Print-friendly versionFiction Book Award
Brian Castro for The Garden Book
(Giramondo)
Brian Castro's new novel is stunningly original in concept, composition and style. Of imaginative strength, profound insight and complex vision, its prose invokes a wide range of intellectual and emotional responses. The ninth book of this highly awarded author transforms his earlier avant-garde narrative style and structure into a more accessible storytelling that leaves the reader deeply satisfied and intensely moved. Castro's The Garden Book is writing at its best, the truly exciting prose by a master novelist at the peak of his powers, a major contribution to Australian literature.
Robert Drewe for Grace
(Penguin Group)
From stalking to film criticism to detainee riots, from Sydney to the Kimberley to the Southern Highlands, from crocodile-farming to paleoanthropology, this broad, broiling, boisterous novel is a marvellous chronicle of our times. Robert Drewe's Grace takes us on Australian journeys that we recognise are the new ways to see ourselves.
Kate Grenville for The Secret River
(The Text Publishing Company)
Kate Grenville's masterly treatment of our early history both disturbs and enchants. Her evocative and accessible prose is a delight to read and her treatment of our convict past is honest and thorough. With rigorous research and much heart, inspired by her own family history, she has brought to life the characters of our fledgling nation and clearly shown the complicated nature of the clash of cultures that ensued when Europeans first settled Sydney and its environs. The seeds of the destruction of one culture are sown by another seeking new horizons and that tragedy is at the heart of our nationhood. By focussing on the personal history of one family she gives us a universal story and one that still reverberates in contemporary Australia.
Roger McDonald for The Ballad of Desmond Kale
(Random House)
This exceptionally well-written, captivating novel opens up a global perspective on Australian penal history, celebrating (indeed mythologising) the contribution of a rebellious Irish convict to the rural wealth of the Colony and an emerging worldwide trade in wool. The narrative scope and depth of the work are impressive, the breadth of its vision and fictional characterisation powerful and splendid. McDonald's prose is elegant and eminently readable.
Gail Jones for Dreams of Speaking
(Random House)
Gail Jones' book Dreams of Speaking is the story of a young Australian academic who steps out of the complications of her life in Australia by moving to Paris to write a book which examines the 'unremarked beauty of modern things', of telephones, aeroplanes, computer screens and electric lights, of television, cars and underground transportation. The subject of her book is a contrast to the turbulence of her personal life which includes a failed love affair and a sister left behind in Australia who is suffering from breast cancer. In Paris, the void is filled by an unlikely friendship with an elderly Japanese man, Mr Sakomoto, who has survived the Nagasaki bombings who reminds her that modern life is also full of essentially human things. The story weaves through time and space with the central friendship between Alice and Sakomoto creating a framework for consideration of the contrasts between modernity and the human spirit.
Emerging Queensland Author - Manuscript Award
Michele Di Bartolo for The Sicilian Kitchen
The Sicilian Kitchen is an unusual blend of family memoir and recipes that depicts the Sicilian Australian migrant experience from the point of view of the Australian-born second generation. It's a warm and moving story about the author's desire to know her family through its history and food. From her grandmother's account of migrating from Sicily and arriving in post-war Australia to her own journey back to Italy, the author is perceptive and insightful in her descriptions of two cultures colliding. There are also many delightful moments where cultural differences facing migrants provide a humorous flashpoint. The different narrative strands merge through rituals of families cooking, eating together and living through life-altering events. This is a colourful and evocative celebration of Italian culture and migrant life. It has the potential to be a beautifully designed book that is a hybrid of memoir, travel and food.
Karen Foxlee for The Anatomy of Wings
Set in an Australian mining town, The Anatomy of Wings is a compelling novel about family life, grief and growing up. As teenage Beth enters a rebellious phase that ends in tragedy, her ten-year-old sister recounts its devastating effect on their family. The real achievement of this manuscript is its ability to be moving and funny in equal measures. Humour is critical to the success of the story, which could otherwise have been very bleak indeed. The author remains in control of her material at all times and has created a narrative voice that will appeal to adult and young adult readers alike (in a way that is reminiscent of Mark Haddon's bestselling English novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night). She makes astute and amusing use of popular culture references and has created believable and flawed characters who are struggling to make sense of a seemingly preventable family tragedy.
Simon Groth for Here Today
Here Today is a contemporary novel that follows a young occupational therapist as she is doing a locum stint in a Brisbane hospital. Astrid is rootless and restless in her life - unable to commit, unable to settle. Her stint at a new hospital working with palliative care patients brings her into contact with people who are facing the end of their life - a novelist with locked-in syndrome; a war veteran; a Russian migrant. This sharp contrast between people who are facing death, but have lived their lives fully, and Astrid, who is only living a half-life, provides the thematic thrust of the novel. The central narrative is Astrid's story, but it segues at intervals into the life stories of her small group of patients. The real achievement of this manuscript is its vivid characterisation and dialogue. In particular, Astrid's wheelchair-bound friend, Leith provides much of the comic relief in the novel. Her acerbic take on the world and her sharp tongue are a foil for Astrid's more sober and cautious personality. Here Today is an affecting and sometimes comic reflection on life, death and mortality that has an unexpected twist in the ending. Its serious themes are tempered by warmth and humour.
