2016
JUDGES’ COMMENTS
Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000) Locust Girl. A Lovesong, Merlinda Bobis (Spinifex Press) Locust Girl is set in a nameless parched landscape of drought, famine and human misery, a place reminiscent of today’s despair in Africa or the Middle East. Through a series of vividly‐
realised moments and scenes, Merlinda Bobis takes us to a next, post‐apocalyptic stage in history. Amedea, the Locust Girl of the title, tells her story of hardship, punishment and dislocation, endured in search of a yearned‐for life ‘beyond the border’. Bobis’ original and lyrical prose confidently blends mythical fantasy with realism, surreal events and images with an only too recognisable quotidian. Locust Girl is a transfiguring fiction that asks the reader to reflect on, and see into the hearts and lives of, those whom political systems and nations label outsiders. This novel is a work on behalf of the right to be small yet valued, to be cared for and to be included. It offers imaginative resistance to the forces and beliefs that actively conspire to deny individual and common humanity. Bobis’ story sounds loudly not only in today’s Australia, but also throughout an environmentally and politically disrupted world where repression and violence are rife, and where huge numbers of the otherwise lost leave their homes to undertake dangerous journeys in the search for life. There were many fine and stylistically accomplished works among this year's entries, but the distinctiveness, sweep and visual power of this short novel set it apart. Bobis’ fabulist, indeed fabulous, narrative enables the reader to imagine what it might look, smell and feel like to be treated as less than fully human. It asserts boldly that in a world seemingly devoid of rationality and logic, a young girl’s dream or a hallucinatory vision may well offer a means of maintaining hope, dignity and identity. UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($5,000 – sponsored by UTS) An Astronaut’s Life, Sonja Dechian (Text Publishing) Many of the atomised characters in Sonja Dechian’s wryly‐original collection of stories are loosely attached to their lives, all too ready to step off into a different and uncertain space. A man waking in a hospital room longs to return to the coma‐dream of his life with molecular biologist Francis Crick. Another resumes a relationship with an amnesic old flame, but the vividness of their relationship could exist entirely within his own imagination. A suburban backyard, excavated as part of a murder investigation, loosens the otherwise firm foundation of a relationship. P&D-4695-5/2016
Dechian’s often audacious scenarios are inventive and beautifully executed, at times reminiscent of the extrapolated weirdness and clean prose Peter Carey’s early stories in The 2016
Fat Man in History. The effects of climate change and ecological ruin burn at the edges of some stories and inform a number of others, adding subtly to the sense of things being off‐
kilter. Distance between the real and the imagined dissolves repeatedly and the shock of recognition is unsettling. Dechian trusts her reader. She resists drawing every story to a crafted conclusion, thereby inviting us not only to imagine a character’s unresolved and unwritten future, but also to wonder: Could this be our future? Our world’s future? Dechian is a bold new voice in Australian fiction. In this debut collection she offers a provocative and exciting range of voices and scenarios. Her images, characters and unsettling possibilities hover long after the covers are closed. Douglas Stewart Prize for Non‐fiction ($40,000) Reckoning: A Memoir, Magda Szubanski (Text Publishing) Reckoning is a reflection on courage and the ‘stone of madness’ that the children of damaged parents carry with them. It is the story of the author’s relationship with her father – a fearless but difficult man, who was still a boy when he became an assassin for the Polish resistance during the Second World War. It is also an absorbing narrative of growing up in the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1970s, finding a calling in comedy, and the author’s slow, painful coming out in the shadow of her father’s trauma. In tracing her life and career, Szubanski creates acutely‐observed incidental portraits of her Scottish mother and aunts, all of whom married Polish men before migrating to Australia. She describes the tight‐knit Polish community that surrounded her parents, and includes memorable sketches of sharpies, nuns and university students finding their voices at time when Australian comedy was coming into its own. The book’s finest portrait, however, is of Szubanski’s father, a man who claimed to have put his past behind him, yet who was driven, sometimes ruthlessly, to prepare his daughter for a world that could fall into darkness. Reckoning turns richly on the question of moral action, as the author struggles throughout her life and this book to understand the profound choices raised by her father’s past. The judges commend Magda Szubanski’s Reckoning as a book that is compelling from its first page. It is warm, clear, wise, funny and deeply intelligent. The amplitude of Szubanski’s writing is particularly impressive. Her voice has a light surety, while constantly giving narrative and moral weight to the larger themes of grief, family, migration and finding one’s place in the world. Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000) brush, Joanne Burns (Giramondo) P&D-4695-5/2016
