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Annual History Awards 2022 Winners Announced

The HCNSW Annual History Awards were announced at a ceremony on Tuesday, 6 December, 2022 in the Metcalfe Auditorium, at the State Library of NSW where over fifty members and guests helped to celebrate the winner’s achievements.

The wonderful works produced by this year’s winners were diverse in subject matter and theme.

From an online exhibition of nursemaids who journeyed across the networks of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to a documentary exploring the bloody battles that established the Australian nation, there was no shortage of fascinating stories.

This year’s judging committee  comprised of Professor Michael McDonnell, Associate Professor Jan Lanicek, Dr Julie McIntyre and Dr Naomi Parry Duncan, as well as the History Council of NSW Councillors, commend this year’s winners and thank the generosity of donors, cultural partners and the NSW government who continue to advance and promote the public understanding and appreciation of history. 

The HCNSW Annual History 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. To find out more about the HCNSW Annual History Awards, click here.

If you have any questions please contact us and subscribe to our e-newsletter to receive announcements.

 
Alison Wishart, winner of the Macquarie-PHA Applied History Award​. Photo Credit:  Juanita Kwok

The Addi Road Award for Multicultural History

Addi Road Award for Multicultural History is supported by the Addison Road Community Organisation.

The purpose of the Award is to encourage new and emerging historians to discover, analyse and explore multicultural histories and the history of multiculturalism in Australia, helping to increase academic and public engagement in a topic that has ongoing relevance to Australian history and society today.

In 2022, the winner receives a citation and a prize of $1,000. The winning entry (essay or multimedia) makes an original argument using primary historical sources and demonstrate the capacity to develop complex arguments linking the past to contemporary, multicultural issues that have, or are currently impacting on the Australian community.

This year’s Addi Road Award for Multicultural History is awarded to The team of researchers that curated the online exhibition, Ayahs & Amahs: Transcolonial Journeys

Information about this winning entry, including links to the entry, can be found further down this page.



The Macquarie-PHA Applied History Award

The Macquarie-PHA Applied History Award is jointly sponsored by the Macquarie University Centre for Applied History and the Professional Historians Association (NSW & ACT). 

The purpose of the Award is to encourage historians to produce a creative work of applied history drawing on their research. It aims to promote the value of public history and the pursuit of history as a rewarding professional career.

Individuals and groups are eligible to apply. The award is open to historians at all stages of their career, including those inside and outside of academic institutions; undergraduate, diploma, masters and doctoral level students; as well as professional, local, community and family historians. Candidates must have lived and/or created their work in New South Wales or the Australian Capital Territory over the 12 months preceding the deadline for submissions.

The winner receives a citation and a prize of $1,000. The winning entry will demonstrate excellence in writing or other media, and the ability to use original source materials, or demonstrated originality of interpreting the past in a contextual way. This work should engage with the field and practice of professional, public and applied history, using the past to inform contemporary concerns, issues and topics in creative ways.

This year, the Macquarie-PHA Applied History Award goes to Alison Wishart for her entry:  Parks for the People!  Eastlakes, Jack Mundey and the Green Bans.

Information about this winning entry, including links to the entry, can be found further down this page.

The Max Kelly Award

The Max Kelly Award of $500 is given annually to an early career historian for a work of excellence in any aspect of Australian history. The Award was established as a tribute to Associate Professor Maxwell John Kelly (1935-1996), the first elected President of the History Council.

The History Council of NSW is grateful to Mr Geoffrey Jones for his continuing support and generous donation of the prize money for the 2022 Max Kelly Prize.

The winner of the 2022 Max Kelly Award is Dr Juanita Kwok for her article The Lambing Flat Riots and the Chinese Quest for Compensation.

Information about this winning entry, including links to the entry, can be found further down this page.

The Jill Roe Regional History Award

The Jill Roe Regional History Award is supported by the HCNSW’s Jill Roe Bequest Fund.

In 2022, and in anticipation of the Annual History Lecture to be given in Orange, NSW, the History Council of NSW is introducing a new Regional History Award. Named in honour of Professor Jill Roe (1940-2017), an outstanding and pioneering Australian historian, the purpose of the Award is to encourage historians at any stage of their careers to discover, analyse, and explore rural and regional Australian history, helping to increase academic and public engagement in a topic that has ongoing relevance to Australian history and society today.

In 2022, the winner will receive a citation and a prize of $500. The winning entry (essay, multimedia and/or public history project) will make an original and compelling argument using primary historical sources and demonstrate the capacity to develop complex arguments linking the past to contemporary, rural and regional issues that have, or are currently having an impact on the Australian community.

The winner of the Inaugural Jill Roe Regional History Award is Mr Greg Raffin for his essay ‘1942: When the War came to Australia’.

Information about this winning entry, including links to the entry, can be found further down this page.

