HCNSW Annual Awards
Overview
The HCNSW Annual Awards celebrate history in all its diverse forms. From the history makers and its thinkers to collective memory and multicultural history, our Awards & Prizes support and acknowledge contributions towards historical practice and theory, through exploring the past to engage and inform the memories and historical narrative of our present and future communities.
About the HCNSW’s Annual Awards
Our awards foster excellence in Australian historical writing, showcase and reward best practice, and advance and promote public understanding and appreciation of history.
We offer a number of prestigious annual awards totaling over $6,000 in prize money, with Honorable Mention citations also awarded where appropriate. The Awards Judging Panel consists of leading academics from NSW universities, representing our Cultural Partners, as well as a delegate of the Professional Historians Association (NSW & ACT).
Information about past & current years’ winners can be found via the Annual History Awards dropdown menu above.
Annual History Citation
Each year the History Council of NSW, via nominations from General Council members, awards the Annual History Citation to an eminent historian to honour a lifetime of service to history.
The Citation recognises individuals for outstanding research and scholarship and acknowledges their broader contribution through teaching, leadership, mentoring and community involvement.
The History Council of NSW also supports Create NSW in its administration of the NSW History Awards and Fellowships in partnership with the State Library of NSW. This event, which traditionally signals the start of History Week each year, is held at the State Library of NSW on the first Friday of September.
Further information about the winners of each years Awards & the Annual History Citation can be found on each year’s Awards page, accessible via the dropdown menu at the top of this screen.
If you have any questions please contact us and subscribe to our e-newsletter to receive announcements.
Award Winners
The History Council of NSW has been very lucky to recieve an outstanding range of submissions for the various prizes offered over the years. Here are some examples, with links through for you to read or view more.
2023 Max Kelly Award
The 2023 Max Kelly Award was awarded to Zoe Smith for her essay ‘A Prisoner on the Rack’: Marital Rape, Consent, and the Gothic in Late-Nineteenth-Century Colonial Women’s Writings.
The essay contributes to the growing body of historiography on marital rape in Australia, turning to the late nineteenth century, and considering how literary representations of ‘wife-beating’ and physical abuse in the fictional works of three colonial women – Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, and Rosa Praed – explored the violation of women’s bodies as a whole.” The judges noted that the “difficult subject matter is well researched and explored, not only in the scope of the history of [the] authors’ published works, but in balancing this with the real-life experiences of these same authors or other women who could attest to the realities of domestic violence within marriage.”
In 2024, the essay was published in Australian Feminist Studies and can be accessed here.
2020 Addison Road Multicultural History Award
The 2020 Addison Road Multicultural History Award was awarded to Dr Alexandra Dellios for her essay Unsettling Post-War Settlement: Remembering Unassimilable Families in the Space of the Migrant Camp.
Hundreds of thousands of assisted migrants and refugees passed through these camps, established from 1947 and progressively shut down from the late 1950s.
This essay analyses memories of migrant camps by mothers, sons and daughters. They have grappled with contentious and contradictory family histories and the ongoing legacies of being ‘received’ and temporarily housed in a place of containment and control.
The place features prominently in the meaning-making practices of child migrants grappling with unsettled and unsettling family histories.
In 2019, this essay was published as a chapter in the book Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space and can be accessed here.
2023 Addi Road Multicultural History Award
The 2023 Addi Road Award for Multicultural History was awarded to Talei Mangioni for her essay: No Planners, No Bombs, No Rambos: Our Activist Foremother, Amelia Rokotuivuna’s Legacy in Oceania.
This work is a biography of prominent Indigenous Fijian feminist and socialist Amelia Rokotuivuna which highlights her immense impact on the Pacific region from the 1960s onwards. The judges commented that this essay was beautifully and assuredly written, and that the work “contributes to understanding of the difficult as well as affectionate diasporic and economic histories that connect Fiji and Australia.”
In 2025, this essay was published as an article in the Australian Journal of Biography and History (No. 9, 2025). It can be downloaded here.
2020 Aboriginal History Award
The 2020 Aboriginal History Award was awarded to Sally Ghattas for her essay: Black Power, Aboriginal Genocide, and the Politics of Identity.
In 1970, five Indigenous Australians petitioned the UN, charging the Australian Government with “genocide.” Drawing on archival material from the Office of Aboriginal Affairs and ASIO, she examined how these historical agents conceived of “genocide,” and why it was employed at this historical moment. Taking William Sewell’s notion of discursive “slippage,” this paper argues that the AAL’s claim to genocide was dependent on the rise of Aboriginal identity politics. In reading the petition from the lens of intellectual history, this paper seeks to understand this utterance of genocide in 1970 as an insight into the greater intellectual currents in Aboriginal thinking.
In 2021, this essay was published as an article in the Journal of Genocide Research. It can be accessed here.