AustLit
History
'Emily Scott founded this prize to perpetuate the memory of her husband Emeritus Professor Sir Ernest Scott Knight Bachelor. Ernest Scott was professor of History at the University was for 23 years. The prize commemorates his interest in the development of Australian historical studies.
'Ernest Scott was professor of History from 1913 to 1936. Born outside wedlock, raised by his grandparents and enjoying no higher education, he worked as a journalist for twenty years. As a young Fabian and Theosophist, he married the daughter of Annie Besant and migrated to Melbourne in 1892. His books on Australian exploration history made Scott into a professional among amateurs and antiquarians. He inspired his students to do archival research and to ask critical questions of popular historical mythologies. A generation of young Australians learned about the country's past from his notable Short History of Australia (1916).' (Source : website)
Latest Winners / Recipients
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Year: 2023
Also winner: Te Motunui Epa (Rachel Buchanan [Taranaki, Te Ātiawa], Bridget Williams Books). Also shortlisted: The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi; Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia.joint winner y
Elizabeth and John : The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm
Sydney
:
NewSouth Publishing
,
2022
24489829
2022
single work
biography
'A landmark and revealing joint biography of Elizabeth and John Macarthur, from one of Australia’s most respected historians.
'Arriving in 1790, Elizabeth and John Macarthur, both aged 23, were the first married couple to travel voluntarily from Europe to Australia, within three years of the initial invasion. John Macarthur soon became famous in New South Wales and beyond as a wool pioneer, a politician, and a builder of farms at Parramatta and Camden. For a long time, Elizabeth’s life was regarded as contingent on John’s and, more recently, John’s on Elizabeth’s.
'In Elizabeth and John, Alan Atkinson, prizewinning author of Europeans in Australia, draws on his work on the Macarthur family over 50 years to explore the dynamics of a strong and sinewy marriage, and family life over two generations. With the truth of John and Elizabeth Macarthur’s relationship much more complicated and more deeply human than other writers have suggested, Atkinson provides a finely drawn portrait of a powerful partnership.' (Publication summary)
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Year: 2022
joint winner Janet McCalman for 'Vandemonians: The repressed history of colonial Victoria'. (Joint winner with Lucy Mackintosh's 'Shifting Grounds: Deep histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland'.) -
Year: 2021
joint winner Grace Karskens for 'People of the River' (joint winner with a Aotearoa / New Zealand scholar). -
Year: 2019
winner y
Deep Time Dreaming : Uncovering Ancient Australia
Carlton
:
Black Inc.
,
2018
12791018
2018
single work
autobiography
'Soon after Billy Griffiths joins his first archaeological dig as camp manager and cook, he is hooked. Equipped with a historian’s inquiring mind, he embarks on a journey through time, seeking to understand the extraordinary deep history of the Australian continent.
'Deep Time Dreaming is the passionate product of that journey. It investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia.
'It explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and belonging. It is about a slow shift in national consciousness: the deep time dreaming that has changed the way many of us relate to this continent and its enduring, dynamic human history.' (Publication summary)
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Year: 2014
