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Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction: Winner & Shortlist 2009
Judges: Helen MacDonald (convenor), Waleed Aly, Chris McAuliffe, Brenda Niall and Sue Turnbull
Winner
The winner of the 2009 Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction is:
- The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island
Chloe Hooper (Hamish Hamilton)
Shortlist
| The City’s OutbackGillian Cowlishaw
(UNSW Press)
The City’s Outback is a deeply satisfying reflective ethnography which demystifies that scholarly practice as it deftly illuminates the lives of people residing in a contemporary Aboriginal community in western Sydney. Cowlishaw reveals the complications of group identities and how – in the nitty gritty of living – individual people’s experiences inevitably overflow conventional ways of understanding them. She elegantly argues that Aboriginal people are too often categorised in ways that turn them into exhibits of the nation’s history, making a compelling case instead for their subjective experiences to be illuminated through ethnographies that focus on specifics: 'this violent father, those officials intervening, that foster parent's cruelty'. Cowlishaw then brings this concern with particularities to a persuasive discussion of more universal matters, showing how cultures shift and identities are made and mobilised. In the process, the people whom she presents to her readers emerge from the page in all of their complicated humanity. |
| ArabesquesRobert Dessaix
(Picador)
To depict Arabesques as a travel memoir is taxonomically correct but inadequate to describe what Robert Dessaix has accomplished in this book. It is a work of rare beauty, richness and depth that offers readers far more than the vibrant characters and places that decorate its pages. Traversing diverse terrain from France to northern Africa, Dessaix's journey is more profoundly one of self-rediscovery through confrontation with the unfamiliar. The book is structured around his quest to follow the footsteps of French writer André Gide, who is the starting point for Dessaix’s examination of his own past and present. Along the way he reflects on writing, travelling, sexuality, human relationships and where lines are drawn in the sand. Exquisitely presented and superbly crafted as a literary work, Arabesques artfully engages many of life's enduring and gripping themes, of love, spirituality and truth. |
| The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island - WINNERChloe Hooper
(Hamish Hamilton)
Every now and again there comes a book which might change how we think. Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man is such a book, affording an original perspective on the vexed topic of Aboriginal deaths in custody. Like Truman Capote with In Cold Blood or John Berendt with Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Hooper’s starting point is a 'true crime', the death of Cameron Doomadgee. This event, involving real people, including the impossibly tall Detective Sergeant Chris Hurley, took place on Palm Island, site of a former Aboriginal mission 'where history is so close to the surface, so omnipresent it seems to run parallel with daily life'. Arriving as a journalist with a brief to cover the background to the case, Hooper ruminates on the consequences of the past for the present. Historical research and vivid reportage meld seamlessly in this book, which inevitably carries a powerful emotional charge. |
| House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroger-MannEvelyn Juers
(Giramondo Publishing)
House of Exile is a group biography with an extraordinary range. Radiating out from the life stories of Heinrich Mann (novelist brother of the more famous Thomas) and his staunch and spirited wife Nelly, it takes us on a journey with the Manns and other political exiles of the 1930s and 1940s. Intricately structured, brilliantly evocative of period and places from Berlin to Zurich, Paris, London and Los Angeles, it illuminates the struggles of Mann and other displaced intellectuals to maintain their creativity after their worlds had collapsed. For some, like Virginia Woolf, who is a vibrant presence in the story, Hitler’s war brought inner exile and despair. Others improvised, rebuilt, wrote, painted, survived. This is fascinating intellectual history, told with warmth, humour and inventiveness and full of surprising brief encounters which show Juers' imaginative power as well as her grasp of mundane realities within perilous times. |
| Darwin's ArmadaIain McCalman
(Viking)
In a year crowded with books on Darwin, Darwin’s Armada captures the passion and the polemic that saw Darwin dubbed the greatest Englishman of the nineteenth century. McCalman traverses adventure on the high seas, the grinding discipline of scientific research and the heated controversies of Victorian society. Darwin's Armada is crewed by the unlikely heroes of evolutionary theory: beetle-browed Darwin is at the helm, supported by the earnest Joseph Hooker, the pugnacious Thomas Huxley and the gnomic Alfred Wallace. Charting the personal and professional partnerships behind the formulation of evolutionary theory, McCalman writes of scientific endeavour as quest. With a knowing wink at the Boy's Own papers of the era, he rediscovers Darwin's sense of adventure and ambition. This is science with sinew and soul. The physical struggle for discoveries in the field is matched by the fierce combat over evolutionary theory in scientific, political and religious circles at home. | |
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