The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction: Shortlist 2005

Judges
Morag Fraser (Convenor), Ian Britain, Brenda Niall, Bruce Sims and Ceridwen Spark

Non-fiction continues to engage Australian readers, writers and their publishers. In time sociologists or historians may explain the trend and with it the mood of the times. Meanwhile, non-fiction judges have to live in the shed while the incoming titles occupy their houses. This year there were a record number of entries, bemusing in their range and variety. In recognition of their number and quality, the non-fiction shortlist has been expanded from three to five, but even that licence has not simplified the selection process. The judges have had to weigh exemplary essays and finely written brief memoirs against meticulous works of history and scholarship. We have said it before: something needs to be done.

The quality was high and even, and the choice therefore very difficult. Some impressive books were let down by slipshod or insufficient editing. This year many were better served by their publishers than last, with the literary quality complimented by imaginative design and quality production. Overall, it has been heartening to read so many writers who find the world daunting or beguiling or idiosyncratically fascinating, and who can write those findings into life. .

Shortlist

Degenerates and Perverts: The 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art
Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller with an introductory essay by Judith Pugh
The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Publishing
Much more than a sumptuous visual record of an important exhibition, Degenerates and Perverts looks at the whole experience of the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art. This lucid and lively work of scholarship is not just about the paintings, but about those who brought them to Australia, and those who came to gasp or scoff, returned to gaze—or took to the newspaper columns to denounce modernism and all its works. Some of the episodes recorded here are among the most embarrassing in Australia’s cultural history, but are given sensitive and explanatory historical context. This is a brilliant, searching work in which place, taste and tradition at a key moment in Australian cultural history are explored.

Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self
Greg Dening
The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Publishing
Beach Crossings is a demanding, richly rewarding book, as daring in its structure as in its explorations. An anthropologist as well as a historian, Greg Dening is concerned with cultural encounters. In a lifetime of engagement with the seemingly strange, often violent, history of the Pacific islands, he discerns meeting points, footprints in the sand, ways of knowing. Deeply personal, revealing the historian’s self as well as the ‘others’ he meets in the huge yet intimately observed spaces of past and present, Dening opens new worlds for his readers, new ways of seeing, in this adventurous work of poetry and passion. And his publishers have done lavish justice to the intricacy of his conception.

Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev
Robert Dessaix
Picador/Pan Macmillan
This is remarkable, mature work, one that synthesises memoir, history, travel and critical genres, and transcends them all. It is a rare book, written in an international context that effortlessly incorporates an antipodean perspective. Above all, it explores the notion of love and its permutations over two centuries. Dessaix’s fine prose, at turns acid, lyrical and poised, carries a search for Turgenev beyond the personal and into universal yearnings for a life of joy and fulfilment.

It is as though the writing of this Russian master, so joyfully internalised by the Russian speaking Dessaix, has tempered and burnished a critical intellect that was always sharp, but which is now rounded with wisdom.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law
Helen Garner
Picador/Pan Macmillan
All of Helen Garner’s talents as an imaginative writer, investigative reporter and intimate memoirist come together here in a continuously gripping chronicle of a bizarre murder case, its wider ethical ramifications and its disturbing personal resonances for us all, not least the author herself. The prose is unflaggingly fluent, while the grim central story is deftly punctuated by quirkily pertinent asides and cadenzas that vary the narrative pace as they broaden the focus.

As Garner flies to and from Canberra to cover the murder trial, anxiously rearranges furniture at 3am and considers 'junkies' who nod off while they await decisions about their battered children, we are jolted and compelled.

Her greatest gift may be her mastery of ordinary words. Unnerving us with her pithy insights, she lances the heart of these emotionally and psychologically complex matters without a hint of pretension.

Bypass: The Story of a Road
Michael McGirr
Picador/Pan Macmillan
Like Lance Armstrong's seven Tour de France wins, Michael McGirr's story about riding his bike from Sydney to Melbourne seems effortless. But we know about art that conceals art. If the enterprise also seems slightly mad, its author is demonstrably sane in the way he leads the reader, with humility and humour, through the Australian landscape and psyche. With unfailing honesty, and a degree of good-humoured blarney, McGirr laughs at our follies while basking in our glories of joy, love and sorrow. He also provides an astute history of the Hume Highway and many who have lived and travelled along its length. By the end of this book, the reader is a better person without quite knowing why. Perhaps it’s from knowing Michael McGirr a little.