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ALS Gold Medal (1928-)
or Australian Literary Studies Gold Medal
Subcategory of ASAL Awards
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History

The ALS Gold Medal is awarded annually for an outstanding literary work in the preceding calendar year. The Medal was inaugurated by the Australian Literature Society, which was founded in Melbourne in 1899 and incorporated into the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) in 1982.

The medal was originally awarded for the best novel published in the previous year but, since 1937, other literary forms have been eligible for consideration. The medal has sometimes been called the Crouch Gold Medal after its principal benefactor, Colonel R. A. Crouch.

No nominations are required, though ASAL members are invited to propose potential winners to the judging panel.

The award was either not offered or not awarded in the following years: 1943-1947 inc., 1953, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1967-1969 inc., and 1975-1982 inc.

Notes

  • Awarded annually since 1928, originally for the best novel published in the previous year, but since 1937 other literary forms have been eligible for consideration. Since 1982 the medal has been awarded by ASAL (Association for the Study of Australian Literature). The medal has sometimes been called the Crouch Gold Medal after its principal benefactor, Colonel R. A. Crouch. (Oxford Companion to Australian Literature)

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2023

winner y separately published work icon We Come With This Place Debra Dank , Richmond : Echo Publishing , 2022 24391084 2022 multi chapter work essay prose Indigenous story

'A deeply personal, profound tribute to family and the Gudanji Country to which Debra Dank belongs.

'We Come with This Place is a remarkable book, as rich, varied and surprising as the vast landscape in which it is set. Debra Dank has created an extraordinary mosaic of vivid episodes that move about in time and place to tell an unforgettable story of country and people.

'There is great pain in these pages, and anger at injustice, but also great love, in marriage and in family, and for the land. Dank faces head on the ingrained racism, born of brutal practice and harsh legislation, that lies always under the skin of Australia, the racism that calls a little Aboriginal girl names and beats and rapes and disenfranchises the generations before hers. She describes sudden terrible violence, between races and sometimes at home. But overwhelmingly this is a book about strong, beloved parents and grandparents, guiding and teaching their children and grandchildren what country means, about joyful gatherings and the pleasures of eating food provided by the place that nourishes them, both spiritually and physically.

'Dank calibrates human emotions with honesty and insight, and there is plenty of dry, down-to-earth humour. You can feel and smell and see the puffs of dust under moving feet, the ever-present burning heat, the bright exuberance of a night-time campfire, the emerald flash of a flock of budgerigars, the journeying wind, the harshness of a station shanty, the welcome scent of fresh water.

'We Come with This Place is deeply personal, a profound tribute to family and the Gudanji Country to which Debra Dank belongs, but it is much more than that. Here is Australia as it has been for countless generations, land and people in effortless balance, and Australia as it became, but also Australia as it could and should be.'  (Publication summary)

Year: 2022

winner y separately published work icon Human Looking Andy Jackson , Artarmon : Giramondo Publishing , 2021 22958297 2021 selected work poetry

'A ground-breaking insight into the experience of disability, from a distinguished poet who has lived with Marfan Syndrome, including severe spinal curvature, and whose poems give voice to those who are often treated as ‘other’ or alien. 

'The poems are visceral and intimate, they comfort and discomfort at the same time – empathy for the other seems to falter, only to expand and deepen.

'The poems in Human Looking speak with the voices of the disabled and the disfigured, in ways which are confronting, but also illuminating and tender. They speak of surgical interventions, and of the different kinds of disability which they seek to ‘correct’. They range widely, finding figures to identify with in mythology and history, art and photography, poetry and fiction. A number of poems deal with unsettling extremes of embodiment, and with violence against disabled people. Others emerge out of everyday life, and the effects of illness, pain and prejudice. The strength of the speaking voice is remarkable, as is its capacity for empathy and love. ‘I, this wonderful catastrophe’, the poet has Mary Shelley’s monstrous figure declare. The use of unusual and disjunctive – or ‘deformed’ – poetic forms, adds to the emotional impact of the poems.'

Source : publication summary

Year: 2021

winner y separately published work icon Song of the Crocodile Nardi Simpson , Sydney : Hachette Australia , 2020 19679450 2020 single work novel

'Darnmoor, The Gateway to Happiness. The sign taunts a fool into feeling some sense of achievement, some kind of end- that you have reached a destination in the very least. Yet the sign states clearly, Darnmoor is the gateway, and merely a measure, the mark, a point on a road you begin to move closer to a place you might really want to be.

