AUSTRALIAN HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

Robin Gerster
Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the occupation of Japan
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

In Travels in Atomic Sunshine, Robin Gerster tells the story of the Australian volunteer servicemen and their families, a community of some 20,000 men, women and children, who went to Japan at the end of World War II and were stationed in the Hiroshima region as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. The Australian presence was a small side show in the American controlled Occupation but as Gerster superbly demonstrates, it was, as the first large scale Australian encounter with Japan, a very significant cultural and human event in Australia’s gradual abandonment of the assumptions that underlay hostility and superiority to Asia.  

Gerster’s focus is on the every day interaction of the Australians with the local people in a world where official policy was non-fraternisation. And this interaction in Gerster’s subtle and nuanced arguments is a story of contradictions.  Acculturated to hate and despise the Japanese, under the influence of alcohol, and with little to do, many servicemen behaved as boorish conquerors, taking up prostitution and the black market on a large scale. But Gerster also tells us of those who made valiant efforts to learn Japanese, who tried to understand the culture, who established strong and lasting relationships with Japanese women, some 650 of whom arrived in Australia as war brides. 

In this lively and compelling narrative full of insightful comments drawn from literature and history, Gerster has made a major and original contribution to social and cultural history and to the long and complex story of Australia’s relationship with Asia and to our understanding of the complexity of racism.
 

GENERAL HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

Warwick Anderson
The Collectors of Lost Souls: turning Kuru scientists into whitemen
The Johns Hopkins University Press

In the 1940s a terrible affliction called kuru took hold of the Fore people in the remote highlands of colonial New Guinea. Women and children were dying in numbers that threatened the Fore with extinction. They would first succumb to muscle weakness, then to uncontrollable tremors followed by the loss of all coordination and ultimately death. 

The Fore people became the subject of intense medical scrutiny. The epidemic drew in doctors, scientists, anthropologists and colonial bureaucrats who sought their own explanation and hopefully a solution. At the centre of this intervention was the brilliant and troubled American doctor, D. Carleton Gajdusek. Controversy and rivalry swirled around Gajdusek, but he was unstoppable. Eventually he established that kuru was caused by a new and mysterious agent of infection, an agent that he described as a slow virus. Gajdusek and his associates then realized that the Fore tradition of eating their loved ones after death was the means by which the virus carried from one person to another.  

This magisterial work is part history of medicine, part anthropology and part collective biography insofar as Warwick Anderson tells the story of Gajdusek and other scientists working in the PNG highlands, some of them as roguish and tragic in life as they were obsessed and brilliant in field work and scholarship. The Collectors of Lost Souls is a gripping exploration, a medical mystery and a moral fable, in its way as ghoulish and shocking as anything we might find in Conrad – but true.  

The Collectors of Lost Souls is a work of exceptional research and remarkable storytelling. It will enthral anyone interested in the history of scientific research, anyone wanting to know more about PNG, our nearest neighbour, indeed, anyone who wants to explore a fine work of history that just happens to be a riveting read.
 

MULTIMEDIA HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

Rachel Landers and Dylan Blowen
A Northern Town
Pony Films Pty Ltd

This film deals with the history of race relations in the northern New South Wales town of Kempsey. It is an outstanding example of the way in which multi-media, effectively employed, can not only make complex stories readily accessible to a general audience, but also make unhappy stories compulsively watchable and, indeed, entertaining. The use of skilfully edited and juxtaposed excerpts from oral accounts, combined with stunning cinematography of the surrounding landscape, the Kempsey township and many of its inhabitants, has produced a documentary that is not only beautiful to watch, but which long after remains with the viewer, encouraging ongoing contemplation. 

By focussing on the Indigenous and non-Indigenous inhabitants of an Indigenous owned and operated aged care facility, A Northern Town surprises the viewer from the first frame, and proceeds to tell its story in unpredictable but always revealing ways. Straightforward personal accounts of both relinquished and unyielding racism sit beside stories of dispossession and survival, whilst footage of Anzac Day and classroom lessons on being ‘Australian’ quietly draw attention to the dominance and exclusivity of European culture. 

This film’s major lesson is its clear demonstration that history is not ‘past’ but lives in the present because of the way it shapes the minds and attitudes of individuals and societies. However, its clever focus on the colour-blind care provided by the Indigenous community for elderly Kempsey people provides an over-arching metaphor for respect and reconciliation.
 

