Western Australian Premier's Book Awards - Fiction Category Winners

2006

The Travel Writer - Simone Lazaroo
Pan Macmillan Australia
The Travel Writer is a moving and beautifully written study of the lives of a mother and daughter from Malacca and their passionate and frustrating pursuit of love in a colonial and post-colonial situation. As in Lazaroo’s earlier novels, these women are ‘Eurasian’, ethnically and culturally between Europe and Malaya, longing for England’s sophistication yet exploited by those English men to whom they turn for love and a sense of belonging. The generations’ different situations are subtly delineated as the daughter lovingly writes her dying mother’s life, which is paralleled with her own in London. The women gain wisdom and strength, but the men too are seen as victims of their own lack of courage. Malaya before independence, with its superstitions and its own colourful take on English, comes brilliantly to life as the novel’s language effortlessly recreates both cultures and the imbalance of power that is mirrored in the lives of the two women.

2005

Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living - Carrie Tiffany
(Picador)
USE SUPERPHOSPHATE one sign urges, and a banner reminds farmers of their patriotic duty to GROW MORE WHEAT as Engine K109 pulls The Better Farming Train and its two dozen cars and wagons of exhibits on “scientific farming” and “women’s subjects” across the Victorian landscape in 1934. By 1940 K109 pulls the one-car-three-wagon One-In, All-In train which displays modern weaponry and exhorts farmers to do their patriotic duty and enlist (“the modern soldier is a man of science”). Along the way, two workers on that train of fools, Jean Finnegan (Sewing) and Robert Pettergree (agrostologist!), marry and leave the train at Wycheproof, scientifically to farm the property he has bought there. But the Southern Mallee is better suited to drought, mouse plagues and sand drift than Ghurka wheat and scientific farming. And when Pettergree, broken and humiliated, enlists, Jean’s thoughts turn to Mr Ohno, the dreamy Japanese chicken-sexer previously on The Better Farming Train but now in the Internment Camp in Tatura… From its faux-shabby cover to the faded photographs within, to the vrai shabby tale it tells, Everyman’s Rules is quirky, sardonic and engrossing.

2004

Sixty Lights - Gail Jones
Random House Australia
Judges' Comments
Orphaned in Australia at eight in 1860, Lucy Strange, lucid by name and strange by nature, is raised in London by her eccentric uncle and then sent to Bombay for an arranged marriage with his friend, the much-older Isaac Newton (namesake of the eighteenth-century physicist famous for his Opticks). It will be a marriage in appearance only, for she falls pregnant during an affair with a fellow passenger on the voyage out. Then she becomes preoccupied with photography, the powerful technology emerging in her lifetime: photo-graphy/light-writing, a kind of life-writing, becomes a medium whereby she learns to see time differently and is thereby freed from its constraints – until she dies of consumption at twenty-two, as we have known from the beginning she will. "A life abbreviated is not a life diminished," Jones has said, and Lucy’s life is "one of extraordinary richness, assertiveness, energy, loving kindness". Jones’s Sixty Lights is a meticulous, elegant, and engrossing book.

2003

The Mindless Ferocity of Sharks - Brett D'Arcy
Vintage
Judges' Comments
Brett D'Arcy has created a memorably eccentric, tight-knit family defined by surf subculture in this, his second novel. It is a coming-of-age story told from the perspective of eleven-year-old Floaty-boy who has an attention disorder along with the gift of buoyancy, and who chronicles his family's continual dance with disaster. Mother Adelaide, the Old Man and the Cronies display shrewdness, determination, humour, warmth, and a skill for cultivating luck as they evade respectability and avoid the law. Brett D'Arcy is an outstanding writer whose descriptions of the South Western Coast of Western Australia, where the novel is set, are Winton-like in their passion and perceptiveness.

2002

Black Mirror - Gail Jones
Picador
Judges' Comments
In this debut novel Gail Jones has produced an outstanding work of archival recovery and artistic re-creation set in Paris, London and the Western Australian Goldfields. The protagonist Anna Griffin progressively discovers her own identity as she researches the life of a fellow Australian and surrealist artist, Victoria Morrell, for a biography. These two emotional and intelligent women, Victoria and her biographer Anna, share an obvious background of place and the plot works to draw the various other links of their lives together through the language of both painting and the written word. Here is a complex, delicately layered work which explores the nature of love, art and the emotional forces that fashion the lives of her characters. Dazzling, rich in metaphor with prose often rendered with the cadence of verse, and demonstrating a superb mastery of art criticism as well, this novel is destined to become a major work by a Western Australian writer.

2001

Dirt Music - Tim Winton
Picador
Judges' Comments
Winton has given us the quintessential West Australian novel: a saga of love, deception and desire set in the vastness of this State. When Georgie Jutland stumbles upon the poacher, the "shamateur" Luther Fox, a rare frisson develops between them and she rethinks her life with Jim Buckridge in the fishing town of White Point. Written in a vigorous style that captures West Australian lingo to perfection, this is a novel that one can't put down as it carries within its narrative momentum such forthright issues as migration, Aboriginal claims to the land, the dreariness of urban lives and the importance of the one act that redeems us. Memories mingle; conflicting thoughts arise as this gifted writer again writes a book at once epic in scope and detailed in its observations of life.

