The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction: Shortlist 2006

Judges

Ian Britain (Convenor), Jane Grant, Ellen Koshland, John Rickard and Bruce Sims

One of the great pleasures but also great challenges involved in judging the non-fiction award is the capaciousness of the category, which embraces scholarship or criticism in all manner of fields, journalism, personal reflection and memoir. This year’s entrants for the Nettie Palmer Prize covered the full range, and contained some remarkably impressive writing across that range. Quality of writing has remained the abiding criterion of the judges, but the shortlist also goes some way to representing the variety of genres and the riches of subject matter on offer.

Shortlist

	Aboriginal Victorians: A History Since 1800 by Richard Broome (Allen & Unwin) An important and timely contribution to our understanding of frontier conflict and race relations at a local level. Based on impressive scholarship, it offers a brave and compassionate analysis of Aboriginal survival in the face of changing government policies of segregation and assimilation.
	Margaret Michaelis: Love, Loss and Photography by Helen Ennis (National Gallery of Australia) A story of migration, photography and politics, the life of Austrian-born Margaret Michaelis, who came to Australia in 1939, is undeservedly obscure. Helen Ennis remedies this in a remarkable synthesis of art criticism, biography, history and exploration, combining scholarship and fine writing. In this beautifully produced book, Ennis journeys to uncover the mysteries of a life of a fine artist.
	Bernard Shaw: A Life by Anthony M. Gibbs (University of New South Wales Press) This biography by an Australian scholar of one of the 20th-century’s most incisive writers is full of new and surprising revelations, not all of them flattering, yet sympathetically and unsensationally conveyed. The book is as notable for its crisp succinctness as for its deep and extensive research.
	East of Time by Jacob G. Rosenberg (Brandl and Schlesinger) Original in its sweeping but unsentimental portrait of humanity, this memoir of pre-war Jewish life in Poland weaves together personalities, episodes, and issues in family and community to convey a rich and moving picture of humanity against the slow march of terrible events.
	Hoi Polloi Craig Sherborne (Black Inc) A darkly funny and disturbing memoir, this book exposes the violence at the heart of the author’s New Zealand and Australian childhood in the 1970s. It is a beautifully crafted work that blurs the line between memoir and fiction, lingering in the imagination long after the book is finished.