AustLit

Held in 2002 and 2004 on the theme There is No Place Like Home school children were encouraged to find and interview someone who was driven or torn from their home and forced to begin a new life and make a new home among strangers. Children and young adults were invited to find and tell the stories of refugee or Indigenous Australians, displaced peoples from recent times or from the distant past. The competition encouragee the discovery of the meaning and experience of exile or forced dispossession, but participants also discovered how their peers or elders survived and rebuilt their lives.The 2004 competition built on the successes of the 2002 experience. Again writers were given absolute freedom of discovery, opinion and mode of expression. And again, prominent Australian authors were the judges.