Hamish Sewell for A Quota of Heartbeats
Set mostly in New Zealand, A Quota of Heartbeats follows the strained relationship between a career politician mother and her son. The narrative is told from the dual perspectives of the mother Maddy and her son Liam, as Maddy battles terminal cancer. As Liam returns from Australia to see her, both are faced with their respective memories of the most turbulent and difficult times in their lives. The story has a strong political base as the personal story is told within the wider context of New Zealand political culture and history. The author handles both narrative voices confidently, and is particularly impressive in his handling of the mother's voice. It's an engaging portrait of the complexities of family relationships and how we all find our own way to make sense of it in the end.
Unpublished Indigenous Writer - The David Unaipon Award
Gayle Kennedy for Me, Antman and Fleabag
Me, Antman and Fleabag has a lightness of touch, characters you wanted to know more about and ease of integration and exploration of issues related to Indigeneity and Indigenous experience, are all present - and successfully. Me, Antman and Fleabag offers great humour, often wry, often partnered with interpersonal friction, with an understanding of the ever-presence of violence - real, or implied - in many Indigenous lives, or with a cheerfulness of expletive that many a Koori or Murri would be familiar with. This entry, we feel, would work for all readerships. There's potentially great appeal for all in the sly subversion, or inversion, evidenced in many of the characters and situations.
Jeanine Anne Leane for Dark Secrets: After Dreaming AD 1887 - 1961
This work is a brave in conception, with some "breathtakingly beautiful language", but diminished by inconsistency, repetition and passages of clichéd language and overblown style. The work obsessively mines a small number of inter-related religious, racist and colonial-era, physical and sexual abuse themes. These, in fact, could result in an immensely powerful work once issues of appropriate language - linked to exactness, and the unforced nature, of metaphor employed - general poetic control and consistency in execution of the bold themes are addressed. The work seemed to gain in strength as it progressed and a master class, or similar opportunity for high-level critique and re-working, could result in a more-realised piece that delivered on the promise that, currently, a reader can only glimpse.
Lorraine McGee-Sippel for Hey Mum, What's a Half Caste?
This autobiography was in the words of one: "… a fabulous read". It carries considerable marketing potential in the light of its moving story of a member of the 'stolen generations' searching for, and reconnecting with, her birth family, all told with restraint and polish. Another judge remarked that the story has "… a lot to tell people". It negotiates familial and national glosses on truth, and the less-than-perfect resolution of people negotiating reconnection, through a skilful uncovering of layers.
Barrina South and Aunty June Barker for Life on the Brewarrina Mission
All judges considered Aunty June's story of mission life, a life-shaping experience undergone by a significant section of the Indigenous Australian population, as a culturally- and historically-important recounting. The story - as recorded by a younger, related woman, an Aboriginal academic, as close to verbatim as possible - is socially, geographically and politically contextualised by that academic, Barrina South. The judges believe the story to be simultaneously engaging and insightful, for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. All judges, though, agreed that the work gained substantial impact, however it was, eventually, to be handled, from the juxtaposition of Aunty June's candid retelling and Barrina South's extension of that story. An important part of the work, then, was the integration of contextualising research to promote reader awareness, as was the high-lighting of under-documented, localised protocols, of language insights and clan knowledge, as well as the opportunity to add to national comprehension of a crucial element of Indigenous history.
Non Fiction - The Dymocks Literacy Foundation Award
Neil Chenoweth for Packer's Lunch
(Allen & Unwin)
More than most journalists, business writers seem to recognise that only a book can give coherence to the sagas of business life reported in daily news stories. This is an outstanding example of the genre. Packer's Lunch manages to be a colourful tale that nevertheless analyses events with serious consequences, whose effects were felt way beyond the Sydney scene where larger than life characters played their parts. Power, influence and the pursuit of money are its themes, and the last flourishing of the flamboyant entrepreneur before real financial power passed to the banks. Seldom has research been so entertainingly packaged.
Dr Brenda Niall for Judy Cassab: a portrait
(Allen & Unwin)
Brenda Niall is a previous prize winner and in her biography of the artist Judy Cassab she shows again that she has mastered her art. In Cassab she has the advantage of a subject with a colourful life story, and other authors might have been tempted to include much more detail. Niall knows how to make judicious selections, keeping the reader's attention while still delivering an account that will serve future students of Australian art.
Jacob Rosenberg for East of Time
(Brandl & Schlesinger)
Books which take the Holocaust as their subject are not uncommon entries in this prize, but none the judges have seen can compare with this masterfully written lyrical memoir of a life and lives lost in the ghetto of Lodz, where the author spent his childhood, before being transported to Auschwitz. What astonishes is the humanity that shines through these poignant stories and character sketches of a teeming community, with all their variety, quirkiness and persistent hope.
Craig Sherborne for Hoi Polloi
(Black Inc)
Hoi Polloi stood out from the other childhood memoirs for the comedy and colour of the writing, and the creation of vivid and memorable characters. That the author survived his naively ambitious and absurd parents without psychological scaring is a wonder, that he can write about them with such humour and affection even more so. The story begins in the family run hotel in Heritage, New Zealand, from which his parents take their profits to Sydney, the Big Smoke, where they set out to mix it with the fast crowd around the racetracks. With an observant eye their son chronicles their efforts at social advancement, and give us his own coming of age story.
