Winning history: 2019 and 2018 NSW Premier’s History Awards
On Monday, 8 April 2019 applications closed for the 2019 NSW Premier’s History Awards. The winners will be announced on Friday 30 August 2019.
First presented in 1997, the awards honour distinguished achievement in history. Historical research and publication of the highest quality and standard are promoted by the award. They also encourage an appreciation of history and the value of historians.
The total prize money in 2019 is $75,000 and the following prizes will be awarded:
Australian History Prize
General History Prize
New South Wales Community and Regional History Prize
Young People’s History Prize
Digital History Prize.
Winning histories in 2018 were:
Australian History Prize│ The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia by Christina Twomey (Winner), Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia by Rebecca Jones (Shortlisted), The Enigmatic Mr Deakin by Judith Brett (Shortlisted).
General History Prize│ On the Stump: Campaign Oratory and Democracy in the United States, Britain, and Australia by Sean Scalmer (Winner), Korea: Where the American Century Began by Michael Pembroke (Shortlisted), The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders by Stuart Kells (Shortlisted).
New South Wales Community and Regional History Prize│Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney by Paul Irish (Winner), Terminus: The Pub That Sydney Forgot by Shirley Fitzgerald (Shortlisted), River Dreams: The People and Landscape of the Cooks River by Ian Tyrrell (Shortlisted).
Young People’s History Prize │The Fighting Stingrays by Simon Mitchell (Winner), Marvellous Miss May: Queen of the Circus by Stephanie Owen Reeder (Shortlisted), Dr Huxley's Bequest: A History of Medicine in Thirteen Objects by Michelle Cooper (Shortlisted).
Digital History Prize | We Don't Need a Map by Warwick Thornton and Brendan Fletcher (Winner), Douglas Grant: The Skin of Others by Tom Murray (Shortlisted), Right Wrongs by Yale MacGillivray, Bronwyn Purvis, Lorena Allam, Solua Middleton, Scott Gamble and Daniel Battley (Shortlisted).
What an impressive and interesting list of histories the 2018 awards recognised. I am looking forward to seeing what histories win in 2019 and highlighting these at Capital history here.
Please share. Let’s get the past and present talking.
Acknowledgement: The image above is of Australian nurses, former prisoners-of-war, being escorted to a reception at the Heidelberg Hospital, 1945. See acknowledgement page for details.
