The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent Michael Cathcart

The book

The ways Australians live and think have been shaped by water – or rather by the lack of it. The Water Dreamers tells the story of the settlement of Australia and how our culture has been shaped by the scarcity of water and by the need to fill the imagined silence of the continent with the sounds of civilisation. It’s the story of who we are today as much as a history of how the country grew.

The Water Dreamers is an illuminating look at the ways people have imagined and interpreted Australia while struggling to understand this continent and striving to conquer its obstacles. It’s an important work of environmental and cultural history with an unmistakable sense of how, today, we are part of that continuing story.

The author

Michael Cathcart was born in Melbourne in the year television came to Australia. He teaches Australian history at the University of Melbourne and works for the ABC. He has presented several programs for Radio National including Arts Today, Bush Telegraph and the Radio National Quiz. For ABC TV he has presented the history magazine show Rewind, and the documentary series Rogue Nation. His most recent appearance was in the documentary The Reincarnations of William Buckley. 

Judges’ comments

Michael Cathcart’s superb cultural history, The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent, demonstrates howwater – whether in its abundance or deficiency – came to be deeply embedded in the Australian settlers’ psyche. Through a lively cast of characters, with myriad agendas, Cathcart’s sympathetic yet critical eye records their disappointments, fears and achievements as they struggle to come to terms with a strange and often unremitting landscape. The “Water Dreamers” were driven by Western concepts of progress challenged to “civilise” the landscape and shut out the silence. As such they failed to heed the warnings of poor land use, from the degradation of the Tank Stream in the 19th century, to the contamination of rivers by salt and blue-green algae in the 20th. Aboriginal communities had practiced centuries-old water and land management techniques but their knowledge was rarely recognised, as they were gradually dispossessed of their lands. In concluding his history, Cathcart urges reconciliation, ‘Between settlers and the indigenous peoples. And between settlers and the land itself’ – a reconciliation recognising the complexities of the Australian landscape and the need for a strong stewardship of the land.

Strange Places: A Memoir of Mental Illness Will Elliott

The book

In 2006 Will Elliott’s first novel, The Pilo Family Circus, was published. It won five literary awards and great acclaim, both nationally and internationally. What nobody knew was that the young author of that work of terrifying fantasy had recently recovered from a psychotic episode and had been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Strange Places takes us on a journey through psychosis and out the other side, documenting the delusions, the drugs and the insights that recovery brings. A beautifully written memoir of a harrowing – and enlightening – time, from one of Australia’s best young writers.  

The author

Will Elliott was born in Brisbane, Australia where he has lived all his life. At age 19 he dropped out of law school after developing schizophrenia. He spent the following years living below the poverty line writing fiction. In the inaugural ABC Fiction Award, his manuscript, The Pilo Family Circus, beat more than 900 entries and was subsequently published in Australia, the UK, the US, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. His work in progress, a fantasy called The Pendulum Trilogy, is being published by HarperCollins in Australia and Quercus in the UK.

Judges’ comments

Will Elliott’s deftly written memoir, Strange Places: A Memoir of Mental Illness, revisits the intense world of psychosis and schizophrenia, accelerated by his drug abuse, which consumed his late teens and early twenties. With wry humour and a raw edginess, Elliott takes us on his strange roller coaster ride. At first this is an exhilarating world, in which barrages of coded signals and his paranoid interpretations convince Elliott that he is invincible. But eventually, as he reluctantly accepts medical assistance, the tempo of his life moves into slow-motion: time stretches inexorably as slovenliness and sleep – even at one point, suicide – appear the only options. And all the while, around the edges, we are aware of his caring, long-suffering family and friends. In reaching out to help Elliott, they too are continually living a nightmare.  Elliott’s story, told without self-pity, illustrates just how much havoc conditions such as psychosis, can wreak. We are challenged to recognise that this condition, so frequently shrouded in ignorance, has in fact many dimensions – social, economic and political. For Elliott, the combination of working with medical assistance, and, incalculably, having the prolonged, sustained support of others, was key to his journey back to a sense of normality. Not the least important, however, was Elliott’s grit and his ability to write his way back. That he achieved this with distinction is clearly demonstrated in this memoir.