History Book Award
Richard Bosworth for Mussolini's Italy
(Allen Lane /Penguin Press)
A very impressive scholarship by a historian completely in charge of his material and subject. Bosworth won the QPLA prize for his biography of Mussolini - this work expands the forms to examine not just the regime, or fascism, but how both related to the social experience of Italians between 1920's to 1943. Very ambitious and fully realised: a well-rounded portrait of totalitarian society and how Italians at all levels adapted to its demands and violence. Richly textured stories of individuals and communities adapting to life under the regime, or seeking to manipulate totalitarianism as necessary to survive - without denying the grim realities, Bosworth presents a more humane account of the Italians under their dictator.
Dr Peter Edwards for Arthur Tange: The Last of the Mandarins
(Allen and Unwin)
This remarkable biography manages to work at three levels. It provides a persuasive and detailed account of a dominant and effective bureaucrat, who sat at the top of the public service for 25 years. He was a complex, often difficult, figure; but Edwards paints a multi-layered portrait of a man of action in tough public service positions. Second, the book is an account of many of those foreign affairs and defence dilemmas that faced Australia between 1943 and Tange's retirement in 1979. Edwards is comfortable in his analysis of the great issues from Korea to Vietnam.
Third, and perhaps most impressive of all, he shows an understanding of the role of the permanent head, running the department but always reliant on working with the minister. Even an official as persuasive and dominant as Tange could be pushed aside when the patience of his minister and the prime minister run out. This is the best available account of what it was like to be a senior public servant in the era of mandarins, a time when the public servants were at their most influential, but still served the elected government. This book is beautifully crafted, well presented and clearly written. It is based on voluminous and careful research. Tange has been as fortunate in his biographer as Edwards has been in his subject. The combination provides a fascinating study of public life.
Dr Regina Ganter for Mixed Relations: Asian/Aboriginal Contact in North Australia
(UWA Press)
A superbly produced study of an important but hitherto - elusive subject. This is perhaps the best and most expansive piece of community history written on a Queensland subject: a 'deep history' of Asian-Aboriginal contact on the porous Northern frontier/boarder. It is a politically timely reminder that boarders are always transversable. Ganter's work clarifies the 'view from the North' in Australian history - contact and interchange in economic activity, cultural exchange and tangled family histories, is a basic thread of historical experience and continuity. Her research and interviews demonstrate how basic this process is to any understanding of our northern relations.
Powerful personal stories, family histories and community memories are woven through archival records and conventional historical narrative.
Prof Patricia Jalland for Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia
(UNSW Press)
An important subject, effectively and sensitively handled. A study of death and bereavement in Australian society since 1918, especially the 'culture of silence' which is not easy to pin down and the 'medicalisation' of death. Containing poignant case studies and a great wealth of documentary research, the human stories are very revealing.
Children's Book Award
Chardi Christian for Selkie and the Fisherman
(Hachette Livre Australia)
When a lonely fisherman hides a selkie skin, he learns that he cannot capture love. Only when the fisherman gives back the skin and experiences his own loss, does he find love. A tender re-telling of a classic tale of love and freedom, warmly illustrated by Freya Blackwood, whose character portrayals are a rare mix of innocence and maturity. Simply elegant!
Martine Murray for The Slightly Bruised Glory of Cedar B. Hartley (who can't help flying high and falling in deep)
(Allen & Unwin)
In writing 'The slightly bruised glory of Cedar B. Hartley', Martine Murray plays with language and streams of thought, while her characters learn to play with life's journey and one another.
A refreshingly quirky, funny and profound commentary on what matters to a young teen....and indeed anyone. Cedar B. Hartley dreams of joining the Flying Fruit Fly Circus. She has a tree-shaped, already unusual life...and as the title suggests, can't help flying high and falling in deep.
Narelle Oliver for Home
(Omnibus Books)
About the urban adaptation of wildlife, Narelle's story is artfully crafted; a beautiful picture book about a pair of peregrine falcons who set out to find a new home after fire has scorched their mountain bush land. Narelle's illustrations take the reader on an aerial journey of the falcons, as they soon discover new cliffs (on top of a high-rise building) and hunt new city valleys for food...home again. The mixed-media blend of hand-coloured digital photographs with additional lino-cut rubbings (for the falcons) works to give a sense of place, space, light and movement throughout.
Tohby Riddle for Irving the Magician
(Penguin Group)
'Irving the Magician' is a heartwarming story of a young boy living in an inner-city apartment block, who brings a little magic into otherwise dull lives. One day, Irving asks himself and those he meets in the street below, "where's the magic?" - Irving decides that he is going to be a Magician. But when he performs his first trick for his Aunt and it fails...he is ready to give up. It is when he learns to 'believe' that his show inspires magic in the hearts and lives of his neighbours who come to see 'Irving the Magician' on his Aunt Erma's birthday. The characters are endearing, and the illustrations luminous at the height of Irving's magic. This book's simplicity is an illusion.