'Darnmoor is the home of the Billymil family, three generations who have lived in this 'gateway town'. Race relations between Indigenous and settler families are fraught, though the rigid status quo is upheld through threats and soft power rather than the overt violence of yesteryear.

'As progress marches inexorably onward, Darnmoor and its surrounds undergo rapid social and environmental changes, but as some things change, some stay exactly the same. Our protagonist characters are watched (and sometimes visited) by ancestral spirits and spirits of the recently deceased, who look out for their descendants and attempt to help them on the right path.

'When the town's secrets start to be uncovered the town will be rocked by a violent act that forever shatters a century of silence.

'Full of music, Gamillaray language and exquisite description, Song of The Crocodile is a lament to choice and change, and the unyielding land that sustains us all, if we can but listen to it.' (Publication summary)

Year: 2020

winner y separately published work icon Nganajungu Yagu Charmaine Papertalk-Green , Melbourne : Cordite Press , 2019 16924590 2019 selected work poetry

'Forty years ago, letters, words and feelings flowed between a teenage daughter and her mother. Letters writen by that teenage daughter – me – handed around family back home, disappeared. Yet letters from that mother to her teenage daughter – me – remained protected in my red life-journey suitcase. I carried them across time and landscapes as a mother would carry her baby in a thaga.

'In 1978–79, I was living in an Aboriginal girls’ hostel in the Bentley suburb of Perth, attending senior high school. Mum and I sent handwritten letters to each other. I was a small-town teenager stepping outside of all things I had ever known. Mum remained in the only world she had ever known.

'Nganajungu Yagu was inspired by Mother’s letters, her life and the love she instilled in me for my people and my culture. A substantial part of that culture is language, and I missed out on so much language interaction having moved away. I talk with my ancestors’ language – Badimaya and Wajarri – to honour ancestors, language centres, language workers and those Yamaji who have been and remain generous in passing on cultural knowledge.

'–Charmain Papertalk Green'  (Publication summary) 

Year: 2019

winner y separately published work icon Click Here For What We Do Pamela Brown , Sydney : Vagabond Press , 2018 13965575 2018 selected work poetry

'Click here for what we do is a cluster of four loosely connected poems that are not only sceptical of the status quo's serial mendacities and hype but, in a way, they also attempt a coming to terms with the erosion of the idealistic conditions that once made non-mainstream culture, including poetry, so viable and, even, necessary. For Pam Brown writing poetry is a habit, a disorganised ritual. Her poetic inventories begin in everyday bricolage. Real things interrupt the poems the same way thoughts and phrases do. She dismantles monumental intent and then, by mixing (rather than layering), splices the remains into a melange of imagery and thoughtful lyric. Hers is a friendly intelligence that clues in connections to the 'social' as the poems make political and personal associative links. Spurning any lofty design these poems debug the absurdities of contemporary materialism with surreptitious humour. Though disquiet is present it's usually temporary. Here, thinking about the future can be 'trickgensteinian' and yet Pam Brown's poems offer a circumspect optimism.' (Publication summary)

Works About this Award

Yamaji Poet Charmaine Papertalk Green Awarded 2020 Australian Literary Society Gold Medal Michelle Stanley , 2020 single work column
— Appears in: ABC News [Online] , July 2020;

'Yamaji woman and author Charmaine Papertalk Green has been awarded the 2020 Australian Literary Society gold medal for her book of poetry Nganajungu Yagu.'

'Outstanding' Mears up with the Greats Stephen Romei , 2012 single work column
— Appears in: The Australian , 5 July 2012; (p. 7)
Undercover Susan Wyndham , 2012 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 17-18 March 2012; (p. 31)
A column canvassing current literary news including a report on the 2012 ALS Gold Medal shortlist and a comment on a new South Australian publishing venture, MidnightSun Publishing.
Undercover Susan Wyndham , 2012 single work column
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 17-18 March 2012; (p. 31)
A column canvassing current literary news including a report on the 2012 ALS Gold Medal shortlist and a comment on a new South Australian publishing venture, MidnightSun Publishing.
Bookmarks William Yeoman , 2009 single work column
— Appears in: The West Australian , 20 March 2009; (p. 12)
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