The Prize for Indigenous Writing: Judges 2006

Marcia Langton is one of Australia's leading authorities on contemporary social issues in Aboriginal affairs. She was appointed Foundation Professor of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne in 2000, after five years as Professor at Charles Darwin University. She has many years experience working as an anthropologist in Indigenous affairs with land councils, the Queensland government, commissions, and universities. Marcia has been a member of the Centre for Aboriginal Reconciliation, serving on the Legal and Cultural Issues Sub-Committee, was Director of the Centre for Indigenous Natural and Cultural Resource Management, and has acted as a consultant to the Northern Land Council and the Australian Film Commission.

Marcia's work in anthropology and the advocacy of Aboriginal rights was recognised in 1993 when she was made a member of the Order of Australia. She was named joint winner (with Larissa Behrendt) of the inaugural Neville Bonner Award for Indigenous Teacher of the Year in 2002, and became a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2001. She has published extensively on Aboriginal affairs issues including land rights, resource management, social impacts of development, indigenous disputes, policing and substance abuse, and gender and identity. Marcia was joint winner (with Malcolm Fraser and Robert Manne) of the inaugural Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate in 2001.

Meme McDonald grew up in south-west Queensland on a sheep and cattle property. After boarding school and a year on a scholarship in New York, Meme co-founded West Theatre, one of Australia’s first professional community theatre groups. Her first book, Put Your Whole Self In (1992), was inspired by the stories of older women at the Melbourne City Baths. It is indicative of the way in which she works collaboratively. She is the author of eight books, five of them in collaboration with Boori Monty Pryor. Njunjul the Sun won the young Adult Fiction Prize in the 2002 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Philip Morrissey is an Aboriginal writer, critic, and social commentator who teaches at the University of Melbourne. He is currently at work on a major work of narrative non-fiction, Battle Mountain. The work is about one of the most tragic episodes in Australian history, the September 1884 final encounter between the warriors of the Aboriginal Kalkatunga tribe and a contingent of soldiers and white settlers at a site near the town of Cloncurry in western Queensland.