W. K. Hancock Prize (1987-)
Subcategory of The Australian Historical Association Awards
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History

'The biennial W.K. Hancock Prize recognises and encourages an Australian scholar who has recently published a first scholarly book in any field of history.

'The W.K. Hancock Prize was instituted in 1987 by the Australian Historical Association, to honour the contribution to the study and writing of history in Australia by Sir Keith Hancock. Since his death in 1988, it has served to commemorate his life and achievements.' (https://www.theaha.org.au/awards-and-prizes/w-k-hancock-prize/)

Notes

  • 'The W.K. Hancock Prize was instituted in 1987 by the Australian Historical Association, to honour the contribution to the study and writing of history in Australia by Sir Keith Hancock. Since his death in 1988, it has served to commemorate his life and achievements.

    The W.K. Hancock Prize is intended to give recognition and encouragement to an Australian scholar who has recently published a first book in any field of history. Consisting of a cash award and a citation, it is awarded biennially for a first book published in the two years preceding the year of the award. ' Source: www.theaha.org.au/ (Sighted 11/06/2009

Latest Winners / Recipients

Year: 2018

winner y separately published work icon The Land Is Our History : Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State Miranda Johnson , New York (City) : Oxford University Press , 2016 11347435 2016 multi chapter work criticism

"The Land Is Our History tells the story of indigenous legal activism at a critical political and cultural juncture in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the late 1960s, indigenous activists protested assimilation policies and the usurpation of their lands as a new mining boom took off, radically threatening their collective identities. Often excluded from legal recourse in the past, indigenous leaders took their claims to court with remarkable results: for the first time, their distinctive histories were admitted as evidence of their rights.

Miranda Johnson examines how indigenous peoples advocated for themselves in courts and commissions of inquiry between the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, chronicling an extraordinary and overlooked history in which virtually disenfranchised peoples forced powerful settler democracies to reckon with their demands. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with leading participants, The Land Is Our History brings to the fore complex and rich discussions among activists, lawyers, anthropologists, judges, and others in the context of legal cases in far-flung communities dealing with rights, history, and identity. The effects of these debates were unexpectedly wide-ranging. By asserting that they were the first peoples of the land, indigenous leaders compelled the powerful settler states that surrounded them to negotiate their rights and status. Fracturing national myths and making new stories of origin necessary, indigenous peoples' claims challenged settler societies to rethink their sense of belonging"–Provided by publisher.

Year: 2014

winner y separately published work icon Kitty's War Janet Butler , St Lucia : University of Queensland Press , 2013 Z1924885 2013 single work biography

'The remarkable wartime experiences of Kit McNaughton.

Kitty's War is based upon the previously unpublished war diaries of Great War army nurse Sister Kit McNaughton. Kit and historian Janet Butler grew up in the same Victorian district of drystone walls, wheatfields and meandering creeks, except many decades apart. The idea of this young nurse setting out on a journey in July 1915 which would take her across the world and into the First World War took hold of Janet Butler and inspired her to research and share Kit's story.

This decisive and dryly humorous woman embarked upon the troopship Orsova, bound for Egypt in 1915. Kit's absorbing diaries follow her journey through war, from Egypt, where she cared for the Gallipoli sick and wounded,to the harsh conditions of Lemnos Island, off the coast of the Dardanelles, and then on to France and the Somme. Here she nursed severely wounded German soldiers for the British. During Passchendaele, a year later, she ran the operating theatre of a clearing station near the front line. Kit finished the war as Australia's first plastic surgery nurse, assisting medical pioneers in this field as they repaired the shattered faces of Australian soldiers.

Through Kitty's diaries and Janet Butler's thoughtful narration, we see the war through the eyes of a young Australian nurse as she is transformed by what she witnesses. Kitty's War is an intimate and rare story of one woman's remarkable experience of war.' (Publisher's blurb)

Year: 2010

winner Natasha Campo for From Superwomen to Domestic Goddesses: The Rise and Fall of Feminism

Year: 2008

winner y separately published work icon The Lamb Enters the Dreaming : Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World Robert Kenny , Carlton North : Scribe , 2007 Z1429990 2007 single work biography

'Traces the life of Nathanael Pepper of the Wotjobaluk people, who was born as the first pastoralists were driving cattle and sheep into Victoria's Wimmera region. In their wake came Christian missionaries, who were just as hostile to the settlers' violence as they were to the traditional beliefs of Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, Pepper converted to Christianity in 1860. The extraordinary story of Pepper's conversion, and his subsequent attempts to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable, reveals much about the deeper symbolic and moral forces at work in this collision of cultures. Robert Kenny challenges many orthodoxies in this profound reconsideration of how indigenous people and Europeans thought about each other. He traces Aboriginal attempts to accommodate the 'people of the sheep' and their pastoralist totem, Jesus, while arguing that it was European animals more than the settlers themselves that ruptured the Dreaming. On the European side, Kenny argues, increasingly powerful scientific and philosophical challenges undermined evangelical Christianity's belief that all humanity was of 'One Blood'. And behind it all lurked the spectre of slavery and the question of the moral order of imperialism. Brilliantly original in conception, and written with a rare lucidity and lightness of touch, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming is a detailed and sensitive exploration of a life, a meditation on the matter of culture and conversion, and a major reappraisal of the relations between Aboriginal and European societies in the first decades of contact in southern Australia.' (Back cover.)

Year: 2004

winner y separately published work icon Blood, Sweat and Welfare : A History of White Bosses and Aboriginal Pastoral Workers Mary Anne Jebb , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2002 8529994 2002 single work criticism

'When Europeans first arrived in the Kimberley, a turbulent era began for the Indigenous people. To survive, they aligned themselves with white men through unspoken and unequal contracts of ownership and protection.'

'Aboriginal men were forced to fight for their own women, children and resources, and many were driven away from pastoral stations or gaoled. Until 1968, when equal wages were finally granted, black pastoral workers received only a pocket money allowance and rations. By then the stations no longer sustained them, and Aboriginal people gradually moved towards towns and reserves, where Welfare and Social Security became their only means of survival.'

'In this absorbing study, survivors of this devastating time speak openly to Mary Anne Jebb about first contact between blacks and whites, the arrival of Welfare, and the demise of pastoralism in the northern ranges. Alongside their oral testimonies, the author draws on a range of written archives to explore what really happened during the settlement of the Kimberley.' (Source: Publisher's website)

winner Warwick Anderson for The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia
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