The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction: Shortlist 2003

Judges report

The judging panel was impressed by the number of high quality entrants in this year's non-fiction award. Many works entered represent long-term projects, which reveal an intrinsic love or fascination for the chosen subject matter. The judges feel that the society as a whole is greatly strengthened by these always ultimately collaborative but often lonely and arduous efforts of research and exposition. Biography, relations between Black and White Australia, issues of racial conflict and cohesion more generally, military history, and works exploring or taking as their starting point, family history, are obvious strengths of the field. There is also a pleasing wariness toward schematic interpretation and an embracing of imaginative forms of narration.

The three books shortlisted represent major achievements and were selected unanimously. Each work sheds new light on subject-matter of the highest importance. The authors draw on an impressive body of knowledge and analysis and convey their findings in an evocative and memorable way.

The judges also felt it necessary to give special commendation to two works which, though they couldn't be included in the final shortlist, are for different reasons of great importance and demand public acknowledgement. They are: Venice-Fragile City by Margaret Plant (Yale University Press) and Dark Victory by David Marr and Marian Wilkinson (Allen and Unwin).

Two hundred years of Venetian history unfold in Margaret Plant's remarkable book. It touches every aspect of the city: history and politics, art and architecture, literature and film, music and theatre, town planning and tourism. Plant begins her story in 1797 when Napoleon conquered the republic and took the winged lion of St Mark to Paris as a trophy. Since then Venice has survived precariously, threatened by floods, suffocated by tourism and pollution. Plant also evokes the Venice of the mind: the city shaped by visitors from Ruskin and Henry James to Peggy Guggenheim, Madonna and Pink Floyd. Venice-Fragile City is a magnificent feat of scholarship, lovingly and meticulously researched, and the quality of Plant's elegant prose is matched by the superb production work of Yale University Press.

Dark Victory is a compelling work of contemporary history, brilliantly weaving together the testimonies of refugees, policymakers, navy personnel and other observers. The authors reveal significant new aspects of the government's refugee policies and the events, which divided Australia. Using the techniques of the journalist and the historian they provide a coherent and convincing account of the Howard government's 2001 election strategy in an international setting.

Shortlist

Seven Versions of an Australian Badland by Ross Gibson (University of Queensland Press)
Ross Gibson's Seven Versions of an Australian Badland is profoundly accomplished and original. In it, the author examines the Central Queensland hinterland 'known in popular legend as "the Horror Stretch"'. Moving effortlessly between historical and present accounts of this blood-soaked place, he traverses its murder mysteries, mythology and genocide. Gibson plumbs the rich depths of Australian Studies, Place philosophy and Aboriginal history to construct a book that is both spirited and spiritual, compelling and meditative. Yet the scholarship of Badland is worn lightly. Taut and evocative, poetic and accessible: a testament to the value of economy in writing.

Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession by Barry Hill (Knopf/Random House)
Barry Hill presents the life of this key figure in the history of Aboriginal-European relations with enormous insight and compassion. While recognising the essentially tragic character of Strehlow's career, Hill treats his life and work with sympathy, carefully probing the relationship between these two spheres. The book mounts a persuasive argument for the importance of language in the history of Black-White relations in Australia, and is itself a daring, metaphoric and suggestive piece of writing, teeming with intellectual, cultural and religious incidents and ideas, richly depicting life in Adelaide and around Alice Springs during a period in which government policies, community attitudes and anthropological theory and practice were undergoing great change.

Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: A Portrait of Paul Keating, PM by Don Watson (Knopf/Random House)
A classic insider's tale of contemporary politics, this is a sensitive and insightful biography, a richly allusive social history and an important contribution to the understanding of democracy in the age of free-markets, technically specialised bureaucracy and professional handlers of 'spin'. A compendium of historical knowledge and a storyteller's eye for the quirks and contradictions of personality, government and society contribute to this complex, inspired monument to Australia's controversial former Prime Minister.