NSW COMMUNITY AND REGIONAL HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

David Bollen
Up on the Hill: a history of St Patrick’s College, Goulburn
University of NSW Press Ltd

David Bollen's Up on the Hill offers a detailed and engaging history of St Patrick's College in Goulburn from its foundation in 1874 through to its closure in 1999. The book is also generously illustrated, well ordered and nicely presented.  

Bollen's aim is to understand the college ‘from within’ as well as ‘from without’, and this draws him into consideration of the many historical, social and economic circumstances that shaped this particular institution. For example, he skilfully situates the College in the broader history of Australian education, and in terms of the wider history of Catholic education and the work of the Christian Brothers order. The narrative is particularly sensitive to the peculiarities and difficulties facing an institution of this type in a small country town, where it was at once integral to the fabric of the community, and yet remained 'a place apart' on a number of levels.  

The work is well researched, drawing on a rich and varied body of materials, including interviews, and demonstrates admirable skill in relating stories and themes for which the documentary evidence is sparse. Far from being a dry recitation of facts, the content is thoughtful and the style attractive. Indeed, there is much about this book that is genuinely enlightening to an audience not familiar with the atmosphere and mechanics of these types of institutions. 

Ultimately, what sets this book apart from the many entries in this category, and what demands it be recognised as the winner of the NSW Regional and Community Prize, is the manner in which the author works what is essentially an institutional history into a singular and highly successful piece of community history.  Bollen skilfully evokes the sense in which the institution was itself a community.  Moreover, and perhaps most impressively, he relates the history and culture of the College in terms of numerous broader factors and phenomena, including its relationship to the local regional community and its important place within the larger communities of Australian religion and education, all the while appreciating how the institution reflected and helped influence the changing nature of those communities over time.  In sum, this book is an exceedingly satisfying work and an impressive example of how such histories ought to be approached.  
 

YOUNG PEOPLE’S HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

Anthony Hill
Captain Cook’s Apprentice
Penguin Group (Australia)

Anthony Hill in Captain Cook’s Apprentice offers his young readers great insights into a seminal event in Australian, and world, history: the voyage of Captain Cook into the South Pacific in 1768 to observe the transit of Venus and, under secret orders, to find and claim the Great South Land. 

The novel gives a fictionalised account of the experiences of Isaac George Manley, a real life cabin boy, later Admiral of the British Navy, and provides a ‘mess deck view’ of life aboard the HMS Endeavour. Isaac’s story is told as a compelling adventure rich with historical detail. The author goes to some lengths to make young readers aware of the cultural differences and misunderstandings between British sailors and the many peoples whose paths they crossed on their journey. Class differences between the sailors and commanders are also skilfully revealed. Delicate illustrations, maps and addenda add strength to the didactic benefits of the novel but nowhere is the strength of the story sacrificed to that purpose. 

Captain Cook’s Apprentice is an exciting, page-turning novel that breaths new life into the ever growing corpus of publications on Cook’s journeys. This wonderful book is based on painstaking research. Hill uses primary sources not only for constructing the narrative, but also he has taken great care to include pictorial archival evidence and other diagrammatic representations of historical artefacts. His novel brings the world of the Endeavour to life, below decks and above. Captain Cook, famous passengers such as Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, as well as the crew, are all faithfully depicted as they encounter the new world of the South Pacific and Australasia. Published as a paperback, this book is a beautifully written and presented text for young, and not so young, adults.

The judges of the 2009 NSW Premier’s History Awards were Emeritus Professor Ros Pesman (Chair), Dr Margo Beasley, Dr Peter Cochrane, Dr Josephine May, Ms Mari Metzke and Dr David Roberts.
 
 

2009 NSW ARCHIVAL RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP ($15,000)

Caroline Ford

Dr Caroline Ford has been awarded the 2009 NSW Archival Research Fellowship to enable her to research and write a history of Sydney’s relationship with its ocean foreshores, commencing in the 1820s and extending to 1920. 

