History
Latest Winners / Recipients
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Year: 2024
Indexed selectively.winner y
Flawed Hero
Crows Nest
:
Allen and Unwin
,
2023
26386838
2023
single work
biography
'With a Victoria Cross and Medal for Gallantry, Ben Roberts-Smith was the most highly decorated Australian soldier, the best of the best. When he returned to civilian life, he became a poster boy for a nation hungry for warrior heroes. He embodied the myth of the classic Anzac, seven-foot-tall and bulletproof. But as his public reputation continued to grow, inside the army rumours were circulating. Gold Walkley Award winning journalist Chris Masters was the first to investigate the rumours of summary executions, bloodings and bullying, and began to examine more closely the man we wanted to hero-worship. When the stories hit the headlines and with a billionaire media baron's backing, Ben Roberts-Smith sued. So commenced the defamation trial of the century, a courtroom contest of tightrope tactics and fierce wit. Chris Masters tells the extraordinary story of Ben Roberts-Smith, the man at the centre of this de facto war crimes trial, from the battlegrounds of Afghanistan to the front lines of the Federal Court.'
(Publication summary)
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Year: 2022
Indexed selectively. Also shortlisted: 'No Enemies, No Friends: Restoring Australia's Global Relevance'. Also longlisted: 'Sold Down The River: How robber barons and Wall Street traders cornered Australia’s water market'; 'Keeping Them Honest: The case for a genuine national integrity commission and other vital democratic reforms'; 'Waiting for Gonski: How Australia failed its schools'; and 'Rogue Forces: An explosive insiders’ account of Australian SAS War Crimes in Afghanistan'.winner y
Telling Tennant's Story : The Strange Career of the Great Australian Silence
Carlton
:
Black Inc.
,
2022
23596988
2022
single work
autobiography
'Tennant Creek and Australia’s Unresolved Past
'The tale of a town, and of a nation
'Returning after fifty years to the frontier town where he lived as a boy, Dean Ashenden finds Tennant Creek transformed, but its silence about the past still mostly intact.
'Provoked by a half-hidden account, Ashenden sets out to understand how the story of ‘relations between two racial groups in a single field of life’ has been told and not told, in this town and across the nation.
'In a riveting combination of memoir, reportage and political and intellectual history, Ashenden traces the strange career of the great Australian silence – from its beginnings in the first encounters of black and white, through the work of the early anthropologists, the historians and the courts in landmark cases about land rights and the Stolen Generations, to still-continuing controversy.
'In a moving finale, Ashenden goes back to Tennant Creek once more to meet for the first time some of his Aboriginal contemporaries, and to ask how the truths of Australia’s story can best be told.' (Publication summary)