2000

The Australian Fiancé - Simone Lazaroo
Pan Macmillan
Judges' Comments
In a spare but elegant style, Simone Lazaroo manages to give life to a couple of unlikely lovers who are brought together in fateful circumstances in the aftermath of World War II. Lazaroo skillfully presents Australian life and customs as they are seen through the eyes of a young Eurasian woman, a former prostitute and victim of war, who finds herself physically and culturally isolated in a remote part of Western Australia. The author's own voice intervenes into that of the narrator as she explores the intensely painful emotions that accompany the woman's gradual rejection by a lover who has his own pastoral lineage to consider. Although written in the genre of romance, the novel eschews the genre's predictable conventions to examine in a moving and imaginative manner, themes of love, hope and loss in a cross-cultural relationship.

1999

Benang: from the Heart - Kim Scott
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
Benang is an outstanding achievement of narrative. It uses the historical record, ideas about revisions and corrections, and the close emotional range of the recording of family to make a political and affecting work of loss that is undercut with both irony and distance. Throughout its five hundred pages it sustains its original idea of subverting the state-sanctioned policies of race and genetic make-up, of making the 'first white baby'. This is a major work of fiction that is always engaged in a struggle against its bleak material, and it succeeds in that struggle. There is a huge investment evident here by the writer in researching, compiling and then making anew this material into an imaginative form.

1998

Going Inland - Pat Jacobs
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
In this novel the author uses the physical journey connected with travelling around Australia as a way of exploring various kinds of inner spaces and the potential for awakenings. The travellers re-assess their attachment to the land; they come to terms with a changed view of the cultural and physical landscape, and they reconsider their marital relationship. Pat Jacobs presents us with outstanding writing which offers the reader the opportunity to see the landscape and feel the tensions between the characters. At the end of the trip nothing remains the same. Happily, the writer resists the temptation to provide any resolution to these altered situations. This is skilled writing and a most impressive first novel.

1997 (Joint Winners)

The Drowner - Robert Drewe
Pan Macmillan Australia
Judges' Comments
Robert Drewe's novel The Drowner is the work of a mature craftsman of language, intricately detailed and with a cinematic vision. The skill with which the writer blends historical and imaginative material to make this love story is immense: from deep and imagistic scenes of intimate relations to the span of Western Australian geography and the dilemma of the arid, typhoid-ridden goldfields of Kalgoorlie. The lives of the people in this novel flow with the presence or absence of water, also a metaphor for love. It is a novel about the fragility of sexual love, about people constructing tenuous but sustaining human relationships in strange contexts; it is also about pain, anguish and death. Drewe writes with great skill and detachment about history and the multiplicity of ways of telling and retelling stories and he does this in a prose style that is full of sensual delights. The Drowner is a compelling and rich novel.
Fetish Lives - Gail Jones
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
The stories in Fetish Lives by Gail Jones concern themselves with meditations about acts of artistic creation and speculations on the voices and lives of those responsible, both the makers and those who receive the work. As announced in the title, the fetish is explored as a productive, producing state between art and life. We are offered yearnings and obsessions and desire. This collection is impressive for the remarkable subtleties and nuances of its language. This skill holds our attention; the stories are both compelling and accessible, and at times, carry a gentle, wry humour. There is a darkness about this work, though; an attempt to find some truth about human relations which can be accessible only if all the usual verities are ignored, turned upside down or bypassed. This is usually the terrain of the poet, but Jones explores her ideas through narratives of real and imagined events, and she does so with intelligence and a fine elegance of language.

1996 (Joint Winners)

The Lighthouse Spark - Heather Grace
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
Heather Grace's The Lighthouse Spark is a convincing work which makes sense of the past without sentimentality or nostalgia. It is written in a fine clear style which is alert to visual and sensory impressions.
City of Light - Dave Warner
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
Dave Warner's City of Light adapts the genre of crime fiction to local conditions, showing a remarkable imaginative understanding of complex power play and the interaction between sporting, political and police circles. The style is crisp, amusing and full of impact.

1995

The World Waiting to be Made - Simone Lazaroo
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
Simone Lazaroo's The World Waiting to be Made is a warm, witty and moving story of cultural differences and personal conflict in reconciling traditional customs with present realities. Written in a clear, consistent style, this novel portrays the lifestyle of people known as the "In-betweens". It is a tale of irony and sadness in which some vital and memorable characters emerge.

1994

Letter to Constantine - Joan London
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
Joan London in Letter to Constantine draws complex narrative lines that hook the reader in, requiring work of the reader to keep up with its twists and turns. Moving, deeply felt stories by an important writer who is assured and sophisticated.

1993

House of Breathing - Gail Jones
Fremantle Arts Centre Press

1992

Playback - Philip Salom
Fremantle Arts Centre Press

1991 (Joint Winners)

The Country Without Music - Nicholas Hasluck
Penguin Book
Cloud Street - Tim Winton
McPhee Gribble

1990

The Same Light - Vasso Kalamaras
Fremantle Arts Centre Press

1989

Not Being Miriam - Marion Campbell
Fremantle Arts Centre Press

1988

Minimum of Two - Tim Winton
McPhee Gribble/Penguin

1987

Sister Ships - Joan London
Fremantle Arts Centre Press

1986

The Color of the Sky - Peter Cowan
Fremantle Arts Centre Press

1985 (Joint Winners)

Shallows - Tim Winton
Allen & Unwin
Scission - Tim Winton
McPhee Gribble/Penguin

1984

Stories from Suburban Road - T. A. G. Hungerford
Fremantle Arts Centre Press

1983

Mr Scobie's Riddle - Elizabeth Jolley
Penguin Books

1982

Day of the Dog - Archie Weller
Allen & Unwin