The Colony: The History of Early Sydney Grace Karskens

The book

The Colony is the story of the marvellously contrary, endlessly energetic early years of Sydney. It is an intimate account of the transformation of a campsite in a beautiful cove to the town that later became Australia's largest and best-known city.

From the sparkling beaches to the foothills of the Blue Mountains, Grace Karskens skilfully reveals how landscape shaped the lives of the original Aboriginal inhabitants and newcomers alike. She traces the ways in which relationships between the colonial authorities and ordinary men and women broke with old patterns, and the ways that settler and Aboriginal histories became entwined. She uncovers the ties between the burgeoning township and its rural hinterland expanding along the river systems of the Cumberland Plain.

This is a landmark account of the birthplace of modern Australia, and a fascinating and richly textured narrative of people and place.

The author

Grace Karskens teaches Australian history at the University of New South Wales. Her groundbreaking book The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney won the 1998 NSW Premier's Award for Local and Regional History and established the author as a leading historian of colonial Australia. As Project Historian for the world-renowned Cumberland-Gloucester Streets Archaeological Project (1994-1999) she combined history and archaeology to explore the lost world of the Rocks neighbourhoods in her book Inside the Rocks. She has also written local histories and is a regular contributor to journals on topics ranging from convicts to museums to grave-robbers.

Judges’ comments

The Colony is a marvellous story grounded in the landscape – from pre-history to successive transformations of the colony from campsites to towns, from garden plots to huge land-holdings. Tracing and exploring the sense of place is the backbone of Karskens’ narrative. Always present in Karskens’ story is the Indigenous population, a dynamic, pervasive presence, a presence with victories as well as defeats, of shapers as well as of the dispossessed. Karskens’ scholarship is rich in the exploration of what she lovingly calls ‘the city of words’ – the work of fellow historians, archaeologists, geologists, museologists, and art and architectural historians. Karskens’ own voice is a confident one, balanced, perceptive and startling in its simplicity and directness as she challenges received wisdom.

The Life and Death of Democracy John Keane

The book

John Keane’s The Life and Death of Democracy will inspire and shock its readers. Presenting the first grand history of democracy for well over a century, it poses along the way some tough and timely questions: can we really be sure that democracy had its origins in ancient Greece? How did democratic ideals and institutions come to have the shape they do today? Given all the recent fanfare about democracy promotion, why are many people now gripped by the feeling that a bad moon is rising over all the world’s democracies? Do they have a future or is democracy fated to disappear?

Keane confronts his readers with an entirely fresh and irreverent look at the past, present and future of democracy, explaining how and why democracy spread in modern times to Latin America, Africa and Asia. Unearthing the beginnings of institutions and ideals like government by public assembly, votes for women, the secret ballot, trial by jury and press freedom, it also tracks the changing, hotly disputed meanings of democracy and some of the extraordinary, yet long forgotten characters, that dedicated their lives to building or defending it.

In The Life and Death of Democracy, Keane reasons why he believes we are presently living in a new age of ‘monitory democracy’, why a democracy continues to be the best form of government on earth and why he believes democracies all over the word are sleepwalking their way into deep trouble.

The author

Born in southern Australia and educated at the Universities of Adelaide, Toronto and Cambridge, John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. The Life and Death of Democracy is one of many books written by Professor Keane and the first full-scale history of democracy for over a century.

Judges’ comments

Professor John Keane’s The Life and Death of Democracy is a monumental history as well as a prescient analysis as to the future of democracy. Keane moves outside previous Anglo-Saxon perspectives to range from India to Uruguay to the Islamic world, in order to emphasise the global roots of democracy. Keane reminds us, however, that ‘democracy is not the timeless fulfilment of our political destiny’. He outlines the emergence of ‘monitory democracy’, a new form replacing representative democracy, and its impact, both good and bad, of the internet, lobbying groups, Non-Government Organisations and the media. Keane’s historical broad sweep, full of detailed knowledge and cogent insights, is expressed in a lively anecdotal prose style, making The Life and Death of Democracy essential reading for academia and the general public alike. Keane makes a strong case for a world history of democracy that is no longer conceived within the confines of national or linguistic boundaries, in order to achieve ‘a more sustainable, balanced and equitable global society’.

