The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards recognise individual excellence and the contribution Australian authors make to the nation’s cultural and intellectual life. This year, the Academy is thrilled to see five Fellows recognised across four categories.
Fiction
Restless Dolly Maunder
Kate Grenville FAHA
Text Publishing
Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors were starting to creak ajar for women. Growing up in a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, Dolly spent her restless life pushing at those doors.
Most women like her have disappeared from view, remembered only in family photo albums as remote figures in impossible clothes, or maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe handed down through the generations. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of these women to life as someone we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.
In this compelling new novel, Kate Grenville uses family memories to imagine her way into the life of her grandmother. This is the story of a woman, working her way through a world of limits and obstacles, who was able—if at a cost—to make a life she could call her own. Her battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who came after.
Kate Grenville FAHA is one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. Her international bestseller The Secret River was awarded local and overseas prizes, has been adapted for the stage and as an acclaimed television miniseries, and is now a much-loved classic. Grenville’s other novels include, The Lieutenant, Dark and the Orange Prize winner The Idea of Perfection.
Her recent non-fiction includes One Life: My Mother’s Story, The Case Against Fragrance and Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters. Her most recent novel is the bestselling A Room Made of Leaves. She has also written three books about the writing process. In 2017 Grenville was awarded the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.
The judges said,
‘Grenville imagines herself into this pain and gives it a voice – a voice that is faithful to the understatement, emotional elision and stoicism of its time, but a voice that also lets in lovely frequencies of humour and irony.’
‘This is a powerful book about an ordinary life, accretive in its power, profoundly open-eyed and steady and moving.’
Non-fiction
A Kind of Confession
Alex Miller FAHA
Allen & Unwin
This selection from his notebooks and letters makes it exhilaratingly evident that Miller has been devoted to finding and telling stories that are profound, substantial and entertaining, stories that capture both intellect and emotion.Miller’s fascinating life is told in a personal, behind-the-scenes exploration of his struggle to become a published writer, his determination, his methods of creative thought and the sources of his inspiration. His writing, sometimes in anger and despair, sometimes with humour and joy, whether created for publication or for private meditation, is alive with ideas, moral choices, commentary, encouragement, criticism and love.
The judges said,
‘He relishes the melodramatic role of being a funny old grump. He is vain and, when not wielding detachment as a shield, easily wounded. If we are being honest, these are, if not essential, overwhelmingly common qualities in a writer. What elevates Confession is the sheer charm of it.’
Children’s fiction
Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country
Violet Wadrill and co-creators Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Leah Leaman, Cecelia Edwards, Cassandra Algy, Briony Barr, Felicity Meakins FAHA FASSA, Gregory Crocetti
Hardie Grant Explore
Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country is a fascinating, illustrated science book that takes kids inside the life of termites through storytelling from the Gurindji People.
Did you know there are four types of termite poo? Or that a warm paste made from termite mound is used to strengthen a Gurindji baby’s body and spirit? Or that spinifex (which termites eat) is one of the strongest plants in the world?
Created as a collaboration between over 30 First Nations and non-Indigenous contributors, the story and artworks explore how termites and their mounds connect different parts of Country, from tiny Gurindji babies and their loving grandmothers, to spiky spinifex plants growing in the hot sun.
Written in traditional Gurindji, Gurindji Kriol and English (with a QR code to an audio version spoken in language), Tamarra is a truly original story with beautiful artwork that takes readers on an educational and cultural journey through Gurindji Country.
Felicity Meakins FAHA FASSA is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Queensland. She is a non-Indigenous field linguist who specialises in the documentation of First Nations languages in northern Australia and the effect of English on these languages. She has worked as a community linguist as well as an academic over the past 20 years, facilitating language revitalisation programs, consulting on Native Title claims and conducting research into First Nations languages. Felicity has compiled a number of dictionaries and grammars, and has written numerous papers on language change in Australia.
Linguist Professor Felicity Meakins FAHA FASSA has worked with the Kalkaringi community for over twenty years. She shares how the children’s book is bridging a surprising generational language gap within the community while sharing culture and healing.
Read about Felicity’s research here.
Australian history
Killing for Country: A Family Story
David Marr FAHA
Black Inc Books
A gripping reckoning with the bloody history of Australia’s frontier wars.
David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result – a soul-searching Australian history.
This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world – of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country – a war still unresolved in today’s Australia.
David Marr FAHA lives in Sydney and broadcasts for the ABC. Over the years he has edited the National Times, written for the Sydney Morning Herald, reported for Four Corners and presented Media Watch. He is a four-time Walkley Award winner for print and television reporting. He has written biographies of Sir Garfield Barwick (1980) and Patrick White (1991) and several studies of Australian politics including Dark Victory with Marian Wilkinson (2003) and Panic (2011). His Quarterly Essays have examined the careers of Kevin Rudd (2010), Tony Abbott (2012) and Cardinal George Pell (2013). His most recent book is Killing for Country, a personal reckoning with the frontier wars.
Bennelong & Phillip: A history unravelled
Kate Fullagar
Simon & Schuster
The first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history – the colonised and coloniser – and a bold and innovative new portrait of both.
Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. T
he pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.Fullagar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire.
To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelong’s world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagar’s approach his and Phillip’s histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.
Kate Fullagar FAHA is professor of history in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University. She is also co-editor of the Australian Historical Association’s journal, History Australia. Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Kate specializes in the history of the eighteenth-century world, particularly the British Empire and the many indigenous societies it encountered. She is the award-winning author of The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (New Haven, 2020) and The Savage Visit (Berkeley, 2012); the editor of The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle, 2012); and co-editor with Michael McDonnell of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Baltimore, 2018). She is Lead Chief Investigator of an ARC Linkage project with the National Portrait Gallery called Facing New Worlds.
