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The Prize for a First Book Of History: Shortlist 2006
Judges
Simon Clews (Convenor), Robyn Annear, Graeme Davison and Clare Wright
Shortlist
| Human RemainsHelen MacDonald
(Melbourne University Publishing)
Human Remains is a remarkable debut. In this spine-chilling dissection of the moral underworld of the Victorian body snatchers, Helen MacDonald offers an elegant, informative and gripping tale of a medical practice that has been all but forgotten. Or has it? Lightly touching on the contemporary relevance of the 19th-century fascination with dissection and bone collecting, and written with historical insight and flair, Human Remains is ethnographic history at its detailed, dramatic and disturbing best. MacDonald imbues the unwitting subjects of the 19th-century dissection trade with a degree of dignity, showing us something meaningful of their lives as well as their after-lives on slab and in the pickling jar. She also anatomises the anatomists - their motives, their vanities and their crimes. She bridges the imaginative gulf between their world and ours, posing disturbing questions about the origins of modern medicine and continuing conflicts over the rights of the dead. MacDonald's consummate skill as a writer and innovation as a researcher combine to produce an extremely satisfying and thought-provoking reading experience. |
| Botany Bay: Where Histories MeetMaria Nugent
(Allen & Unwin)
With Botany Bay, Maria Nugent has made a major contribution to both national and Aboriginal history. In excavating the landscape of Botany Bay, the first meeting place of blacks and whites in eastern Australia, Nugent exposes the deep rifts and continuities that characterised the subsequent history of the site. Complex, subtle and powerfully drawn, Nugent's story of this critical place unfolds in satisfying - and often surprising - layers of meaning and significance. Drawing on sources as diverse as oral history and mute artefacts (monuments, souvenir shell-art, boomerangs), she presents the layered meanings of a place we think we know, and establishes unexpected strands of continuity between the postage-stamp past and the present day. Nugent's great accomplishment has been to offer a fine, balanced view on to a deeply contested landscape. That her eye is sharp and critical, without barracking, assists Nugent in providing a framework for ideas and understanding about Australia's past that will continue to resonate. Written with candour and occasional touches of dry humour, Botany Bay is a model of how imaginative cross-cultural history can contribute to reconciliation. |
| TraumascapesMaria Tumarkin
(Melbourne University Publishing)
Traumascapes is that rare thing: a work by an Australian historian, concerned with Australia's past, that reaches beyond national borders and across time periods to encompass world history in all its messy contortions. In this moving account of her journey to places of violence and suffering - the 'traumascapes' of her title - Maria Tumarkin draws upon the testimony of observers, historians and her own personal experiences to ask: How do we honour the victims of trauma? Tumarkin proves herself a deep thinker and dexterous scholar as she guides us through dark and disturbing places and ideas wrought by traumatic events. Ambitious, original, dripping wet with emotion and intellectual energy, Traumascapes offers a powerful meditation on history, current affairs and the human heart. Written with rare honesty and imagination, this book owes its power not just to the confronting subject matter, but to the rawness of the author's personal response to it. Traumascapes is a satisfying, and apparently effortless, blend of history, memoir, reflection and critical analysis. | |
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