In brush joanne burns continues her investigations into the odd junctures and social juxtapositions she observes within everyday encounters. Her work is highly comical and satirical, but her poems also inhabit a broad range of tones and have at their base an intense 2016
meditative poise and an intimacy of voice. The opening sequence bluff, which examines the world of finance, is a tour de force of enterprising language and pert observation and throws the absurdities of market economics into stark relief. A poet of meticulous craft, burns' diction is pinpointing and penetrating, yet it is always tempered with playfulness. Sydney is burns' recurrent locale, and in her poem 'comb', Bondi Beach is centre stage, both in its glamorous and not so glamorous aspects: 'even the sewer outlet water, its stream/ etched into the beach right down to the surf,/ could not stain bondi's ascendency.' burns' ear is always cocked for the right cadence, the right rhythm. She achieves a sustained and generous weaving of conversational phrasings and intensities of tone through the way in which she negotiates her line‐endings with the syntax. This book demonstrates that burns is one of the most skilled practitioners of the free verse line, and she has the ability to build sequences of short pieces into beautifully weighted larger structures. Alert to the complexities and contradictions embedded in our moral and social lives, burns gives us poems in which we can see the points at which these mix and intersect. Her poems allow as much emphasis to music and speech as to the image, and she explores her own unique terrain with a courageous and playful consciousness. Her ability to be constantly surprising is a hallmark of her work in general, and particularly in brush, her sixteenth collection. This poetry takes as its starting point the life of the body in all its materiality and presence; this striking faith in bare life delivers rewards as the poet skilfully works simultaneously outwards and inwards. Although the materials burns assembles in these poems are drawn from the realm of the quotidian, they are situated within global circuits of commerce, power, taste and discourse. By weaving the global into the daily she immerses the reader in intense visceral moments of being, connected to multiple histories and flows. While apparently modest in scope this intrepid and original poetry’s achievement is considerable as the commonplace is excavated in all its multifarious dimensions. Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children’s Literature ($30,000) Teacup, Rebecca Young & Matt Ottley (Scholastic Australia) Rebecca Young’s sparely written, multifaceted tale of a young refugee enables Matt Ottley’s glorious, painterly oil illustrations to shine in their moving picture book, Teacup. The child character has to find a new home and leaves with only a book, a bottle, a blanket and a teacup filled with earth. The sea voyage tests the boy immeasurably with its variable, often confronting, weather and empty horizons. But the natural elements of stars and clouds, as well as occasional interaction with whales and an albatross, also provide succour. When a seed sprouts in the boy’s teacup, the story becomes transcendent with hope and life. P&D-4695-5/2016
The masterful illustrations transpose the reader both onto and above the boy’s small boat isolated on the sea. Painted textures denote storm and stillness. Ottley also achieves this with his signature high angled long shots, positioning the boy as vulnerable. These perspectives are 2016
interspersed with closer eye‐level views to develop the reader’s relationship with the character. The illustrations generally fill the double‐page to emulate the large canvas of the open seas, but some are formed as panel‐strips, particularly to represent growth over time. The pictures, words and talisman of Teacup create a powerful, yet tender, allegory. Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature ($30,000) Laurinda, Alice Pung (Black Inc.) “Here, you could not be mediocre, but you had to be well‐balanced. Not too real, yet not too fake…” Lucy Lam, second‐generation daughter of Vietnamese migrant parents, living in the outer suburban fringes of Melbourne, receives a scholarship to the exclusive Laurinda Ladies College – a world away from her previous life. She finds herself in a world of privilege, where decoding the secret language and power relationships of the school is as important and as difficult as meeting the exacting standards expected of ‘Laurinda Ladies’. Told in epistolary form, Lucy’s sharp eye misses little, and the novel puts notions of power, privilege, race and identity under a microscope. In doing so, it presents readers with both a crisp portrait, and a searing critique of contemporary multicultural Australia. The adolescent characters are beautifully evinced, and the world of Laurinda evoked so effectively that it exudes a sense of understated menace, right from the opening lines. At the same time, the novel avoids any hint of didacticism or ‘issues’ based narrative, and instead draws the readers in through careful and measured storytelling. The end result is a novel that is often witty, very biting, and always engaging. Several factors made Laurinda a standout book with all three judges – perhaps most notably the degree of craft and deftness with which Alice Pung has handled the issues of character. While many of the books on this year’s lists were populated with interesting, challenging and dynamic characters, the cast of Laurinda are perfect drivers for a plot that refuses to deal in binaries, but which rather sets about teasing apart and exploring the complexity of interpersonal relationships as they try to function within a tangle of often conflicting social and cultural values. The end result is a novel that is utterly engaging and believable, and which builds an extraordinary sense of empathy with its readers. Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000) The Bleeding Tree, Angus Cerini (Currency Press in association with Griffin Theatre Company P&D-4695-5/2016
Angus Cerini gives us three women in a sort of hell. While it may appear to be one of their own making, as the work unfolds, we are instructed in what has brought them to the point of violence. The shocking but sustained arc of action involves a family whose lives are at the mercy of a domineering patriarch, and their savage retaliation. In language that is robust and idiomatic, redolent with memorable and original imagery, Cerini constructs a world that is recognisably ours despite feeling perverse and fantastical. 2016
Fizzing with energy, passion and confident craftsmanship, Cerini’s story of downtrodden women who rise is demanding, blackly hilarious and unflinchingly tough. In a sustained narrative line passed between the three characters, Cerini demonstrates control of form and momentum. He refuses to let us off the hook, insisting we consider the ramifications of abuse – and what happens when victims reverse the roles – as they do here with grisly results. This short but formidable work is as epic in its power as any great tragedy. By turns murder ballad, gothic horror story, outback myth and revenge thriller, Cerini’s cautionary tale is grotesque and exquisite. His rural Furies hunt and haunt us. They insist, in language that is unforgettable for its cruel beauty and tender ugliness, that the cycle of domestic violence continues long after bruises have healed. While sharing qualities with the Greeks and Jacobeans, Angus Cerini’s wildly poetic text is a morality play for these days and this land. Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000) Deadline Gallipoli, Episode 4: “The Letter”, Cate Shortland (Matchbox Pictures) In this concluding episode of the series, the drive of journalists Bartlett, Murdoch and Bean to report on the truth of war comes to it’s climax, resulting in a bittersweet victory – the Gallipoli evacuation. Bartlett and Murdoch successfully conspire to convey the reality of Lord Hamilton’s disastrous campaign to the Australian and British Prime Ministers. Bean has stayed with the remaining soldiers and leaves with them, having documented their lives by collecting letters, diaries and mementoes, ultimately forming part of Bean’s legacy – the Australian War Memorial. Cate Shortland’s script deftly interweaves the various characters and their story arcs bringing them to a conclusion that is seamless and satisfying. Shuler’s final sequence is tragic and beautiful. Murdoch and Bartlett’s confrontation of the British military is delicately handled, conveying victory but not without personal toll. But it’s with Bean, typhoid ridden and emaciated, that Shortland takes us through the exhilarating yet heart‐breaking Anzac evacuation. And although this event is highly documented, the script is infused with unpredictability, tension and emotion, focusing on friendships (particularly Bean and his loyal assistant, Bazely) forged by tragedy, loyalty and an unwavering survival instinct. A skillfully emotional, page turning read. P&D-4695-5/2016