Carole Wilkinson for Garden of the Purple Dragon
(Black Dog Books)
A sequel to the award winning 'Dragonkeeper'. Set in Ancient China, Han Dynasty this is a substantial work that creates an absorbing world about a girl named Ping and her vocation as the Imperial Dragonkeeper, but there are some who would rather dragons didn't exist. Will an old man, a boy and a rat come to Ping's aid?
Young Adult Book Award
Catherine Bateson for His Name in Fire
(University of Queensland Press)
Is a verse novel in which country life in 'Abbatoir Town' is warmly and tenderly evoked as a female circus performer's influence on a group of unemployed youths leaves them all changed for the better. Mollie's grief over the loss of her lover Seb is also soothed by her interaction with them. Bateson's skill in this verse novel form has been frequently acclaimed and this work can only add to her considerable reputation.
Ursula Dubosarsky for The Red Shoe
(Allen & Unwin)
Is set in the 1950s against a backdrop of the Australian political controversy known as the Petrov Affair. Dubosarsky demonstrates again in this novel, that her ability to combine character, theme and metaphor in her characteristically dreamlike style is extraordinary. Focussed on the lives of Matilda and her two sisters, this novel explores the pain of growing up but suggests other themes such as Australia's cultural maturation in typically obtuse fashion. In the parallel plots of the public and private events being chronicled here, she offers the reader another tour de force which 'leaks' insights long after the book has been finished.
Julia Lawrinson for Bye, Beautiful
(Penguin Group)
Is a tragic and powerful interrogation of the pain, loss and guilt caused by prejudice, racism and hypocrisy, set in a small WA town in the 1960s. The denouement hits the reader with the force of a physical blow; this novel is an impressive analysis of family and community relations which is tempered by an authorial restraint which makes it all the more powerful.
Kierin Meehan for In the Monkey Forest
(Penguin Group)
This is a thoroughly original and very funny Japanese mystery. Meehan's use of language is delicate and yet assured. Her ability to weave an intersecting web of fantasy and realism is informed by her knowledge of Japanese culture in this intriguing and imaginatively exciting novel.
Scott Westerfeld for Peeps
(Penguin Group)
Is set in NY and is a witty contemporary vampire novel with very gothic undertones. 'Peeps' are those infected by a mysterious disease and one of them, Cal, is sent to hunt down those he has infected. This novel explores the history of parasitism and contagious diseases in a metaphorical plot which is exciting, frightening and uplifting in equal measure. This is a highly entertaining and original novel.
Science Writer - the Department of State Development, Trade and Innovation Award
Brad Collis for Food Crops
(Various print media)
The author provides three articles written for three different journals/newspapers on essentially the same theme - protection of our genetic resources and diversity (in this case plant genetic resources). The three pieces were for "The Bulletin", Country Man and GroundCover. The topic is important and the writing is clear, but most significantly the author modifies his writing to address the different audiences of the different journals/papers. In each case a number of key concepts are most effectively conveyed.
Dr Carole Hungerford for Good Health in the 21st Century
(Scribe)
Carole Hungerford in "Good Health…" aims to help the lay-person assess "scientific evidence" in a range of health areas that affect us all. As she points out " ..there is good science and bad science and for many, a bewildering amount of information in the press and on the Internet". In her book she shows clearly that there is a knack to looking at evidence. In particular she has presented a fundamental problem: why are so many health problems increasing when western medicine and science continues to advance? By going back to the basics of health through good nutrition and other simple remedies, by drawing on anthropology, agriculture and other ecosystems, she has given us some of the answers to the problems. The book is structured, written in a very readable and accessible format and style.
Murray Sayle for Overloading Emoh Ruo: The Rise and Rise of Hydrocarbon Civilisation
(Griffith University & ABC Books)
As Sayle himself claims "I have no solution to offer, not even a course of action to recommend, but rather a compilation of what seems to me relevant. I can claim no prescience. The present piece is the result of a very long, and often confused, journey, geographical and conceptual, made over many years." The author takes us on this journey in a most engaging and, for much of the piece, illuminating way. His historical perspectives on how climate change was viewed by our forbears, key changes in history that impacted on climate and descriptions of earlier scientific views make for excellent reading.
Poetry Collection - Arts Queensland Judith Wright Calanthe Award
John Kinsella for The New Arcadia
(Fremantle Arts Centre Press)
Kinsella demonstrates with his most exciting collection to date, why he is one of Australia's most internationally respected poets. There is an easy familiarity with demanding forms of poetry from earlier ages, alongside the most contemporary and sophisticated structures of thought. The New Arcadia displays both technical virtuosity and a sensual embracing of the landscape and people it dissects so unflinchingly. The smallest insect and a dazzling array of birds have been brought together seamlessly with politics, history, weddings, births, farms and violence - the many possibilities open to a poetic body that takes the world into its blood. Above all, here is a laser-like intelligence and exhilarating testing of the limits of language and invention.
Jennifer Maiden for Friendly Fire
(Giramondo)
This collection is an extension of the kind of poems developed in Maiden's previous collection, Mines, and which she calls in one of the poems of this book, "Cluster poems". They are marked by the way in which different elements coalesce through processes of association. One of the pleasures of reading this distinguished book is the surprise quality of some of the connections: watching the sky-crane helicopters during one of Sydney's Christmas bushfires modulates to an imagined discussion with Elvis Presley, for example. Maiden is able to bring into this web personal experience as well as global political and ethical issues: to be absolutely individual in her outlook and concerns and at the same time to be deeply sane.
