2008 non-fiction short list
- A History of Queensland Raymond Evans
- Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time Clive James
- My Life as a Traitor Zarah Ghahramani and Robert Hillman
- Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769-1799 Philip Dwyer
- Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers Philip Jones
- Shakespeare’s Wife Germaine Greer
- Vietnam: The Australian War Paul Ham
A History of Queensland Raymond Evans (Cambridge University Press)
A History of Queensland is the first single volume analysis of Queensland’s past, stretching from the time of earliest human habitation—to the present. It encompasses pre-contact Aboriginal history, the years of convict settlement, free settlement and subsequent urban and rural growth. It takes the reader through the tumultuous frontier and Federation years, the World Wars, the Cold War, the controversial Bjelke-Petersen era and on, beyond the beginning of the new millennium.
It reveals Queensland as a sprawling, harsh, diverse and conflicted place, where the struggles of race, ethnicity, class, generation and gender have been particularly pronounced, and political and environmental encounters have been intense. It is a colourful, surprising and at times disturbing saga, a perplexing and diverting mixture of ferocity, endurance and optimism. (Cambridge University Press)
The author
Raymond Evans recently received the inaugural John Douglas Kerr Medal of Distinction for History from the Royal Historical Society of Queensland.
He has been writing about Queensland and Australian history since 1965. His numerous publications cover social history and popular culture and include Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914–18 (1987), The Red Flag Riots (1988), Fighting Words: Writing About Race (1999), as well as the co-written Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (1975, 1988, 1993) and 1901—Our Future’s Past (1997); and the co-edited Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (1992) and Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (2004). Dr. Evans retired from the Department of History at the University of Queensland as an Associate Professor in 2002 and is presently a freelance historian attached to the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Faculty of Arts, Griffith University.
Non-fiction judging panel comments
This is an ambitious but economical history of Queensland, from the ancient past to 2005. It is an excellent piece of work—history delivered with a broad and confident brush, and beautifully written. The early colonial history is extraordinarily well-documented and will usefully introduce this era to a wider audience. The author is persuasive in arguing that some of the early colonial brutality in Queensland contributed to the national psyche. The rather prosaic title underplays the liveliness of this outstanding history.
Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time Clive James (Picador)
A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is the book Clive James has always wanted to write. Organised from A through to Z, and containing over 100 essays, it’s the ultimate guide to the twentieth century, illuminating the careers of many of its greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists and philosophers.
From Louis Armstrong to Ludwig Wittgenstein, via Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, it’s a book for our times—and, indeed, for all time. (Picador)
The author
Clive James is the author of more than twenty books, including collections of essays, literary and television criticism, travel writing, novels and verse, plus his famous Unreliable Memoirs (1980). In 1992 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia and in 2003 he was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Literary Excellence.
Non-fiction judging panel comments
This book presents Clive James’ accounts of the lives, thoughts and legacies of an astonishing, and idiosyncratic cast of characters, including Sir Thomas Browne, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Margaret Thatcher and Beatrix Potter. It is a glorious collision of style and substance. There is no attempt at objectivity; this is a chronicle of the author’s almost visceral connection with his own adventures in learning. This leads to great clarity of insight in many cases. Many chapters are crafted with extraordinary precision and invention—two of the hallmarks of great literature.
My Life as a Traitor Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman (Scribe)
My Life as a Traitor is a beautifully written memoir of Zarah’s life in Iran, revealing the human face behind the turmoil of the modern Middle East. Her descriptions of Persian culture, contemporary Iranian society, and radical Islamist politics are eye-opening, as is her account of the growing voice of dissent in Iran.
But it is the story of Zarah’s struggle to survive the nightmare world of Iran’s oppressive regime that makes My Life as a Traitor an unforgettable testimony to the strength of the human spirit. (Scribe)
The co-authors
Zarah Ghahramani was born in Tehran in 1981, two years after Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to establish the Islamic Republic. Her life changed suddenly in 2001 when, after having taken part in student demonstrations, she was arrested (literally snatched off the street by secret police) and charged with ‘inciting crimes against the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran’.
