The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction: Shortlist 2004

Judges

Morag Fraser (Convenor), Ian Britain, Peter Mares, Brenda Niall and Ceridwen Spark

The volume of entries (129) and their dizzying variety point to a new energy and an urge, among Australian writers, to re-imagine our history and explore our society, environment, neighbours—near and far—and our ways of expressing and representing ourselves over time. The enthusiasm of publishers for more non-fiction suggests that there is a corresponding public appetite for such explorations, which the panel can only applaud.

This year’s entries spanned the range: we read historical narrative, biography, memoir, political essays, sociology, autobiography, oral history, how-to guides, literary critique, ecological and ethical investigations. The variety made engaging reading but difficult judging. The non-fiction category is perhaps now too broad. Exemplary, topical political pamphlets jostle alongside works of scholarship that have taken years of research. Time for some new divisions?

The quality of the writing, not the quality of design or production, was decisive for the judges, but we do wish to record that some writers—and in turn the public— have been much better served by their publishers than others. We often had to look beyond the cover, and imagine fine photographs in finer reproduction.

While the short list was decided unanimously, the panel wishes to acknowledge the competitive quality of many entries and to commend Jaynie Anderson’s beautifully conceived and researched Tiepolo’s Cleopatra (Macmillan) and Stephen Kinnane’s rich, layered and personal work of Western Australian and Aboriginal history, Shadow Lines (Fremantle Arts Centre Press).

Shortlist

Dancing with Strangers
Inga Clendinnen
Text Publishing
Dancing with Strangers is an intimate account of a foundational moment in Australian history. Using detailed portraits of the key individuals—indigenous and non-indigenous—involved in that first historic dance together, Clendinnen, with characteristic panache, tempts us from our wallflower positions to re-imagine the first days of the colony. She would have us see that early moment of encounter as emblematic of the missed chances in Australia’s race relations. She would also have us understand that momentous events are constructed from the day-to-day actions of ordinary, fallible human beings. With cool poise, the historian presents herself not so much as an authority as a questing, questioning spirit—one that’s also disarmingly happy to leave its own intuitions open to question by other interpreters.

Thoughtful, beautifully paced, with an engagingly informal narrative voice, Dancing with Strangers is a pleasure to read. It is also, a pleasure to hold. First class design and production add to the attraction of a distinguished work by an eminent historian whose lucidity is surpassed only by her daring.

Car Wars: How the Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities
Graeme Davison
Allen & Unwin
Car Wars, by Australia’s most imaginative social historian, Graeme Davison, is not simply about cars, nor is its meaning limited to its Melbourne context. Davison draws on a wealth of material to construct a history from the driver’s seat, showing how the car has shaped not only the topography of a city but also the social and working lives, the culture, of its inhabitants, in ways that are simultaneously liberating and constraining. Intricately woven, it is also wry and appealing—the kind of book that makes one ask why we have had to wait until now for the car to attract the sustained attention of one of our major historians. Davison’s Car Wars distils years of research in administrative archives and a wide range of popular culture sources, but wears its considerable scholarship lightly. The writer is as at home in the cabin of a mid-twentieth-century Chev ute as he is analysing the intricacies of BOOT funding or chronicling the campaigns to halt carnage on Australian roads. This is a rich and entertaining study of the way we lived then and the way we live now.

The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty
Mark Peel
Cambridge University Press
The Lowest Rung is oral history at its most compelling. It is also an important piece of scholarship that provides new insights into Australian poverty and disadvantage in three widely scattered localities. Peel gives voice to those who know poverty personally by letting them speak for themselves—as the finest oral historians always do. He has the gift of selecting and framing the words of his subjects so as to bring out their individual meaning with sympathy and emotional resonance. And without special pleading he also urges on all of us, particularly those involved in welfare administration, the importance of learning from and actively heeding his assembled voices. He also reflects thoughtfully on the complex role of the social researcher who enters a community to tell its story.

Scholarly books are not often so clearly written, or so profoundly affecting. By honouring the dignity of his materially impoverished subjects, Peel has taken seriously their wish to be respected. The book’s quality derives in no small part from his humility and profound sense of justice.