Les Murray for The Biplane Houses
(Black Inc)
This is the new collection of a great poet in fine form. Its characteristic tone is light and gracious and there is something satisfying about the fact that so many of the poems concern themselves with air, flight and light. Wooden, verandahed houses also make many appearances and they, like Murray's style, sit lightly on the earth. At the same time these are poems which register the darker side of a world where, as one poem says, "Tears underlie every country".
Jaya Savige for Latecomers
(University Of Queensland Press)
This is a most impressive collection by a young poet, which David Malouf has accurately extolled for its "refinement of language and cadence, allusiveness and wit". Unlike those poets who seem trapped in a safe monotone of introspection, Savige moves easily from the personal and tender to the wider world of nature, city, national myths, the cryptic forms of death, the complexity and richness of Brisbane in the twenty first century. Here is a poet from which much will now be expected.
Australian Short Story Collection - Arts Queensland Steele Rudd Award
Tony Birch for Shadow Boxing
(Scribe)
In this linked collection of stories, Tony Birch resuscitates the social realist tradition, writing not about the between-war period but about the sixties in the battling suburb of Fitzroy. Sensitive to people's often hidden inner lives, the narratives use the focus of a young boy's growth to touch on a variety of social issues and, perhaps more importantly, subtle, broad scale changes that occur in this period. The writing has both an elegance and sensitivity though these always remain understated.
Craig Cormick for A Funny thing Happened at 27 000 Feet.....
(Ginninderra Press)
Craig Cormick's collection of 6 short stories have a superficial sense of playfulness, humour and vivacity - as well as a fertile inventiveness - that seems the most powerful and fitting Australian response to the contemporary age of terror. Certainly, these are not stories that could come from any other country. Although we are thrust almost recklessly into the modern milieu of air hijacks, terrorists and fanaticism, the narrative voice keeps creating a curious counterpoint with the ordinary, the everyday and the strange pathos of the colloquial. Many of the stories are about travel, trippers, people displaced from their normal surroundings. These are stories very much of our world, but it is a world as discomforting as it is recklessly hilarious. It is very frightening. Craig Cormick knows how to twist the knife, and even in the funny bits, we feel the edge.
Michael De Valle for Take a Breath & Hold it
(Ginninderra Press)
Take a Breath and Hold It is a collection of eight, mainly quite short, stories, in which the strains and tensions of suburban life are evoked in a manner of oblique suggestion rather than of telling or finger-pointing. The small details that illuminate larger areas of stress are carefully and succinctly described, leaving the reader to soak up the inference. The range of subject matter is restricted but done with great accuracy and nuance so that one gets inside the ache and the anguish.
Tara June Winch for Swallow the Air
(University Of Queensland Press)
Tara June Winch's Swallow the Air, winner of the 2004 David Unaipon Award for Indigenous Writers, can be read as a episodic novel or as a series of inter-linked short stories. Seemingly semi-autobiographical, the stories cluster around a young woman who, after the death of her mother, travels from the east to the north coast of Australia in search of what's left of her
family. Winch's stories expose the violence and hopelessness that continues to beleaguer some indigenous communities, but they also capture some of the robust vernacular and the humour of the people who live there. There is a sense of pure delight in childhood, despite the shadows everywhere.
Literary or Media Work Advancing Public Debate - The Harry Williams Award
Matthew Carney for The Ice Age
(Four Corners ABC TV)
This ABC TV Four Corners program is a confronting and sometimes provocative documentary about the level of addiction to the drug meth-amphetamine, or "ice", as it is known on our streets. It drew a huge public response when it was broadcast and is now being used as an educational and training tool. Matthew Carney chronicled a world of needles, violence and unpredictable behaviour by living with the addicts in the film and allowing them, largely, to tell their own stories. He argues that although "ice" is attracting more addicts than heroin there are no dedicated treatment programs for the drug, which is already straining health services. This is a powerful contribution about a world most of us never see, presenting a basis for the debate about the way health services and government must inevitably respond.
David Corlett for Following them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers
(Black Inc)
This is a contribution about an important, continuing debate. David Corlett provides a first-hand account of the scale of human suffering and insecurity among asylum seekers Australia sends away, their dignity and humanity often sacrificed after the hum9iliating experience of detention. It calls for radical change to Canberra's present policies and an equally reformist reappraisal within the Australian community of the implications of Australia's system of detention and processing on people's lives after they are deported, sometimes after years within the detention system. Corlett examines the Government's duty of care, its legal and moral obligations to temporary refugees deemed not at risk in a comprehensive examination of what happens to individual asylum-seekers when they are returned home.
Graeme Crowley and Paul Wilson for Who Killed Leanne?
(Zeus Publications)
Fifteen years ago, Brisbane schoolgirl Leanne Holland was found tortured, mutilated and murdered; Graham Stafford, her sister's boyfriend, was convicted and sentenced to a life-term in jail. This book documents a 10-year investigation by former police officer Graeme Crowley and criminologist Paul Wilson in which they conclude it is highly unlikely Stafford could have been the perpetrator. They present material which has encouraged two forensic scientists and a former jury member to cast doubt on Stafford's conviction; they provide accounts leading to an alternative suspect; the book will form the basis of a petition to the Queensland Government to pardon Stafford. This entry has been painstakingly researched but is not well written. It is, however, a compelling demonstration of the way a miscarriage of justice can occur and for this reason alone makes a major contribution to public debate.