The judges were impressed by the quality of the submission and its promise to use sources within the NSW State Archives, and the records of the NSW Department of Lands in particular, to explore the complex and conflict-filled history of Sydney’s ocean beaches for the first time.  The project will draw heavily on these key records, together with related material in the collection, to explore the origins of the attachment to place shared by so many Australian beach users.  Dr Ford will document the history of the contest over Sydney’s coastal land and the debate over the public versus private use of the beaches, juxtaposing it with our modern understanding the beach as a site for recreation, which everyone has the right to access.

Dr Ford has a first class honours degree in history from the University of Sydney where her PhD was on the making of beach culture in Sydney, 1810–1920. She has written articles and presented conference papers on Sydney’s beaches and beach culture.

The judges for the 2009 NSW Archival Research Fellowship were Emeritus Professor David Carment, Dr Mark Hearn and Ms Christine Yeats.
 

2009 NSW HISTORY FELLOWSHIP ($20,000)

Janette Holcomb

Dr Janette Holcomb has been awarded the 2009 NSW History Fellowship to enable her to research and write a book-length history of the early merchant families of Sydney in the period 1788-1850.

Dr Holcomb will explore the development and dynamics of private enterprise in the early years of colonial New South Wales. Her research will examine the family and business networks, sources of capital, and fortunes of these pioneering merchant families. In forging links with Asia, the Americas and the Pacific region, they helped shape the pace and direction of British imperial and colonial policies.

Combining features of business history, biography and local history, the research identifies over twenty major merchant houses of the period, and will focus on those involved in the whaling industry, agents of British merchant houses, and merchants trading with China, south-east Asia and the Pacific region. The research will examine factors including business risk in developing markets, credit structures and cost of infrastructure development, providing a rigorous analysis of the development of colonial capitalism.

The judges were impressed with the ambition and depth of the proposed research, addressing the crucially important development of private economic activity and enterprise in colonial New South Wales, largely unexamined in recent historical research into the early colonial period.

Dr. Holcomb was awarded a PhD from the University of New England in 2009 for her thesis, ‘Opportunities and Risks in the Development of NSW Shipping Industry, 1820-1850’.

The judges for the 2009 NSW History Fellowship were Professor Ann Curthoys, Dr Mark Hearn and Ms Mari Metzke.

AUSTRALIAN HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

Robin Gerster
Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the occupation of Japan
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

In Travels in Atomic Sunshine, Robin Gerster tells the story of the Australian volunteer servicemen and their families, a community of some 20,000 men, women and children, who went to Japan at the end of World War II and were stationed in the Hiroshima region as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force. The Australian presence was a small side show in the American controlled Occupation but as Gerster superbly demonstrates, it was, as the first large scale Australian encounter with Japan, a very significant cultural and human event in Australia’s gradual abandonment of the assumptions that underlay hostility and superiority to Asia.  

Gerster’s focus is on the every day interaction of the Australians with the local people in a world where official policy was non-fraternisation. And this interaction in Gerster’s subtle and nuanced arguments is a story of contradictions.  Acculturated to hate and despise the Japanese, under the influence of alcohol, and with little to do, many servicemen behaved as boorish conquerors, taking up prostitution and the black market on a large scale. But Gerster also tells us of those who made valiant efforts to learn Japanese, who tried to understand the culture, who established strong and lasting relationships with Japanese women, some 650 of whom arrived in Australia as war brides. 

In this lively and compelling narrative full of insightful comments drawn from literature and history, Gerster has made a major and original contribution to social and cultural history and to the long and complex story of Australia’s relationship with Asia and to our understanding of the complexity of racism.
 

GENERAL HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

Warwick Anderson
The Collectors of Lost Souls: turning Kuru scientists into whitemen
The Johns Hopkins University Press

In the 1940s a terrible affliction called kuru took hold of the Fore people in the remote highlands of colonial New Guinea. Women and children were dying in numbers that threatened the Fore with extinction. They would first succumb to muscle weakness, then to uncontrollable tremors followed by the loss of all coordination and ultimately death. 

The Fore people became the subject of intense medical scrutiny. The epidemic drew in doctors, scientists, anthropologists and colonial bureaucrats who sought their own explanation and hopefully a solution. At the centre of this intervention was the brilliant and troubled American doctor, D. Carleton Gajdusek. Controversy and rivalry swirled around Gajdusek, but he was unstoppable. Eventually he established that kuru was caused by a new and mysterious agent of infection, an agent that he described as a slow virus. Gajdusek and his associates then realized that the Fore tradition of eating their loved ones after death was the means by which the virus carried from one person to another.  