The reality of war, culminating in the legacy of the painful maturing of a nation is powerful subject matter for any writer. However, Shortland elevates the material in a manner that is succinct and poetic, beautiful and compelling. Action is described with filmic elegance and fine, detailed attention. Dialogue is firmly rooted in character, deeply moving but without sentimentality as the themes of love, honour, friendship, sacrifice are played out… This is a sublime screenplay, masterful storytelling. 2016
Multicultural NSW Award ($20,000) Good Muslim Boy Osamah Sami (Hardie Grant Books) The often hilarious, equally moving, and always entertaining memoir of trying to find your place in the world – from the martyr‐strewn graveyards of the Iran‐Iraq border to the peaceful streets of suburban Melbourne – Good Muslim Boy is an enlightening and affectionate account of the struggles many new Australians face in balancing the demands of the society they left behind and those of their new home. Ostracised as Iraqi Arab refugees in Persian Iran at the height of the Iran‐Iraq war, Osamah Sami’s family, led by his wise, compassionate father, arrive in a country as alien to them as Iran must be to many Australians. With humour and grit, they adjust to their new home with the same spirit and courage that helped them survive the post‐
revolutionary theocracy. Intriguingly structured between Sami’s own life, including his journey to Australia and to adulthood, and the often harrowing and heartbreaking account of his and his father’s last trip to Iran, Good Muslim Boy is a powerful saga of discovering the true meaning of home. A gripping tale of exile and return, Sami deftly uses humour and a light, compassionate touch in this deeply affecting and thoughtful memoir. Constantly subverting stereotypes and confounding expectations, Sami is a master of comic writing, particularly in the candid depictions of his adolescent misadventures and the culture shocks he later experiences in his new homeland. Equally, Sami does not shy from describing the horrors of war and death, and he does so with raw and sometimes unflinching honesty. An inspiring account of survival, Good Muslim Boy is a beautifully written memoir that offers a powerful and hopeful message of love, understanding and universal humanity. Indigenous Writers Prize ($30,000) (NEW PRIZE) JOINT WINNERS: Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe (Magabala Books) This vital book wrestles with Australia’s ideas about itself and its oldest traditions. Dark Emu injects a profound authenticity into the conversation about how we Australians understand our continent. Pascoe demonstrates with convincing evidence, often from early explorers’ journals, that the Aboriginal peoples lived settled and sophisticated lives here for millennia before Cook. Aboriginal democracy created ‘the Great Australian Peace’ on a continent which was extensively farmed, skilfully managed and deeply loved. The British colonist Cecil Rhodes outlawed any mention of Shona architectural achievement in Zimbabwe; Pascoe argues convincingly that a similar intellectual ‘disappearing’ of Aboriginal civilisations has taken place here. Dark Emu reveals enormous Aboriginal achievement in governance and agriculture, and restores these to their rightful place at the epicentre of Australian history. P&D-4695-5/2016
Pascoe’s thesis is not simply about what once was but, critically, it also informs a vision of an Australia yet to be. ‘Ensuring that Aboriginal life and history are not wiped from the map because they interrupt the view from Parliament House,’ he argues, ‘will have a convulsive 2016
effect on the country’s prospects.’ Passionately and with great love, Pascoe builds a picture of a shared future in Australia based on the traditions which sustained the Aboriginal Nations for so long: respectful human co‐operation across political borders, and knowledgeable, sustainable care of the natural world. A voice at once catalysing and unifying, Bruce Pascoe is without peer in his field. Dark Emu is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what Australia once was, or what it might yet be if we heed the lessons of long and sophisticated human occupation. Heat and Light, Ellen van Neerven (University of Queensland Press) The judges were very impressed with this remarkable exercise in fiction. Though the three sections of her narrative are apparently discontinuous, they add up to a very satisfying and exciting whole, involving the diverse experience of a family named the Kresingers. It is as if Ellen van Neerven has held up three different lenses to the experiences of an Aboriginal family. The judges felt an urge to celebrate such aplomb and apparent ease in a writer who was born only a quarter of a century ago — to Dutch and Aboriginal parents. P&D-4695-5/2016
Van Neerven’s assurance, her unique voice, and her confidence as a narrator promise great things in what we hope will be a long career. Her narrative idiom and dialogue are subtle yet seem unstudied and straightforward. Young womanhood and women in general are well‐
realised. This is a work of fiction by a born novelist.