AustLit
History
'Emily Scott founded this prize to perpetuate the memory of her husband Emeritus Professor Sir Ernest Scott Knight Bachelor. Ernest Scott was professor of History at the University was for 23 years. The prize commemorates his interest in the development of Australian historical studies.
'Ernest Scott was professor of History from 1913 to 1936. Born outside wedlock, raised by his grandparents and enjoying no higher education, he worked as a journalist for twenty years. As a young Fabian and Theosophist, he married the daughter of Annie Besant and migrated to Melbourne in 1892. His books on Australian exploration history made Scott into a professional among amateurs and antiquarians. He inspired his students to do archival research and to ask critical questions of popular historical mythologies. A generation of young Australians learned about the country's past from his notable Short History of Australia (1916).' (Source : website)
Latest Winners / Recipients
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Year: 2021
joint winner Grace Karskens for 'People of the River' (joint winner with a Aotearoa / New Zealand scholar). -
Year: 2019
winner y
Deep Time Dreaming : Uncovering Ancient Australia
Carlton
:
Black Inc.
,
2018
12791018
2018
single work
autobiography
'Soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian’s inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent.
'Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia.
'It explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and belonging. It is about a slow shift in national consciousness: the deep time dreaming that has changed the way many of us relate to this continent and its enduring, dynamic human history.' (Publication summary)
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Year: 2014
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Year: 2013
winner y
Larrikins : A History
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
2012
Z1852492
2012
single work
criticism
'From the true-blue Crocodile Hunter to the blue humour of Stiffy and Mo, from the Beaconsfield miners to The Sentimental Bloke, Australia has often been said to possess a "larrikin streak". Today, being a larrikin has positive connotations and we think of it as the key to unlocking the Australian identity: a bloke who refuses to stand on ceremony and is a bit of scally wag. When it first emerged around 1870, however, larrikin was a term of abuse, used to describe teenage, working-class hell-raisers who populated dance halls and cheap theatres. Crucially, the early larrikins were female as well as male.
Larrikins : A History takes a trip through the street-based youth subculture known as larrikinism between 1870 and 1920. Swerving through the streets of Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, it offers a glimpse into the lives of Australia's first larrikins, including bare knuckle-fighting, football-barracking, and knicker-flashing teenage girls. Along the way, it reveals much that is unexpected about the development of Australia's larrikin streak to present fascinating historical perspectives on hot "youth issues" today, including gang violence, racist riots, and raunch culture among adolescent girls.' Source: http://uqp.com.au (Sighted 03/04/2012).
Bellanta refers throughout to literary representations of the larrikin in the works by writers such as Louis Stone, Ambrose Pratt and C. J. Dennis.
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Year: 2011
joint winner y
A Three-Cornered Life : The Historian W. K. Hancock
Sydney
:
University of New South Wales Press
,
2010
Z1704878
2010
single work
biography
'While W.K. Hancock may no longer be described as 'Australia's most distinguished historian', he has some enduring claims to our attention. No other Australian historian - and few elsewhere - can match his 'span', to use one of his watchwords. Hancock was a major historian in four or five fields, who himself made history by going on a mission to Uganda for the British government in 1954 to mediate the future of Buganda after its ruler had been exiled. He was also, from a room in the Cabinet Office in Whitehall, the editor of a vast historical project: the writing of a series of accounts of British mobilisation on the home front during the Second World War. In addition, Hancock was a founder of the Australian National University, while his Australia (1930) remains one of the classic accounts of this country' (Publishers website).
Joint winner with Emma Christopher's A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa and How It Led to the Settlement of Australia.