This magisterial work is part history of medicine, part anthropology and part collective biography insofar as Warwick Anderson tells the story of Gajdusek and other scientists working in the PNG highlands, some of them as roguish and tragic in life as they were obsessed and brilliant in field work and scholarship. The Collectors of Lost Souls is a gripping exploration, a medical mystery and a moral fable, in its way as ghoulish and shocking as anything we might find in Conrad – but true.  

The Collectors of Lost Souls is a work of exceptional research and remarkable storytelling. It will enthral anyone interested in the history of scientific research, anyone wanting to know more about PNG, our nearest neighbour, indeed, anyone who wants to explore a fine work of history that just happens to be a riveting read.
 

MULTIMEDIA HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

Rachel Landers and Dylan Blowen
A Northern Town
Pony Films Pty Ltd

This film deals with the history of race relations in the northern New South Wales town of Kempsey. It is an outstanding example of the way in which multi-media, effectively employed, can not only make complex stories readily accessible to a general audience, but also make unhappy stories compulsively watchable and, indeed, entertaining. The use of skilfully edited and juxtaposed excerpts from oral accounts, combined with stunning cinematography of the surrounding landscape, the Kempsey township and many of its inhabitants, has produced a documentary that is not only beautiful to watch, but which long after remains with the viewer, encouraging ongoing contemplation. 

By focussing on the Indigenous and non-Indigenous inhabitants of an Indigenous owned and operated aged care facility, A Northern Town surprises the viewer from the first frame, and proceeds to tell its story in unpredictable but always revealing ways. Straightforward personal accounts of both relinquished and unyielding racism sit beside stories of dispossession and survival, whilst footage of Anzac Day and classroom lessons on being ‘Australian’ quietly draw attention to the dominance and exclusivity of European culture. 

This film’s major lesson is its clear demonstration that history is not ‘past’ but lives in the present because of the way it shapes the minds and attitudes of individuals and societies. However, its clever focus on the colour-blind care provided by the Indigenous community for elderly Kempsey people provides an over-arching metaphor for respect and reconciliation.
 

NSW COMMUNITY AND REGIONAL HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

David Bollen
Up on the Hill: a history of St Patrick’s College, Goulburn
University of NSW Press Ltd

David Bollen's Up on the Hill offers a detailed and engaging history of St Patrick's College in Goulburn from its foundation in 1874 through to its closure in 1999. The book is also generously illustrated, well ordered and nicely presented.  

Bollen's aim is to understand the college ‘from within’ as well as ‘from without’, and this draws him into consideration of the many historical, social and economic circumstances that shaped this particular institution. For example, he skilfully situates the College in the broader history of Australian education, and in terms of the wider history of Catholic education and the work of the Christian Brothers order. The narrative is particularly sensitive to the peculiarities and difficulties facing an institution of this type in a small country town, where it was at once integral to the fabric of the community, and yet remained 'a place apart' on a number of levels.  

The work is well researched, drawing on a rich and varied body of materials, including interviews, and demonstrates admirable skill in relating stories and themes for which the documentary evidence is sparse. Far from being a dry recitation of facts, the content is thoughtful and the style attractive. Indeed, there is much about this book that is genuinely enlightening to an audience not familiar with the atmosphere and mechanics of these types of institutions. 

Ultimately, what sets this book apart from the many entries in this category, and what demands it be recognised as the winner of the NSW Regional and Community Prize, is the manner in which the author works what is essentially an institutional history into a singular and highly successful piece of community history.  Bollen skilfully evokes the sense in which the institution was itself a community.  Moreover, and perhaps most impressively, he relates the history and culture of the College in terms of numerous broader factors and phenomena, including its relationship to the local regional community and its important place within the larger communities of Australian religion and education, all the while appreciating how the institution reflected and helped influence the changing nature of those communities over time.  In sum, this book is an exceedingly satisfying work and an impressive example of how such histories ought to be approached.  
 

