Western Australian Premier's Book Awards - Premier's Prize Category Winners

2006

The Arrival - Shaun Tan
Hachette Livre Australia
Through his intriguing and elegant artwork in this ground-breaking 128-page wordless picture book/graphic novel, Tan captures both intimate personal moments (note his studies of hands) and the vast scale of human movement across time, space and cultures. Travelling from his family in a city overshadowed by some nameless threat to a foreign land, the un-named protagonist encounters many strange customs as well as other new arrivals, each with compelling reasons for starting a new life. The journey unfolds through varied illustrations in sepia tones, drawing the viewer deeply into the immigrant experience. The storytelling is both simple and complex, with close views of small, familiar details of daily life set in a wide and surreal landscape. Between its endpapers with their sixty ‘passport portraits’ of immigrants from many cultures, this beautifully designed book conveys a universal message of hope and humanity.

2005

Cleared Out: First Contact in the Western Desert - Sue Davenport, Peter Johnson and Yuwali
(Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies)
Between May and October 1964 a successful attempt was made to remove a small group of Martu Aboriginal women and children from the Percival Lakes region of Australia's Western Desert. This was done because the Martu, who had no previous contact with European society, were within the Woomera firing range stretching across remote South and Western Australia, and used for testing Britain's Blue Streak rockets. The story of the encounter and removal is told by Yuwali, a Martu woman, and two patrol officers, one of whom, Walter MacDougall, was later condemned “for having placed the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations.” Besides presenting Yuwali's compelling and amazingly accurate recollection of events, the authors place this first encounter within a political, bureaucratic and social context, forcing us to consider not only the consequences for the Martu of removal from the desert, but also the wider issue of Indigenous people's relationship to their lands.

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

Last Cab to Darwin - Reg Cribb
Pork Chop Productions/ Black Swan Theatre
Judges' Comments
Reg Cribb has crafted an exceptional Australian play for our time. Using laconic and irreverent vernacular, he explores traditional topics like small-town life and rural decline along with the contemporary debate on voluntary euthanasia. Along the way he reflects on the perennial themes of love, friendship, identity, mortality and, without fuss, race. Although the driving force of the plot is Max's quest for euthanasia, which takes him on a long odyssey in his own taxi through the outback to Darwin, the play is far from morbid: its caricature, humour and satire are suffused with a characteristically Australian humour forged in defiance of adversity. This is a masterful work that continues to linger in the mind.

2002

Mussolini - Richard Bosworth
Edward Arnold
Judges' Comments
This is a major literary accomplishment, as well as an extraordinary biography of a perplexing and paradoxical personality and an internationally significant contribution to an understanding of Mussolini's role in history. It is a massive work of substance, of historical research and analysis, and yet is readily accessible to the lay reader. The work may well enter the lore of works that become a yardstick by which other biographies are measured. Drawing upon original sources, in both English and Italian, Bosworth's book is a triumph of scholarly research, human endeavour, extraordinary commitment and passionate belief in the power of historical narratives. It is a hefty book that will nevertheless emerge as something of a bestseller among those interested in Fascism, the Second World War, and the dynamics of power. Its Western Australian author has already been acknowledged as making an immense contribution to the international debate on the meaning of Mussolini to twentieth-century politics.

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

Into the Wadi - Michèle Drouart
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
A rare and illuminating insight into the cross-cultural marriage of a Western woman and a Jordanian man. It is a work that neither uncritically celebrates nor condemns, but traces in fine detail and with great sensitivity the daily lives and cultural practices of the extended family into which the narrator has married. However, even as the narrator accommodates and understands, the relationship becomes strained. This painful awareness is recounted without acrimony and with the unusual understanding that her husband in a Western country would have had similar difficulties. A moving, metaphorical account, often rendered with a fiction writer's detached point of view, that reminds us that examination of cultural difference need not relapse into the crude stereotypes of orientalism. A brilliant antidote, moreover, to the "Western woman's escape from the barbaric Arab world" genre of popular weeklies.

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

Pomegranate Season - Carolyn Polizzotto
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
This is a beautifully written autobiographical account of the author's gradual acceptance of her child's disability.
It is structured as a detailed diary which has the effect of underlining the slow daily process of healing. The author focuses especially on daily minutiae concerning the plants growing in her garden, the tending of which she shares with her husband. Sometimes the plants have to be cut back or controlled in some way; sometimes they burst unexpectedly into wonderful blooms. The daily attention to the garden is a metaphor for the daily observance and care of the loved but disabled child who also sometimes performs in unexpected ways, bringing moments of unlooked-for joy. This is an innovative work by one of our most skilled writers.

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

Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance - Banjo Woorunmurra & Howard Pedersen
Magabala Books
Judges' Comments
Banjo Woorunmurra and Howard Pedersen's Jandamarra represents a unique collaboration between the traditional custodian of a major episode in Aboriginal-white relations in Western Australia and an academically trained historian, and as such provides a pioneering model for Australian historians. It draws on research from many sources, and while expressing a firmly stated point of view is careful in its use of evidence.

1995

Radical Take-offs - Glyn Parry
Allen & Unwin
Judges' Comments
Glyn Parry's Radical Take-offs is a versatile collection of short stories whose range of storylines will absorb young adults. The deft control of idiom and structured prose admirably captures the tone of adolescent bravado and half-acknowledged anxieties.

1994

Peninsula - Dorothy Hewett
Fremantle Arts Centre Press
Judges' Comments
Dorothy Hewett's Peninsula is a remarkably powerful collection, elegiac, wise and passionate by turns, with a unique gift for language which conveys strong feeling.

1993

Central Mischief - Elizabeth Jolley
Penguin Books
Judges' Comments
The judging panel was unanimous in its choice of Elizabeth Jolley's Central Mischief, a collection of great distinction which provides a complete portrait of the woman and the writer. Central Mischief is an evocation of the life and art of our most gifted writer.

1992

The Garden of Gethsemane : Poems from the Lost Decade - Mudrooroo Nyoongah
Hyland House
Judges' Comments
Mudrooroo's Garden of Gethsemane represents a substantial new departure for Australian poetry generally. The poems here not only capture the voice and rhythms of Aboriginal culture but, even more ambitiously speak what has hitherto been all but unspeakable, their experience both individually and as a people.