Winners - 2005 Queensland Premier's Literary Awards

Tim Winton for The Turning
(Pan Macmillan Australia)

With this masterful discontinuous narrative Tim Winton stakes a claim as the most elegant and insightful novelist in Australia today.

The writing is simple, yet powerful exploring a world that is essentially local yet rendered universal by Winton, who has rejuvenated his prose with a welcome return to short fiction.  This collection has the cohesive feel of a novel, as the stories are interrelated and capture the everyday struggles of the characters in moments of brutality as well as beauty.  Invoking the lives of battling coastal dwellers he lends their striving dignity, passion and the hidden promise of redemption in these moving and always entertaining stories.

The judges unanimously agreed that this book stood out as the most convincing achievement of the year and feel it is destined to become regarded as an Australian classic.                                 

Patrick Holland for The Long Road of the Junkmailer

(pictured, far left, celebrating with his family at the 2005 Awards)                                 

Of this year's entries, The Long Road of the Junkmailer exhibited the greatest originality of storytelling and execution.  It is vivid, adventurous and intelligent, as well as witty, sad and magical.  It features a cast of whimsical, eccentric street and circus characters, and shows a mastery of style and imaginative flair that distinguished it from all other 2005 entries in this manuscript category. 

This manuscript is a work of fiction that follows an extraordinary day in the life of a junkmailer on the streets of Brisbane.  It draws from the storytelling tradition of magical realism, with our central character on a quest to find a circus girl with whom he is smitten and to complete his delivery quota of junk mail.  As we follow our young junkmailer on his bizarre journey, the reader is also taken on a journey of vivid imagination and literary playfulness.

The Long Road of the Junkmailer defies easy description as it challenges the boundaries of narrative and stylistic convention.  Its language is rich and distinctive.

Yvette Holt for Anonymous Premonition
(pictured accepting the David Unaipon Award at the 2005 Awards ceremony)                                   

From its first line, Anonymous Premonition heralds a heartfelt and candid collection of verse.  Exploring the personal as well as meditations on social justice issues, Holt engages the reader by virtue of conveying compassion and insight to her subject matter.  A thought-provoking compilation. 

Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon for Papunya - A Place Made After the Story
(Melbourne University Publishing)

This is a touchstone in Australian art history, and an extraordinary publication from The Miegunyah Press, funded by special bequest.  This book is dedicated to the artists of the Western Desert who worked with the late Geoffrey Bardon and founded the Western Desert Painting Movement at Papunya in the early 1970s.

The many reproductions in the book do full justice to the wonderful paintings that emerged from Papunya in these early years, and Geoffrey Bardon's photographs, sketches and autobiographical story bring the artists and their work to life.  Papunya is not only a standard reference for all art historians in Australia and overseas, it is a book about how magic happens.

Shane White and Graham White for The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons and Speech
(Beacon Press)                                  

This book is breath-taking.  A history told in sound is an exciting concept, brilliantly executed.
This is a brave book.  It is extraordinarily effective in its ingenuity and brevity.  The work presents a massive amount of conceptual thinking and innovative research condensed into a book which is exciting to read. Overall, it is a superb and poignant treatment of a tactile and engaging historical topic.

The massive research underpins a simple and direct analysis.  This is one of the most vivid works of history to appear in recent times.  Cultural history has been gradually shedding its 'anthropological' pretensions, and this book exemplifies how accessible good cultural history can be to general readers.  It is very well-produced, with an accompanying CD.

Prue Mason for Camel Rider
(Penguin Books Australia)

Language and culture unite when two boys, outside their different homelands, find themselves in an alien and at times hostile desert environment.

Prue Mason's book is an immediately engaging tale written from alternating character points of view.  Seamlessly crafted, the justaposed worlds of the two boys build and sustain the dramatic pace.  Camel Rider is a heart-warming and timely story of friendship and survival against the odds.

