It’s been a long time since I’ve attended a NSW Literary Awards Night in person, but I like to give an account of them if I can, based on the video of the streamed event.
If you like, you can skip this blog post and watch the video yourself. (When I watched it, nothing happens for the first 30 minutes.)
If you’re still here (and I hope you are), here’s my version of the evening. (I’ve added only two links to elsewhere in his blog.)
Uncle Brendan Kerin did the Welcome to Country. He addressed the recent Anzac Day booing at the Welcome. He said there were two kinds of people who objected to Welcomes to Country: ignorant people and racists. He’d explain, he said, and if there were still people who objected he’d know which they were, and (he said with a friendly smile) he’d offer further explanation out in the car park after the event. ‘All we’ve ever done is walk with a hand out: come!’ He played a welcome song, urged us to stop calling his instrument a didgeridoo. ‘There are 59 words in language for this instrument, and none of them is didgeridoo,’ he said and then, anticipating a theme of the evening, ‘We’ve lost control of our own narrative.’
The State Librarian Caroline Butler-Bowdon did a Welcome to the Library. Library Council President Bob Debus reminded the audience of Neville Wran’s initial statement of the aims of the awards: to uphold the writer’s place in a free society; to raise and preserve the standards of our literature, and to confirm the community’s respect for a free and flourishing literary culture. He referred explicitly to the book-banning we see in the USA, and obliquely to the disinviting of writers in this country of writers. And he spoke warmly of David Malouf, who won four awards over the decades. The Minister for Arts John Graham reminded us of the ALP’s record as supporter of writers. (A side comment: in the past, Labor Premiers have graced this occasion with their presence, and appeared to be genuinely interested – Neville Wran, Bob Carr, Kristina Keneally, and Nathan Rees come to mind. It’s only recently that the Premier dropped out of the awards’ title.)
James Bradley, in his capacity of Senior Judge, did some more thank yous and contextualising, and then we moved on to the awards.
UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate, Micaela Sahhar (NewSouth Publishing)
Micaela Sahhar thanked Sweatshop in Western Sydney, and was the first speaker to refer to the genocide in Gaza. In particular she spoke in support of the people who protested at the visit of Isaac Herzog in February this year. As a Palestinian person she thanked people who protest.
Multicultural NSW Award
Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath, S. Shakthidharan (Powerhouse Publishing)
‘This book is an act of vulnerability for me,’ he said, and spoke about love across difference as at the heart of multiculturalism. I’m half way through reading this book and am delighted that it won.
Indigenous Writers’ Prize
Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea, Natalie Harkin (Wakefield Press)
Natalie Harkin, wearing a ‘Readers and Writers Against Genocide’ T-shirt, described the book as ‘a collaborative mixed media project with many amazing and generous women in my community to document South Australian women’s stories’. She said, ‘There can be no truth-telling in this country without access to our archives and our records,’ and spoke of ‘the strength, the love, the strategic resilience and refusal’ of the women whose words she found in the archives.
Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting
The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Episode 4, Shaun Grant (Curio Pictures, Screen Australia, Amazon MGM Studios)
‘Our baby-sitter fell through and I have a seven-month-old at the back of the auditorium who should probably go to bed,’ Shaun Grant said by way of explaining that he would be brief, and also perhaps explaining why he looked uncomfortable in suit and tie.
Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting
The Black Woman of Gippsland, Andrea James (Melbourne Theatre Company/Currency Press)
Andrea James said, ‘Theatre-making is very much a collaborative art form.’ And in her thank-yous she demonstrated that First Nations story telling is also very much a collaborative, multi-faceted, relational art form. ‘The cash is going to be great,’ she said, ‘but the biggest prize for me would be the immediate removal or at least reinterpretation of the three memorials to the so-called founder of Gippsland, Angus McMillan, who we actually know as the Butcher of Gippsland.’
Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature
Desert Tracks, Marly Wells and Linda Wells (Magabala Books)
The mother and daughter award winners appeared on video link from Alice Springs / Mparntwe. Marly: ‘Colonisation caused and continues to cause chaos for all of us. One of its powerful tools is controlling the narrative, so the more that we can contradict those dominant colonial narratives through truth-telling the better off we’ll all be.’ I love that ‘all’: Linda, Marly’s mother, is non-Indigenous; Marly is Warlpiri.
Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature
Gone, Michel Streich (Thames & Hudson Australia)
‘Gone is a story about dying, grief and memory,’ Michel Streich said, ‘and bizarrely … it was almost published posthumously.’ He didn’t elaborate on his near death experience.
Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry
How To Emerge, Jill Jones (Vagabond Press)
Jill Jones said she’s probably the only person who has been a judge on these awards, has won one of them and has also administered them. About the book, she said, ‘I was wanting to pay attention to both the infinitesimal and the cosmological – I’m quoting some of the words that the judges used about the book, why not? – the resonance between sky, asphalt, weed, wharf, vulnerability and memory and many, many other things.’ And she quoted William Blake.
Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction
Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions, Clare Wright (Text Publishing)
Clare Wright invoked the Yolŋu name she has been given, meaning ‘special tree’. She spoke of ‘the writing cave, battling the dragon’, and thanked many many people. ‘This is a book about a people speaking truth to power. It’s a story about respect, consultation and consent, values and practices we have seen demolished in recent decisions by publishers, universities and other cultural organisations and boards around First Nations knowledges, cultural representation and freedom of speech.’
Christina Stead Prize for Fiction
The Immigrants, Moreno Giovannoni (Black Inc)
Moreno Giovannoni is mostly a translator. His parents bought him a typewriter when he was 12 because he wanted to be a writer – it took him 51 years to write his first book, The Fireflies of Autumn (my blog post here), and another six years to write this one. Migrants are in the news again – this is a book about migrants.
The University of Sydney People’s Choice Award
Rapture, Emily Maguire (Allen & Unwin) – my blog post here
Emily Maguire described the idea for the book as ‘a weird little mediaeval girl pope story’.
Book of the Year
Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions, Clare Wright (Text Publishing)
Wearing a Star of David, Clare Wright confessed that though she didn’t expect to win this award she had written something just in case. And the speeches ended as they had begun with a call to stand up for Palestine:
One of the particularly powerful connected elements of Näku Dhäruk is the way it demonstrates how a strong and sovereign Indigenous people resisted the Australian government’s attempt at erasure and silencing of their voice, of their very existential right to belong on and to their land and their law.
The story told in this book through both documentary archival, and eyewitness oral sources also speaks to the potency of allyship, of defending basic human, civil and democratic rights, even when your own quotidian existence is not directly threatened. At this time of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and resultant moves both in Australia and globally to suppress legitimate criticism of the death, dispossession, and destruction of sovereign people, by Palestinians and their allies, the weight and fortune of this book’s dhäruk, its message, could not be more opportune.
As an academic historian, a Jewish Australian, and a human being, I stand here tonight grateful for the opportunity to participate in the global and timeless struggle for justice and equality under the law, resisting the mounting pressure from governments, universities, funding bodies, and publishing companies to stay quiet, timid, and submissive at a time of patent poly crisis.
And it was all over bar the final thanks from the Head Librarian.
I am an Australian man of settler heritage. I’ve written this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora nation. I acknowledge Elders past and present of those clans, and welcome any First Nations readers. I thank Uncle Brendan Kerin for explicitly acknowledging non-Indigenous Elders in his Welcome to Country.
Me fail? I fly! 