Gideon Haigh for Asbestos House
(Scribe)
Gideon Haigh presents a chronicle of company history, personal stories and an analysis of corporate behaviour in his timely study of the biggest contributor to asbestos-related disease in Australia, the manufacturer James Hardie Industries, known for the fibre cement products important to post-war development. Hardie continued to manufacture fibro products well into the'80s, but failed to investigate health dangers of asbestos and met claims of corporate culpability with a series of legal manoeuvres. This well written, well-researched account debates the conflict between a boardroom's defence of its commercial interests and its obligations to the victims of its commercial success.
Murray Sayle for Overloading Emoh Ruo: The Rise and Rise of Hydrocarbon Civilisation
(Griffith University & ABC Books)
This extremely well-written essay in the Griffith Review re-opens the forum on climate change at a significant time in the contemporary public debate by reviewing the history of the world's development and the more recent experience of industrialisation. Sayle brings together climate science, economics, ethics and politics in what he describes as a very long and often confused journey, geographical and conceptual, over many years as proliferating new studies steadily undermined the old certainties of high-school science. In outlining his case for greater recognition of the limits of sustainable life he presents a fresh way of thinking about one of the greatest challenges facing the world and the uncertain road ahead.
Drama Script (Stage) Award
Van Badham for The Gabriels
(Floodtide Theatre Company)
Last year's winner shows she is still in great form, featuring again her confident use of multiple realities and deliberately foregrounded fictions which frame and focus the narrative. It's an intelligent, passionate play on the issues of scientific advance, religious fundamentalism and its relations with science. Set in an isolated English farmhouse for a family reunion over the Easter weekend, the writing produces the articulate and nuanced character-drawing one expects in the bourgeois reunion play. The reversals, revelations and character confrontations are such as would be expected from mature boulevard writers. But of course, this familiar realism is a platform for deeper exploration, not the whole thing. In a 'cartoon' that lies within the play's narrative, drawing out the graphic novel that is being written by one of the principal characters, we are in a fantasy dystopic future run by fascistic Christian fundamentalists. The unexpected outcome is that these two wildly differing styles work together to produce an integrated whole. This is one hell of a good stage dramatist, but this exceptional piece could equally step across into film.
Patrick Carr for Batavia
(Map Theatre Co.)
Though this is an historical drama, it is much better than that genre can sometimes deliver. In fact, this one is a cracker script: a fantasia on the historical mutiny story which draws out contemporary applications without labouring them. The situation of shipwreck, social dissolution and desperation on carceral islands off northern Australia, for example, is left to resonate. Intelligent, strongly structured scene-centred writing, scripted to put us straight into the situation and to let clearly-conceived characters define themselves to us by their words and deeds. Carr's imaginings are of a piece: a fundamentalist theocracy in which property is more valuable than life, and notions of predestination define personal morality and social relations. The play lets the implications of this world-view run to their horrible logical end. These 'lord of the flies' type dystopian texts can be an excuse for a bit of existentialist wallowing in the mire, but Carr's strength of vision never wavers and his horrors have dramatic and thematic point. Carr's is a strong, important dramatic voice.
Patricia Cornelius for Boy Overboard
(Australian Theatre for Young People)
This is one of the year's excellent stage adaptations, this time of a Gleizman novel, and an accomplished piece of theatre writing for young audiences, but will equally work for audiences of any age. It looks at an Afghan family fleeing Taliban ferocity (landmines, execution of women teachers etc) who risk everything to seek refuge in Australia. It then charts what sort of welcome they get in this country. The little girl character is feisty and strong, her young family and friends nicely differentiated, and there is comedy within the fear. Soccer is the universal language which gives the young people hope that their country and their future can improve. It is scripted for fast multiple roles and given the speed this necessitates theatrically, it is spare and confident. The narrative is dramatically sustained and a real page-turner. This is a play that really wants to reach us to show the necessity of hope, and it succeeds.
Noelle Janaczewska for Mrs Petrov's Shoe
(Theatre @ Risk)
This play re-tells the Demidenko/Darville story, and finely done in a script of multiple layerings of narrative voice. The construction is outstanding, moving from the subject 'Ania's' first masquerade of 'Polish' self-representation at the literary award, through her fictional view of her life, to her English suburban youth, her exposure and her renewed self-representations. People may think that Australia is 'over' the Demidenko event now, but this play doesn't come at the Demidenko affair as a crass exposé or a moralising documentary. It employs simplicity and control in the telling, but the lightness and sureness of technical touch should not be confused with insignificance of purpose or achievement. In this play, Janaczewska has crafted a profound and engaging play out of familiar material, using it to create probing questions about ethnicity and self-representation which directly affect all modern citizens, and which are critically important for Australians to hear now. 'Ethnicity' is a story created in an on-going imagining, the play suggests, and while fashions in marginality or romantic identities do notoriously come and go, nobody is 'authentically' more 'Australian' than anybody else. The script shows the playwright's signature level of sophistication in conceptualisation of dramatic style and structure, yet this is an engaging and delightful script which audiences will greatly enjoy whether or not they are up to speed with the details of the events of the mid-90s.
