AustLit logo

AustLit

Ethnic Affairs Commission Award
Subcategory of New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Notes

  • Awarded to a work deemed to have contributed most to Australian literature from a multicultural perspective during the year of the awards.

    The award was offered between 1992-2000 inclusive. From 2001 onwards it was known as the Community Relations Commission Award.

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 1997

winner y separately published work icon The Fiftieth Gate : A Journey Through Memory Mark Baker , Sydney : HarperCollins Australia , 1997 Z1296530 1997 single work biography

'A love story and a detective story, a study of history and of memory, this spellbinding new work explores a son's confrontation with the terror of his parents' childhood. Moving from Poland and Germany to Jerusalem and Melbourne, Mark Raphael Baker travels across the silence of fifty years, through the gates of Auschwitz, and into a dark bunker where a little girl hides in fear. As he returns to scenes of his parents' captivity, he struggles to unveil the mystery of their survival. The Fiftieth Gate is a journey from despair and death towards hope and life; the story of a son who enters his parents' memories and, inside the darkness, finds light.' (Harper Collins)

Year: 1996

winner y separately published work icon Caravanserai : Journey among Australian Muslims Hanifa Deen , St Leonards : Allen and Unwin , 1995 Z1136283 1995 single work non-fiction

Year: 1987

winner y separately published work icon Dreamtime Nightmares : Biographies of Aborigines under the Queensland Aborigines Act Dreamtime Nightmares : Eight Biographies of Queensland Aborigines Under the Queensland Aborigines Act Bill Rosser , Bill Rosser (interviewer), Canberra : Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies , 1985 Z1350317 1985 anthology biography A collection of interviews of eight Aboriginal people about their experiences in the sheep and cattle industries. These life stories reflect the harsh treatment and living conditions inflicted upon Aboriginal workers on the stations in the north-western areas of Queensland and the Northern Territory border.

Year: 1986

winner y separately published work icon No Snow in December : an autobiographical novel Maria Lewitt , Melbourne : Heinemann , 1985 Z393892 1985 single work novel autobiography

Year: 1985

winner y separately published work icon Paese Fortunato : Romanzo Rosa R. Cappiello , Milan : Feltrinelli , 1981 Z1081324 1981 single work novel (taught in 1 units) Depicting 'migrant life in Sydney...Rosa Cappiello follows the tormented lives of a random group of European women, from their incarceration in a hostel to their struggles in a series of derelict rooms and flats. They keep in touch with each other not through affection or genuine solidarity but purely through need, to escape their own desolation and solitude...This unusual and disconcerting view of migrant life does not aim to stand in judgment or reveal general truths on Australian conditions and society. It is instead a subjective account with a universal application, relating not just to Italian migrants in Australia but to all migrants everywhere. The characters are victims less of their new environment than of the circumstances which led them to seek change; ultimately they are the victims of their own natures and of the inevitable discrepancy between dream and reality.' (Source: dustjacket, Oh Lucky Country, 1984 edition)
VIEW ALL LISTED RECIPIENTS (13)
X