2008 Magarey Medal Shortlist
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Sylvia Martin, Ida Leeson: A Life. Not a Blue-Stocking Lady (Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, 2006)
Sylvia Martin's biography brings into relief the rich literary, cultural and intellectual life of the nation through the life of Ida Leeson, and her under-acknowledged role in shaping those traditions. Leeson finds the missing log of Matthew Flinders in the London Shipping Lists, for example, and lobbies for the Angus & Robertson archives to be secured. Writers associated with the library as both staff and readers during her time include Christopher Brennan, Miles Franklin, Nancy Phelan, and Marjorie Barnard, and she was part of the anthroposophical community at Castlecrag started by the Burley-Griffins in the 1930s. During WWII she was part of an extraordinary intellectual coterie that Alfred Conlon brought together in the National Morale Committee, and after the war she left the Mitchell permanently to construct libraries in the South Pacific as part of their social development. Leeson's life attests to the astonishing role of librarians - and bibliographies - in the creation of nations and their histories.
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Darleen Bungey, Arthur Boyd: A Life (Allen & Unwin, 2007)
Known especially for his allegorical works and powerful landscapes, Arthur Boyd was one of the most acclaimed artists of Australia's premier artistic family, the Boyds. Darleen Bungey's beautifully produced biography of Boyd, based on her doctoral research, is a detailed and ultimately moving account of both his life and work. Bungey presents Boyd as deeply committed to his art, and shows his modesty and shyness as concealing a powerful personality. While Arthur Boyd: A Life has attracted some controversy over its claim that Boyd's uncle, the writer Martin Boyd, killed himself, it is nevertheless a powerful, and powerfully imagined, piece of biographical writing, as much an account of a milieu as an individual.
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Helen Bethea Gardner, Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania (Otago University Press, 2006)
Gathering for God is a meticulous biography based on the rich archives produced by Pacific missionary Reverend George Brown (1835-1917) including thirty volumes of journals, correspondence and papers. The attraction of this fine biography, which originated as a doctoral thesis, is the way Gardner interrogates Brown¹s relatively vast and varied archives. Missionaries were once celebrated and revered, but during the twentieth century they were criticized as imperial and later colonial agents of racial subordination and political oppression. Gardner's biography of Brown is neither eulogy nor condemnation. She sets out to understand the contradictions inherent in Brown¹s work. He was 'amongst the most politically engaged of all the missionaries of the period' and Gardner unpicks the public responses his mission
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elicited. She also, and ambitiously, attempts to understand Pacific Island Christianity on its own terms. In the process Gardner contributes to the wider biographical project by examining both the remembering and forgetting of Brown's contribution to Pacific history, wider historiographical trends in religious biography and the politics of artefact and material collection.
Alison Bartlett (UWA) Chair
David McCooey (Deakin)
Melanie Nolan (Victoria U, Wellington)
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2006 Magarey Medal Shortlist
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Cassi Plate, Restless Spirits, Pan Macmillan, 2005
Restless Spirits is a pilot work in an innovative partnership between the University of Sydney and Pan Macmillan to turn a thesis into a book. Reconstructing the life of her nomadic grandfather through treasures from the bottom of his old sea chest, Plate embarks on a journey of her own, travelling across Australia and the Pacific while trying to retrace Adolf's steps and piece together the scattered fragments of his life. Written in an intimate and often whimsical tone, the book evinces an openness to reading a wide range of sources as the archive of her grandfather's life and offers an original perspective on the relation between memory and biography.
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Prue Torney-Parlicki (now Prue Torney), Behind the News: A Biography of Peter Russo, Perth: UWA Press 2005
In Behind the News, Prue Torney draws on exhaustive archival research in Australia and Japan, Torney documents Russo's life with a deft hand, integrating the complex backgrounds of world history, foreign affairs and the Australian media with impressive scholarship, while never losing sight of the main focus of her biography, Russo himself. Particularly significant is her engagement with Russo's experience in Japan and his interpreting of Japan to an often hostile Australian audience. Although the chief emphasis of the biography is on Russo's public career, Torney does not ignore the complicated private self, offering a nuanced and layered portrait of this complex, difficult and fascinating man.