While imprisoned in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison she faced brutal interrogation: her head was shaved and she was beaten. After being released, she was forbidden to return to university and soon realised that she had no future in her native land. Robert Hillman, an Australian writer, met and befriended Zarah in Iran in 2003 and helped her to escape to Australia, where she now has permanent residency.
Robert Hillman was born in 1948 and grew up in rural Victoria. His first novel, A Life of Days, appeared in 1988 and was followed by The Hour of Disguise (1990), Writing Sparrow Hill (1996), and The Deepest Part of the Lake (2001). His 2004 memoir, The Boy in the Green Suit, won Australia’s National Biography Award. After many years of teaching in high schools and university, Robert Hillman now works as a full-time writer. He has three children and lives in Warburton, in Victoria’s Yarra Valley.
Non-fiction judging panel comments
Gharamani grew up in Iran and this is her account of her life in post-revolutionary Iran. She was arrested and imprisoned when she was 20 for taking part in student demonstrations. This is a moving and beautifully written book, full of small life-details, that widens out into a shocking story of political oppression. The book contains meditations on Persian culture and accounts of deep and warm family relationships that make it much more than simply a grim account of imprisonment and torture.
Napoleon: The Path to Power, 1769–1799 Philip Dwyer (Bloomsbury)
The first volume of a groundbreaking and innovative popular biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, one of history’s most complex and charismatic leaders. Napoleon’s rise to power was neither inevitable nor smooth. It was full of mistakes, wrong turns and pitfalls. His identity during his formative years was shifting, his character ambiguous, and his intentions often ill-defined. As a young inexperienced general, he covered up his defeats and exaggerated his victories. He never hesitated to blame others for his own failures and failings. He was, however, highly ambitious, and it was this drive that others noticed and that allowed him to advance his career and his social status. One of the first truly modern politicians, Napoleon was a peerless manipulator of the media of his time. He was able to build an image of himself that laid the foundation for the legend that was to follow. (Bloomsbury)
The author
Philip Dwyer studied at the Sorbonne under France’s pre-eminent Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, and is now lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Newcastle. He was the editor of Napoleon and Europe (2001) and author of Talleyrand (2002).
Non-fiction judging panel comments
This is a wonderfully engaging history of Napoleon’s first 30 years. It gives fascinating accounts of the murky world of Corsican politics, and also of Napoleon’s complex relationship with his wife Josephine. The modern resonances of this book are remarkable. The challenges facing Napoleon in the Middle East echo through to today. Also, given Dwyer’s view, Napoleon may well have been the first of the modern politicians to use the media consciously to create an heroic image. The book is meticulously researched, well-written and is a work of significant merit.
Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers Philip Jones (Wakefield Press)
Ochre and Rust takes Aboriginal artefacts from their museum shelves and traces their stories, revealing charged and nuanced moments of encounter in Australia’s frontier history.
This book explores the Australian frontier through chapters centred on particular objects, collected from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Focusing on critical moments and individual actions, Ochre and Rust recasts the European-Aboriginal frontier as a complex zone of encounter, rather than a stark line of combat and racial conflict. Meticulously researched, each chapter reaches behind museum objects, photographs and archival documents to reveal a rich, textured history, brushed with drama and pathos. Ochre and Rust builds incrementally, resulting in a convincing new insight into our frontier past and the motives of its characters. (Wakefield Press)
The author
Philip Jones is an historian interested in the Australian frontier and in the artistic and cultural activity engendered by it. Before writing his doctorate on the history of ethnographic collecting he completed a law degree and majored in French history at the University of Adelaide. Appointed curator in the Anthropology Department at the South Australian Museum in 1984, he was a contributor to Peter Sutton’s seminal Dreamings: the art of Aboriginal Australia (1988). Philip has curated a number of ethnographic and historical exhibitions, and designed the concept for the South Australian Museum’s Aboriginal Cultures Gallery.
Since 1985 he has undertaken fieldwork with Aboriginal communities in southern and central Australia. He is currently involved in a site-recording project with Aboriginal people of the Birdsville region. The contemplative and reflective strain in Ochre and Rust reflects Philip’s strong interest in literature; from Goethe to Cortazar, and Stendhal to Sebald.