The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir Mark Tredinnick

The book

'I came to the plateau in the winter of ninety-eight. A place a thousand metres in the air ... a world of sandstone and eucalypt and unregenerate weather, a place just fallen from the sky ...'

The Blue Plateau is a lyrical natural history of the Blue Mountains, and a memoir of one man's attempt to belong there.

An inspired meditation on the contours of the land and its people, of time and place and family, the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of friendship, it is a book of many belongings. Here you will meet the plateau's first people; you will meet Les and Henryk and Jim; you will walk the Kedumba and the Kanimbla in drought, fire and flood.

Evocative and deeply moving, The Blue Plateau is a poet's story of an astonishing place and a loving portrait of home.

The author

Mark Tredinnick spent a number of years in the Blue Mountains, the inspiration for his landscape memoir, The Blue Plateau. He also wrote the best-selling writing guides The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Green Grammar Book and The Little Black Book of Business Writing. His other books include A Place on Earth (2003) and The Land’s Wild Music (2005). His awards include the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize and the Calibre Essay Prize. His work has appeared in Australian Book Review, Best Australian Essays, Island, Southerly, The Australian, The Bulletin, The Sydney Morning Herald, and other newspapers, journals and anthologies in Australia, the UK and the US.

Judges’ comments

Mark Tredinnick's account of his family’s seven year residence in the Blue Mountains and his interaction with the landscape and his neighbours is a compelling work of “creative non-fiction”, told through a variety of literary forms – history, travel, biography, memoirs, poetry and prose. Tredinnick is a literary fringe dweller in the best sense of the word, as he observes the changing seasons, recalls and recreates the lives of settlers through conversations and diaries, and their struggles against hard times, droughts and bushfires. Tredinnick cleverly unpeels, through his ‘experiment in seeing and listening’, the region's natural “sacred geography”. As pasts and presents mingle, Tredinnick's landscape memoir achieves a graphic sense of people and place.  

The Ghost at the Wedding Shirley Walker

The book

Three generations, two world wars, one family.

In the year of 1914, in the canefields of northern New South Wales, the young men couldn't wait to set off for the adventure of war. The women coped as best they could, raised the children, lived in fear of being next to receive an official telegram. They grieved their dead, and came to learn that for returned men there are worse things than death in combat. They bore more children to replace those lost in the First World War, and the sons were just the right age to go off to the second.

The Ghost at the Wedding is like no other account of war, chronicling events from both sides – the horror of the battlefields and the women who were left at home. Shirley Walker's depictions of those battles – Gallipoli, the Western Front, the Kokoda Track – are grittily accurate, their reverberations haunting.

Written with the emotional power of a novel, here is a true story whose sorrow is redeemed by astonishing beauty and strength of spirit.

The author

After a long career as a lecturer in Australian literature at the University of New England, Shirley Walker is now an Honorary Fellow at the institution. She is a past President of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the Founding Director of the Centre for Australian Language and Literature Studies at UNE, and the author of four books and numerous critical articles. She now lives on the far north coast of New South Wales, between the escarpment and the sea.

Judges’ comments

Shirley Walker’s family memoir evocatively traces the impact of two world wars on three generations of an Australian family through the perspective of Walker's mother-in-law, Jessie. Walker’s almost lyrical recreation of rural life in the Clarence region of northern New South Wales precedes the horrors of the First World War, where Jessie’s brother Joe, ‘the ghost at the wedding’, is lost, and her husband to be, Eddie, returns with his face severely disfigured. The Ghost at the Wedding symbolises the women who wait rather than the men that leave. The emotional and physical scars of the war on Eddie impact on Jessie and her family for decades to come, but history repeats itself after Jessie’s children leave for the Second World War. Walker’s imaginative use of family photos, letters, diaries and Jessie’s paintings results in a superb and moving recreation of Jessie’s ‘family's truth’, in which Jessie's spirit ultimately assuages the sorrow and the heartbreak.