Stephen Sewell for The 3 Furies: Scenes from the Life of Frances Bacon
(Performing Lines)
Sewell, one of Australia's most valuable theatrical voices, surprises us with this one, finding a fresh vehicle for his characteristic, resonnant voice. The theatrical strategies of the script merge dramatic sequences with music and vocals, and this serves his ambitious meta-theatrical bent so well one wishes he'd found the idea before. With the weight of metaphor lifted from the dialogue, the play can expand its resonance by the interplay of various art forms. The play deals with such themes as amour fou and the muse-artist symbiosis, all well-rehearsed material but here presented with freshness, violent energy, erotic focus and lots of dramatic attack, as the growth of the artist vampirises his model/lover. It is to be admired for the fearlessness of the handling of what used to be called gay themes, and the savagery of the class relations which anchor what could just be a love story in the real social world of power. It displays focus and conviction that this is the RIGHT story that this writer needs to tell for now.
Film Script - Pacific Film and Television Commission Award
Tony Ayres for The Home Song Stories
(Big and Little Films Pty Ltd)
This drama of love and catastrophe steps respectfully into the cross-cultural world of Chinese-Australians in the 1970's and brings out one of its remarkable tales. It tells the story of Rose, a beautiful Shanghai nightclub singer, forced by poverty and danger to emigrate to Australia, who must always rely on a man to support her and her two long-suffering young children, and who journeys with them through what seems to them an endless chain of disastrous relationships on her search for the very peace she cannot abide. Rose is a complex, troubled and intensely self-destructive character, surrounded by a range of other strong characters, some of whom try to love her but fall back shocked. This is fine portrait of a woman who despite her many failings never submits, and is never diminished. The success of this script is that while it is set within the Chinese-Australian community and its cultural norms and nuances set many of the patterns that flow through Rose's life, is it not about that at any level. This is simply the sad story of a strong, stubborn, remarkable, wilful woman - a woman of qualities.
Reg Cribb for Last Train to Freo
(Taylor Media Pty Ltd)
Adapted from his own play, this film from the pen of this prolific Western Australian writer is an interesting departure for Australian film. Its theatre origins show in its confined setting on a moving train, and its dialogue-based scripting, but the tension remains and it is palpable. Always an intelligent storyteller, Cribb is unafraid to break rules in form, and the appearance of the Writer in this piece, sitting with them on the train transcribing their claustrophobic and verbally violent conversations, underlines that. This is a dangerous piece of work, and while it is hard not to sympathise with the lead character, it is also clear he is a violent psychopath, and this trip could end very badly indeed for them all. The final twists are not expected, and they are well judged and timed. Stripped of the more intellectual framework of metaphor and relativism that supported it in the theatre, this cuts back to a finely-tuned, brightly savage, nasty little nail-biter for us and for these characters, none of them free of guilt, trapped together on the last train for the night. This film will leave a mark.
Rolf de Heer for Ten Canoes
(Vertigo Productions)
This film marks a miraculous departure for Australian filmmaking. The result of a close collaboration between Rolf de Heer, David Gulpilil and the people of Gulipilil's community, this film is an elegant and mysterious mix of ethnography, ancient storytelling forms, ancient stories, jokes, re-enactments, community-devised situation, traditional canoe-building and hunting technologies, screenwriting, and filmmaking technologies. It is funny, mysterious, dramatic, engaging, entertaining, wise and full of wonder, but it achieves all of this in new ways. It tells a story that is set in ancient times, tribal times, but in turn within that film it tells a teaching story set in the far more ancient mythical past, ancestor time - a love story. It is about wrong love, kidnapping, sorcery, revenge-murder, payback and mistaken identity. The story is told in a mix of English narration, and Ganalbingu language which will be subtitled. The script was devised as much as scripted, and edited as much as written, a true collaborative open-system work, and the result is a classic of world cinema. It is not only a landmark work in itself but it points the way to a future of astonishing possibilities in which Indigenous Australian filmmakers will work together with filmmakers from all other cultures, including those of multi-cultural Australia, to make a new kind of storytelling in cinema. There has never been a film in Australia like this, and it represents a new dawn.
Ana Kokkinos and Andrew Bovell for Book of Revelation
(Wildheart Films)
This arresting, courageous work breaks through the confines of usual Australian screen drama, unflinchingly exploring the dark worlds of imposed power and sado-machocistic sexuality. A male dancer, at the height of his powers, about to launch a powerful new and violently imagined work as the principal performer, is abducted and chained in a warehouse for 12 days, forced to become a sex slave for three masked women who abuse, torture and mutilate him. Finally freed, he rebuilds what remains of his strength and his shattered self-belief, and begins his search for the leader of the trio of torturers, driven by the need for revenge, and his unacknowledged need for the woman herself. This film has generated controversy from the beginning, and it will continue to do so. Directed by the incomparable Ana Kokkinos, this film will resonate through any history of Australian filmmaking as a landmark piece.