Non-fiction judging panel comments
The author sets himself the difficult task of extrapolating the implications of cultural contact between European and Aboriginal people through the examination of objects, most now in Australian museums. These disparate objects include a cake of red ochre, Aboriginal shields and Daisy Bates’ travelling suit. The book is written with elegance, simplicity and outstanding clarity. The insights drawn are through a true historian’s eye and the work illuminates larger debates about encounters between the first Australians and the European settlers. Jones’ conception of using artefacts to discuss aspects of the Australian frontier is an original one. His analysis has depth and breadth; and his prose has simplicity and elegance.
Shakespeare’s Wife Germaine Greer (Bloomsbury)
Little is known of the wife of England’s greatest playwright; a great deal, none of it complimentary, has been assumed. The omission of her name from Shakespeare’s will has been interpreted as evidence that she was nothing more than an unfortunate mistake from which Shakespeare did well to distance himself.
Yet Shakespeare is above all the poet of marriage. Before Shakespeare there were few comedies or tragedies of wooing and wedding. Tragedies were not about loving ‘not wisely but too well’ but about the fall of illustrious men. Comedies were not about the pitfalls that lay in wait along the path of true love but about getting away with adultery.
Shakespeare’s Wife is fascinating in its reconstruction of Ann Hathaway’s life, and the daily lives of Elizabethan women. It offers an illuminating portrait of their working routines, the rituals of their courtship and the minutiae of married life. (Bloomsbury)
The author
Germaine Greer gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1967 with a thesis on Shakespeare’s early comedies and she has taught Shakespeare at universities in Australia, Britain and the US. In 1986 Greer was invited to contribute the volume of Shakespeare to the prestigious Past Masters series. In 1989 she set up her own publishing imprint, Stump Cross Books, and went on to publish scholarly editions of Katherine Philips (1993), Anne Wharton (1997) and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. She currently lives in the UK.
Non-fiction judging panel comments
This book sets out to rehabilitate Ann Hathaway’s history, long dismissed as a minor detail in Shakespeare’s life. As an examination of life in Stratford in the 16th century it is superb, the detail extraordinary and the style engrossing. It is a work of considerable scholarship— the amount of detail the author has recovered from tomb stones and forgotten records is impressive—as well as displaying great mastery of prose. Shakespeare’s plays are brilliantly used to shed light on his domestic relationships. The argument is lively and engaging.
Vietnam: The Australian War Paul Ham (HarperCollins)
‘Surely God weeps’, an Australian soldier wrote in despair of the conflict in Vietnam. But no God intervened to shorten the years of carnage and devastation in this most controversial of wars.
Drawing on hundreds of accounts by soldiers, politicians, aid workers, entertainers and the Vietnamese people, Paul Ham reconstructs for the first time the full history of our longest military campaign. From the commitment to engage, through the fight over conscription and the rise of the anti-war movement, to the tactics and horror of the battlefield, Ham exhumes the truth about this politicians’ war—which affected so deeply the lives of 50,000 Australian servicemen and women.
More than 500 soldiers were killed and thousands wounded. Those who made it home returned to a hostile and ignorant country and a reception that scarred them forever. This is their story. (HarperCollins)
The author
Paul Ham is the author of Vietnam: The Australian War and Kokoda (2004). He is the Australia correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, and has written regularly for The Financial Times, The Bulletin, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald. He has a Masters Degree in Economic History from the London School of Economics and studied journalism and English literature at Charles Sturt and Sydney Universities. Born and educated in Sydney, he lived in London for many years, where he worked for the Financial Times Group and The Sunday Times. In 1990 he established a publishing company which specialised in financial newsletters. On his return to Australia in 1998, he set his mind to pursuing a lifelong interest in 20th century history—particularly Australia’s involvement in military conflict.
Fiction judging panel comments
This history of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War is an extraordinary piece of work. It uncovers the often disturbing story of the political context of Australia’s participation in Vietnam. The book is both an articulate and objective account of the Australian experience, but has a power that is much more than the sum of its parts. It presents a meticulous history and also resonates on an emotional level through its depth and searing honesty.
