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The Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction: Shortlist 2007
Judges: Bruce Sims (Convenor), Tony Birch, Mary Dalmau, Joy Damousi and Peter Mares
Shortlist
| Voyages to the South Seas: In Search of Terres AustralesDanielle Clode
(The Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Publishing in association with the State Library of Victoria)
Danielle Clode's Voyages to the South Seas: In Search of Terres Australes utilises the creative and intellectual skills of the writer to tell the little-known story of the French exploration of, and engagement with, the Pacific landscape during the late 18th and early decades of the 19th century. This is both a scholarly and narrative-driven book that unfolds its history through the cast of real life characters who helped to form it. |
| Whose ABC? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation 1983-2006Ken Inglis
(Black Inc)
This is a fascinating account of a major Australian cultural institution during one of the most turbulent periods of its history. The birth of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1983 ushered in a new era of public debate about the national broadcaster. Based on prodigious and meticulous research, this is a significant work which offers a thoughtful, engaging and highly readable history of the culture and politics of the ABC. |
| Life Class: The Education of a BiographerBrenda Niall
(Melbourne University Press/Melbourne University Publishing)
When your life’s work is the investigation, illumination and estimation of the lives of others, it must be somewhat daunting to turn the light on oneself. Brenda Niall’s Life Class: The Education of a Biographer is a beautifully written record of her journey through her life to this point. It also stands as testament to a particularly characteristic Melbourne upbringing in the last century and to the ways in which a biographer goes about his/her craft. |
| Unpolished GemAlice Pung
(Black Inc)
Unpolished Gem is a wonderfully engaging piece of storytelling and an important new contribution to the literature of Australian childhoods. In an extraordinarily frank account of growing up in Melbourne's western suburbs as the daughter of Cambodian-Chinese migrants, Alice Pung deftly moves between comedy and tragedy while maintaining a tight narrative structure. She canvasses complex issues with a light touch that manages to be irreverent and respectful at the same time. |
| Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in AustraliaPenny van Toorn
(Aboriginal Studies Press)
In a ground-breaking study of the interplay between the colonists’ paper culture and existing Indigenous culture in Australia, Penny van Toorn guides us through examples of the uses to which Aboriginal people put the written world from the early days of white settlement. In clear and sensitive writing, she calls into question settled notions of the nature of books and writing in an intercultural setting. | |
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