriginal world-view, and the "wrench in the sky" caused by confrontation between old and new Aboriginal understandings.
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Barbara J. Keys, Globalizing Sport: National Rivalry and the International Community in the 1930s
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)
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This book examines the rise of international sport and its impact on international relations in the 1930s, focussing on 'the intersection of the national and the transnational in the realm of sport culture.' It provides a fascinating account of the Olympic movement, of the new global hegemony of sport and its operation as a political arena, and it shows how sport might be understood as a vehicle for cultural imperialism and assertions of western civilisation on the one hand and as a site of resistance on the other. It provides a compelling argument for viewing sport as central to developing national identities.
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Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
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This book argues that during the Revolutionary period of the 1770s and '80s white Virginians were at much at war with each other as they were with Britain. Analysing the story of wartime mobilisation, it ventures into the hitherto inaccessible worlds of the non-elite, including slaves, proving in meticulous detail their impact on the unfolding Revolutionary drama. The Revolution thus appears as 'messy' and 'divisive', and the conventional story of unity behind the cause is vividly undermined. Assiduously researched and lucidly written, it provides powerful new insights into a significant arena of United States historiography.
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Peta Stephenson, The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia's Indigenous-Asian Story
(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2007)
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This book is an important contribution to new work on the history of northern Australia. It contains a very useful account of current understandings of mixed-race ancestry and of the legacies of Australia's racially exclusionary policies. It delves into a little-known aspect of national history with great skill and sensitivity, and so makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of Australian race relations and of the continent's connection with Asia. It is well written and methodologically impressive in its use of personal narratives, art and performance, thereby revealing as much about 'mainstream' attitudes as it does about those with a long history of marginalisation.
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2006 W.K. Hancock Prize Shortlist
Maria Nugent, Botany Bay: Where Histories Meet
(Allen & Unwin, 2005)
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In this intriguing and innovative account of Botany Bay, Maria Nugent explores the stories that people tell about this site, its history and commemoration. Above all, she demonstrates that these stories matter.
Nugent's account extends well beyond the act of recognising and collecting the multiple stories associated with Botany Bay. The importance of this volume derives from her exploration of the complex interactions between individual stories of this site, and the importance of meaning-making, especially for local Indigenous people for whom Botany Bay was and is home. The book demonstrates the power of some stories to exclude and ignore Indigenous Australians and the capacity of Indigenous story-telling to reclaim and re-interpret the site. It engages with and extends our understanding of the history of Australian race relations, linking local Aboriginal histories with national and colonial accounts of one of non-Indigenous
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Australia's most symbolic places. Of particular value is Nugent's analysis of the indigenous interpretation of artefacts that derive from the processes of dispossession.
Botany Bay reminds us that, as Nugent remarks, 'the past ... is the stuff of conversations of considerable import.'
Tony Roberts, Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900,
UQP, 2005
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Underpinned by meticulous research and informed by the author's awareness that he is analysing 'a momentous time' in both Aboriginal and Australian history, Frontier Justice traces the history of the Gulf country from the first contacts between the Indigenous occupants and European incomers to 1900.
Tony Roberts has constructed a detailed and evocative account of 'the most colourful and lawless part of Australia's last frontier', based on extensive archival research, accounts from participants and the families of participants, and his own familiarity with the region. The power of this book derives from its comprehensiveness and balance. The author has identified a 'catalogue of killings' that includes fifty-three incidents on the Northern Territory side of the border in which there were multiple Aboriginal deaths. While this litany of horror is central to Roberts' account, the author also recognises the presence of non-combatants, the hardships
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experienced by Europeans as they claimed the Gulf country, and variations in the actions and beliefs of individuals within those groups who imposed, witnessed and suffered from frontier justice.
Roberts' compelling account of the Gulf Country is a significant contribution to the history of northern Australia and the history of Australian race relations.
Sue Taffe, Black and White Together,
FCAATSI 1958-1972, UQP, 2005
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In the preface to Black and White Together, author Sue Taffe comments that 'Myth and silence characterised the FCAATSI I came to know through interviews. The history which follows seeks to understand both while also shedding some light on the reasons for the mythologising or silencing'. Taffe has succeeded admirably in her aim, offering a thoughtful analysis of the organisation, its creation, its campaigns, and its decline.
The strengths of this book derive from the author's impressive depth of research and analysis. Drawing on a wealth of sources including interviews and public and private collections, Taffe consistently demonstrates her determination to truly understand her subject. At no point in the book does she settle for the easy or superficial explanation. The quality of her analysis is especially apparent in her exploration of the Federal Council's demise. The result is a nuanced account which effectively combines the external context in which FCAATSI operated with the organisation's internal dynamics.
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This is a genuinely national account of an organisation whose Indigenous and non-Indigenous members came from across Australia. Taffe has extended our understanding of the anti-racist civil rights movement in Australia and our appreciation of the possibilities and difficulties inherent in multiracial coalitions.
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2002 W.K. Hancock Prize Shortlist
The AHA is pleased to announce the shortlist of the prestigious W.K. Hancock Prize 2002.
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Christine Choo, Mission Girls: Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900–1950, UWA Press, 2001
- Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-class Masculinity 1870–1920., MUP, 2001
- Jan Gothard, Blue China. Single Female Migration to Colonial Australia, MUP, 2001
- Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Paper Nation: The Story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia 1886–1888, MUP, 2001
- Prue Torney-Parlicki, Somewhere in Asia: War, Journalism and Australia's Neighbours 1941–75, UNSW Press, 2000
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Page constructed by Carolyn Brewer
Last modified by Carolyn Brewer
4 February 2009 1104
URL:
http://www.theaha.org.au/awards/hancock/shortlist.htm
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