Magarey Medal for Biography

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 )

 

Most generously donated by Adjunct Professor Susan Magarey, the Magarey Medal for Biography is awarded to the female person who has published the work judged to be the best biographical writing on an Australian subject. The awarding of the prize is administered and judged by a panel established by the Australian Historical Association and the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Award: $10,000 in the first year and thereafter indexed to inflation. The Prize will be presented at the conference of Australian Historical Association or the Association for the Study of Australian Literature in alternate years. If two winners are chosen, the cash prize will be shared between them.

Eligibility: Nominations are invited for a published biography in the form of a book on an Australian subject published in 2010 or 2011 by a female author. Nominations may be made either by the author or, with the nominee's permission, by the book's publishers or by any member of the Australian Historical Association or the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Send entries to Magarey Medal for Biography c/o- History Australia, University of Sydney, NSW 2006 by 1 December 2011.

Entries must be accompanied by a letter of nomination, giving author's full name and postal address (where applicable, institutional address preferred). Nominations should be sent with three (3) copies of the nominated book. Note that books will not be returned.