Keith Thompson for Clubland
(RB Films)
This vibrant little coming-of-age comedy comes in the Australian tradition of representational, naturalistic drama, but at the centre of the piece stands the mother, a raucous stand-up comedienne who strides like a colossus of bad comedy through the lives of everyone near her, wreaking havoc and devastation wherever she goes, particularly for her long suffering son Tim, her "dresser", confidant and emotional captive. Larger than life is too soft a term for this suburban giant of the kitsch club performance. But poor Tim, cursed by a mother and a father (the could've-been country pop star of the 60's with the one hit) who are embarrassingly entertaining, has other ideas - he is growing up and falling in love, and that is more than inconvenient for his loud and needy mother. This film will delight and entertain, and the mother is a dream role for the right performer.
Ann Turner for Irresistible
(Cascade Films Pty Ltd)
This is a psychological drama that takes us into the nether world of that complex mix of the doubt that always lies within any relationship, and a mother's fears for her children. Sophie slowly becomes convinced she is being stalked. She then comes to believe her husband's beautiful co-worker Mara is working behind and within their life, attempting to steal not only her husband, but also her children and her entire identity. Caught up in this web of betrayals, and the increasing flood of what she sees to be signs, the kind of evidence that drifts like fog between real and imagined, Sophie spirals down, now staking, now being stalked. This is a cunning script, and its twists and turns are delivered with an assurance that is rare in an Australian script. While paying homage to the tradition of the psychological drama, this is in itself a strong work, strongly written, with solidly believable characters. It is a commercial work of substance, and it should work very well at the box office.
Television Script - QUT Creative Industries Award
Richard Dennison for Pioneers of Love
(Orana Films)
This documentary traces the remarkable story of a Russian refugee and an aboriginal woman dealing with the ingrained racist laws and harsh attitudes that were part of life around 1914 in North Queensland. It can stand in the short list for this Award on the strength of its story which, while told competently and directly, is much more remarkable than the writing, though that in itself is well controlled and crafted. The piece ultimately cuts through on the strength of the story, and the manner in which the elements, including the written narrational elements, of the documentary work (or are planned to work) together to tell the story.
Sarah Lambert for The Alice - Episode 14
(Southern Star)
This is another relationship-based series, this time set in the outback, but it cuts a more intelligent, dramatic shape out of that time-worn formula than could ever be expected. There is a genuine feeling for dramatic shape and for character in this piece, with its confident handling of spare dialogue and simple situation which brings a freshness to the handling of the material. The presence of the voices and styles of radio in the context of the story as being told in television add other dramatic dimensions and textures to the piece. The characters are drawn in a direct way, almost downplayed, but thanks to the abilities of this writer there is an undercurrent of narrative magic running through their lives. This episode is a competent, well written piece for the genre on one level, and a surprising, well-crafted, intriguing new approach on the other, smuggled in under the guise of standard Australian TV fare.
Sean Nash for All Saints - Episode 358 "Drawing the Line"
(Network 7)
This episode of this much-loved series covers two self-contained stories. While neither take us by surprise in and of itself, the surprise is that a reality TV show pushes its way into the world of medical emergencies, life-threatening experiences, broken bones, broken hearts, and modest ante-room comedy. Although it sits directly in its shared tradition of high-stakes soap, it achieves a much more ambitious set of narrative objectives, bordering strangely on the post-modern, and so, though it would never have intended to, it comments obliquely on the nature of representation. It is the TV version of a play within a play, but the stakes are much higher than is ever the case in theatre of that kind. The characters are well drawn, the dialogue is strong, the twists and obstructions that lie in the path of the hero's are genuinely concerning, and we never lose our sympathy for these two silly young people who are risking their lives in the show for that million dollar payoff. The Reality TV show presenter is suitably cynical, manipulative and hateful, and our usual weekly hero's end up exactly where we want them - safe, slightly chastened, but full of life and optimism for the coming episode. This piece has good energy, and is handled with real craft.
Fiona Seres for Love My Way - Episode 15
(Southern Star)
This is a well written episode with more depth of character than the other episodes of this series that were submitted to the Awards. This is a series that stands in the tradition of drama for young upwardly mobile urbanites, where audiences of that demographic can see the issues particular to their lives and loves played out. In that form the series does its job well to map this frenzied, frenetic, funny but often despairing world of the young heart, but this piece takes a step beyond. Because of this writer's ability, it finds a way through, despite the formulaic demands of the series outline and structure and through house style, to a subtle sharpening and intensified colouring of the characters that is all the writer's own work.
Katherine Thomson for Unfolding Florence
(Film Australia/Becker Entertainment)
This piece is a semi-dramatised documentary on the life and loves of Florence Broadhurst. Through extensive research the writer has unearthed a very wide range of materials in audio, written and filmic forms from which she has been able to draw the full, (and it is a very full) expansive and driven character of an extraordinary woman who lived an extraordinary life of celebrity, controversy, and great achievement, but which ended in her tragic murder. The dramaticised and monologised elements of the script which have Florence telling her own life and asserting her opinions are particularly vivid and fine. They capture exactly the character of the woman we have seen and heard in real life. In addition to this, the writer has excelled herself by her careful selection from the wide choice of materials she had at her disposal. By any measure, this is an outstanding piece of narrative television writing.