Joanne Horniman for Secret Scribbled Notebooks
(Allen & Unwin)

Horniman's writing is always deliciously sensuous and suggestive. Here the style alternates between Kate's private notebooks in which she records a variety of impressions of her life. Her red book contains her personal feelings the yellow (written in third person) features her 'alter ego' a sophisticate in the city living a life of 'cool' style; her blue book is her 'memory book' in which she intends to record her lost life as a child. When the painful memory of her father is too troubling the blue book becomes 'obsolete' and in 'the wild typewritten pages' she links all these impressions of herself together in the narrative of her life.

Littered with quotes from music and literature and with lists written in Horniman's cryptic, witty and playful style, this is imbued with Kerouac's motto to 'be in love with your life.' The journey of this engaging heroine, Kate, is testament to that advice.

Elizabeth Finkel for Stem Cells
(ABC Books)

A well-researched and well-written book on a topic of great contemporary interest. The science is explained clearly and interwoven with both personal and political stories. The style is breezy. The book commands attention but does not become ponderous. It was a clear winner.

Sarah Day for The Ship
(Brandl & Schlesinger)

John Clanchy for Vincenzo's Garden
(University of Queensland Press

This is an outstanding collection of stories, sensitively written, unified in its concerns and having a powerful cumulative effect.  Most of the stories work by introducing characters who are at crucial turning points in their emotional lives and the complexities of their situations are only slowly made clear to the reader through the twists and turns of the mainly retrospective narrative. The long introductory story, 'Late Cruising', is the best example of this method, continually shifting the reader's knowledge to force re-evaluations of the protagonist's situation.

Hedley Thomas for Sickness in the System
(Queensland Newspapers)
(pictured accepting the Harry Williams Award from Premier Peter Beattie)

Journalist Hedley Thomas's work firmly establishes his role in the controversial public debate on the Queensland health system and the work of an overseas-trained doctor Jayant Patel. His key contribution was publication of an Internet search which showed Dr Patel had been found guilty of gross negligence in the US and forced to hand in his practising licence less than two years before being admitted to practice in Queensland. The ensuing public debate has led to a Royal Commission, an independent review and a government undertaking for sweeping reforms to the health system.  The repercussions have become part of a widening health debate with national ramifications. Sickness in the System won by the narrowest of margins in a highly competitive field.                                        

Jacquelin Perske for Little Fish
(Porchlight Films)
(pictured - Noni Hazlehurst accepting on behalf of Jacquelin Perske the Film Script Award)

A finely written cross-cultural love story set in a genre world of drugs and the criminal underworld but superbly translated into the contemporary Australian setting of Cabramatta. This script is well constructed, and pacey, driving us on through the complex relationships within the writer's created world to a meditative, exhausted resolution, nicely balancing the tensions that have played out in the story. We see inside the web of circumstance, deal, counter-deal and betrayal that binds the Vietnamese and Anglo underworlds, and we can sympathise with the main character whose fierce goal in life is to stay straight and keep out of those worlds and to set up her own business, against all the odds.                                           

Sue Smith for RAN: Remote Area Nurse - Episode 5 - Blue Hawaii
(Chapman Pictures Pty Ltd)
(pictured, far left)

Superbly written episode of the series RAN. The writer displays a strong sense of story and structure while giving her characters a distinct voice. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is the world the writer creates, which is an intimate and fascinating view of life in the far away regions of Australia.  Further, the writer deftly points and counterpoints the emotional see-sawing with the skill of a prize fighter.                                     

Van Badham for Black Hands/Dead Section
(LAMDA Company)
(pictured, accepting the Drama Script (Stage) Award via video at the Awards ceremony, September 2005)

Outstanding writing, with an epic range, a complexity of vision, and a balance of mood and emotion, all of which is brought into service to directly confront a fiercely difficult subject, terrorism. Its theme is the Baader-Meinhof gang of the 1970s in Germany.

After a brief prologue, no further overt connection is made to present day terrorist concerns, but the relevance to today is clear without further pressure. A large cast of characters depicts the career of the 'gang' members, charting their moves from legal protest to acts of terrorism, and the matching escalation of repressive state response. The script's achievement is to perfectly balance audience sympathy and horror at the fate and actions of the activists, so that even at their darkest our understanding is not alienated.

At last, a voice pushing our theatre out of the drawing room smallness of recent plays and tackling the great themes.  Brecht without the didacticism.