YOUNG PEOPLE’S HISTORY PRIZE ($15,000)

Anthony Hill
Captain Cook’s Apprentice
Penguin Group (Australia)

Anthony Hill in Captain Cook’s Apprentice offers his young readers great insights into a seminal event in Australian, and world, history: the voyage of Captain Cook into the South Pacific in 1768 to observe the transit of Venus and, under secret orders, to find and claim the Great South Land. 

The novel gives a fictionalised account of the experiences of Isaac George Manley, a real life cabin boy, later Admiral of the British Navy, and provides a ‘mess deck view’ of life aboard the HMS Endeavour. Isaac’s story is told as a compelling adventure rich with historical detail. The author goes to some lengths to make young readers aware of the cultural differences and misunderstandings between British sailors and the many peoples whose paths they crossed on their journey. Class differences between the sailors and commanders are also skilfully revealed. Delicate illustrations, maps and addenda add strength to the didactic benefits of the novel but nowhere is the strength of the story sacrificed to that purpose. 

Captain Cook’s Apprentice is an exciting, page-turning novel that breaths new life into the ever growing corpus of publications on Cook’s journeys. This wonderful book is based on painstaking research. Hill uses primary sources not only for constructing the narrative, but also he has taken great care to include pictorial archival evidence and other diagrammatic representations of historical artefacts. His novel brings the world of the Endeavour to life, below decks and above. Captain Cook, famous passengers such as Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, as well as the crew, are all faithfully depicted as they encounter the new world of the South Pacific and Australasia. Published as a paperback, this book is a beautifully written and presented text for young, and not so young, adults.

The judges of the 2009 NSW Premier’s History Awards were Emeritus Professor Ros Pesman (Chair), Dr Margo Beasley, Dr Peter Cochrane, Dr Josephine May, Ms Mari Metzke and Dr David Roberts.
 
 

2009 NSW ARCHIVAL RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP ($15,000)

Caroline Ford

Dr Caroline Ford has been awarded the 2009 NSW Archival Research Fellowship to enable her to research and write a history of Sydney’s relationship with its ocean foreshores, commencing in the 1820s and extending to 1920. 

The judges were impressed by the quality of the submission and its promise to use sources within the NSW State Archives, and the records of the NSW Department of Lands in particular, to explore the complex and conflict-filled history of Sydney’s ocean beaches for the first time.  The project will draw heavily on these key records, together with related material in the collection, to explore the origins of the attachment to place shared by so many Australian beach users.  Dr Ford will document the history of the contest over Sydney’s coastal land and the debate over the public versus private use of the beaches, juxtaposing it with our modern understanding the beach as a site for recreation, which everyone has the right to access.

Dr Ford has a first class honours degree in history from the University of Sydney where her PhD was on the making of beach culture in Sydney, 1810–1920. She has written articles and presented conference papers on Sydney’s beaches and beach culture.

The judges for the 2009 NSW Archival Research Fellowship were Emeritus Professor David Carment, Dr Mark Hearn and Ms Christine Yeats.
 

2009 NSW HISTORY FELLOWSHIP ($20,000)

Janette Holcomb

Dr Janette Holcomb has been awarded the 2009 NSW History Fellowship to enable her to research and write a book-length history of the early merchant families of Sydney in the period 1788-1850.

Dr Holcomb will explore the development and dynamics of private enterprise in the early years of colonial New South Wales. Her research will examine the family and business networks, sources of capital, and fortunes of these pioneering merchant families. In forging links with Asia, the Americas and the Pacific region, they helped shape the pace and direction of British imperial and colonial policies.

Combining features of business history, biography and local history, the research identifies over twenty major merchant houses of the period, and will focus on those involved in the whaling industry, agents of British merchant houses, and merchants trading with China, south-east Asia and the Pacific region. The research will examine factors including business risk in developing markets, credit structures and cost of infrastructure development, providing a rigorous analysis of the development of colonial capitalism.

The judges were impressed with the ambition and depth of the proposed research, addressing the crucially important development of private economic activity and enterprise in colonial New South Wales, largely unexamined in recent historical research into the early colonial period.

Dr. Holcomb was awarded a PhD from the University of New England in 2009 for her thesis, ‘Opportunities and Risks in the Development of NSW Shipping Industry, 1820-1850’.

The judges for the 2009 NSW History Fellowship were Professor Ann Curthoys, Dr Mark Hearn and Ms Mari Metzke.