The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced in Melbourne on 8th December. Controversy surrounded the Australian History prize, in particular, when this was jointly awarded to Professor Joan Beaumont for her acclaimed Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War and to Hal G. P. Colebatch for his anti-union Australia’s Secret War: How Unionists Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II. Some critics have suggested that Colebatch’s late entry should have been submitted to the Australian Fiction category, given its alleged hearsay and historical fantasies.
Less controversial was the prize for Australian Fiction which was also shared by two writers. The joint winners in this category were Richard Flanagan for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a story about POW working on the Thai-Burma railway, together with Steven Carroll for A World of Other People, a novel that features T.S. Eliot as a central character.
Richard Flanagan, winner of this year’s Booker Prize, was applauded when he revealed in his acceptance speech that he would donate his share of the prize money – $40,000 – to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
“The lesson that my father took from the POW camps”, Flanagan noted in his acceptance speech, “was that the measure of any civilised society was its willingness to look after its weakest. Money is like shit, my father used to say. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and you can grow things.”
Flanagan said words were the first beautiful things his father knew, and he hoped his prize money would contribute to closing the Indigenous literacy gap.
“If just one of those children in turn becomes a writer, if just one brings to Australia and to the world an idea of the universe that arises out of that glorious lineage of 60,000 years of Australian civilisation, then I will think this prize has rewarded not just me, but us all,” he said.
The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were first announced at the end of 2007 by the first Rudd Ministry following the 2007 election. They are administered by the Minister for Arts. The awards initially comprised four categories: fiction, non-fiction, young adult and children’s fiction. In 2012, the poetry category was added and the former Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History was combined with the awards.
Winners receive $80,000 tax-free each, or half this sum in the case of joint winners, while shortlisted authors receive $5,000 tax-free.
It has been a controversial year for the awards. The shortlist was announced late and new appointments to the non-fiction and history judging panel, in particular, included conservative political commentator Gerard Henderson (panel’s chair) and former Liberal MP and editor of Quadrant magazine, Peter Coleman.
According to Chris Feik, publisher at Black Inc and editor of Quarterly Essay, the “Prime Minister’s award for non-fiction professes to judge the best non-fiction written by an Australian each year. The politicisation of this award means the award’s integrity has been seriously damaged.” To make the judging more transparent, Feik recommends that all entries be published rather than just those shortlisted. This measure, he argues, would allow Australian readers “to judge the judge – and to arrive at their own decisions as to the best and brightest.”1
References
Helen Davidson, ‘Row over Tony Abbott’s ‘nasty’ intervention to split literary prize’, The Guardian, 11 Dec 2014.
Chris Feik, ‘Prime Minister’s Literary Awards: judge Gerard Henderson politicises the prize’, Sydney Morning Herald, 6 Jun 2014.
Marilyn Lake, ‘Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War by Joan Beaumont – book review‘, Australian Book Review, Feb 2014
Mike Seccombe, ‘PM’s Literary Awards ignite fresh history wars’, The Saturday Paper, December 13, 2014.
Martin Shaw, ‘Prime minister’s literary intervention makes a sham of peak event’, The Guardian, 11 Dec 2014.
Peter Stanley, ‘Who are the liars? A response to Hal Colebatch’s Australia’s Secret War’, Honest History, 17 Dec 2014.