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Entry Details 2010   |   Winners of the Magarey Medal   |   Shortlisted Authors


The – first – Magarey Medal is the oldest individual award in Australian football.

It began casually. William Ashley Magarey (1868-1929), a lawyer, interstate cricketer, prize-winning boxer, known to his cousins as 'Beautiful Bill' because he was remarkably handsome, was also president of the South Australian Football League. During the 1890s, Australian Rules football was, it is said, a pretty rough game. Bill thought to clean it up by awarding a medal for the 'fairest and most brilliant player' in the association, as judged by the field umpires. He made the first award in 1898, and continued to do so towards the end of each season each year—with gaps in 1900, 1904, and 1916–18 and 1942–4—until he died. At that time his wife, the singer Gulielma Hack (1868–1951), formalised the arrangement. The Magarey Medal was first awarded publicly in the year of Bill's death.

William Ashley Magarey was not the grandson of Thomas Magarey, as is announced in both the Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. II, and A Biographical Register 1788-1939, compiled and edited by H.J. Gibney and Ann Smith. Thomas was his great-uncle. Beautiful Bill was the grandson of Thomas's brother, James, who perished in the wreck of the Admella on the Carpenter Rocks off the far south coast of South Australia in August 1859.

I am not descended from Beautiful Bill. Rather, if I have worked out the family trees accurately, I am his first cousin four times removed. I have spent the greater part of my life in South Australia where, every year, my family name appears on the front page of the Adelaide Advertiser coupled with a great deal of excitement, hype, sweat and testosterone. I have not been absolutely thrilled with the exclusivity of this association, and now seek to balance it.

My own concerns have been principally with research and scholarship, in particular with biography (my biography of Catherine Helen Spence won a prize in 1986), and with promoting publication of feminist research in the journal which I founded and edited for its first twenty years, Australian Feminist Studies. Accordingly, I wish to establish a— second—Magarey Medal. This one is to be for the best work of biography written by a woman during the
previous two years, awarded every second year. The first award is to be made in 2005.

The second Magarey Medal, for Biography, is then a prize that will be awarded to a scholarly woman. I hope that it will balance the Magarey Medal for Football, a prize for a sporting man.
Susan Magarey
June, 2004



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