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2005 Inaugural Magarey Medal Shortlist
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Isabel Flick and Heather Goodall, Isabel Flick: The Many Lives of an Extraordinary Aboriginal Woman, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2004.
Isabel Flick: The Many Lives of an Extraordinary Aboriginal Woman is the story of a 'trouble maker' that begins in the riverbank camps of the country town of Collarenebri, traverses the kitchens of Sydney's Rose Bay, the streets of Redfern, and the halls of Parliament House, and ends back in the town of her birth. It tells the story of Isabel Flick's lifelong challenge to the racism of the wider society and to injustice among her own people, and of the wide networks she helped to build within the Aboriginal community and extending beyond it.
The collaboration between Isabel Flick and her co-author Heather Goodall began when Flick asked Goodall to help her research and write her life story by recording her memories and
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editing the transcripts. When she became seriously ill (she died two years later), she passed the task of completing the book to Goodall, who worked closely with Flick's family to fill out the missing years of the recorded autobiography. The result is a remarkably successful synthesis of autobiography, oral history and biography. The life and words of Isabel Flick provide the power of personal testimony to injustice, and the insights and wisdom achieved through a lifelong commitment to social justice, while Heather Goodall deploys transcripts recorded by Flick, oral testimonies of others, and her own narrative to give a complex picture of Isabel Flick and her times in a way that echoes Flick's commitment to community and collective effort. Goodall structures her rich materials and her own narrative to give the story a powerful shape and a thematic coherence, supported by a range of historical devices: a family tree, maps of significant locations, footnotes, an index, and well placed photos. The result is an engrossing 'tale' that has the narrative drive of a novel and the depth of a history.
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Margaret Somerville, Wildflowering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur, St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2004.
Wildflowering: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur is the story of Kathleen McArthur, botanical illustrator and conservationist, a strong personality descended from Irish/Scottish exiles who named places in the history of Australian settlement. It is also the story of the places she loved and fought for: her bush-surrounded house in a street of concrete high-rises in the Queensland beachside town of Caloundra; her wilderness garden and the wallum country at Currimundi where she did her wildflowering; the delicate ecology of Caloundra beach and estuary; the stretch of sand at Cooloola that was the site of her longest and most
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victorious environmental campaign; and the body of water that is the Pumicestone Passage between Caloundra and Bribie Island.
Margaret Somerville tells McArthur's story creatively, threading together the story of the life and the story of its telling, and structuring the storyline according to a widening circle of places significant in McArthur's life. This approach allows her to provide interesting lines of interpretation: that there is a language of landscape that informs what we can see; that McArthur (like all of us) is shaped by her place(s) and (unlike many of us) both shapes them and provides ways for others to see particular landscapes better; that her life and work illustrate the rhythm of dispossession/loss and possible recovery/renewal; and that her connection to landscape (like that of her friends Judith Wright, Nettie Palmer and Kris Plowman) demonstrates an important, feminine, form of connection. The book is not only the story of the life an ordinary woman doing extraordinary things, but also a collection of ideas to ponder and act on.
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Anne Whitehead, Bluestocking in Patagonia: Mary Gilmore's Quest for Love and Utopia at the World's End, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2003; London: Profile Books, 2004 paperback.
Bluestocking in Patagonia tells the story of poet Mary Gilmore's youthful quest for utopia as part of the ill-fated New Australia settlement in Paraguay in 1893, her marriage to shearer Will Gilmore, the birth of their son, Billy, and the family's struggle to survive and get together enough money to return to Australia six years later.
Anne Whitehead gives her story a compelling immediacy by weaving the historical account of Gilmore's life 'at the world's end' with her own present-day travels in Gilmore's footsteps,
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traversing the great Parana River from Buenos Aires to Asuncion, experiencing the isolation and climatic extremes of Colonia Cosme, where the Australian experiment faltered, visiting the desolate estancia in Patagonia where Will Gilmore worked as shearer and Mary, briefly, as governess. Combined with effective use of contemporary and current newspaper and travellers' accounts and interviews with descendants of colonists and employers, this strategy gives depth and richness to this account of six extraordinary and relatively unknown years in the life of one of Australia's iconic figures.
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Page constructed by Carolyn Brewer
Last modified by Carolyn Brewer
4 February 2009 1103
URL:
http://www.theaha.org.au/awards/magarey/shortlist.htm
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