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.

This year we are honoured to jointly award the citation to two people who have pushed the boundaries of historical inquiry and communication, shining a light on areas of hidden or ignored history.

For 2022, the History Council of NSW is delighted to award the Annual History Citation to Professor Henry Reynolds and Rachel Perkins in recognition of outstanding contributions to the research, writing and filmmaking of Australian (Frontier) Wars history and for communicating history to broad audiences. (Further information is available by scrolling down this page).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HCNSW Award Winners 2022

2022 The Addi Road Award for Multicultural History Winner – The Research Team

for their online exhibition ‘Amahs and Ayahs: Transcolonial Journeys’

The team of researchers who curated the online exhibition Ayahs & Amahs: Transcolonial Journeys brings to life the stories, memories and histories of Indian, Chinese, and other Asian nursemaids who journeyed across the networks of the British Empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The creators skillfully utilise digital technologies to present the wealth of visual and literary representations to a wide audience of scholars and the general public.

The interactive exhibition also makes full versions of old prints available to scholars, thus facilitating further research into the topic. The trove of extraordinary stories that explore the historical experiences and cultural memories of these earliest global domestic workers, makes a strong contribution to the study of the multicultural experiences and exchanges throughout the period of British colonialism, with a particular focus on Australia.

 

 

 

Wining team:  (L-R) A/Prof Claire Lowrie, Srishti Guha, Dr Lauren Samuelsson & Prof Victoria K Haskins.  Photo credit:  Tim Harris, TWH Photography.

2022 The Macquarie-PHA Applied History Award Winner – Alison Wishart 

for her exhibition and collection project ‘‘Parks for the People! Eastlakes, Jack Monday and the Green Bans’

The 2022 winner of this award is a local government project that explained the struggle to protect community spaces from developers, with the support of the late Jack Mundey and the Builders’ Labourers’ Federation. It incorporated local archival materials and items from the Trades Hall Collection, oral history with Judy Mundey, and artists’ responses. The exhibition itself was housed in Bayside Council’s Mascot Library, but it was truly multimedia, with a web presence, teaser exhibitions at other council libraries, the renaming of Eastlakes Reserve as Jack Mundey Reserve, plaques, an online seminar, engagement on social media and YouTube, and an article in Overland. All of these illuminate the national story played out in this LGA.



 

 

Winner:  Alison Wishart (Right) with (L-R) Natalie Funston, Senior Specialist Librarian, Bayside Council and Judy Mundey (wife of the late Jack Mundey OAM).  Photo credit:  Tim Harris, TWH Photography.

2022 The Max Kelly Award Winner – Juanita Kwok

for her article ‘The Lambing Flat Riots and the Chinese Quest for Compensation’

The Lambing Flat riots, in which Chinese miners were violently driven off a goldfield is a well-known incident in Australia’s history – particularly as it also marked the start of anti-Chinese immigration laws. But what Juanita Kwok uncovers from her assiduous research is a rich history of Chinese agency and persistence in seeking justice and legal redress for their losses. Indeed, Kwok puts the June 1861 riots into a longer context of European harassment of Chinese miners across the goldfields, but also the surprising efforts of those miners to use the law to fight back.

While their compensation claims ultimately went largely unpaid, Kwok demonstrates that savvy miners were responsible for getting a hearing for those claims in the first place. In doing so, Kwok also reveals a rich archive of sources on individuals and families connected to these events – an archive that will help enrich the work of all those involved in recovering the oft-neglected multicultural – and racist – past of Australia.



 

 

Winner:  Dr Juanita Kwok. Photo Credit:  Tim Harris, TWH Photography.

 

2022 The Jill Roe Regional History Award Winner – Greg Raffin

for his article ‘1942: When the War Came to Australia’

This informative and timely essay draws from the National Library of Australia’s Trove database of digitised newspapers to highlight community bonds forged through air raid precautions in central western New South Wales in 1942. During World War II, the federal government instituted state-based schemes of cooperation between emergency services. This initiative made state governments responsible for the administration of preparation for anticipated Japanese air attacks. Air raid preparations in New South Wales received funding under the 1941 National Emergency Services Act. The NES, as distinct from today’s State Emergency Service (SES), involved community sector wardens within urban and rural municipalities working with state services.

These wardens organised activities such as first aid training for the public and raised funds to meet revenue shortfalls. The judging panel wholeheartedly commends this author’s efforts in bringing to light the grass roots processes, humour and hardship of regional emergencies and their after-effects. This essay is especially resonant as some central western New South Wales townships that it mentions are now experiencing flood emergencies, raising important questions about past institutional and community responses.





 

 

Winner:  Mr Greg Raffin.  Photo credit:  Supplied.

 

2022 Annual History Citation Award

Rachel Perkins & Professor Henry Reynolds (Joint Winners)

 

for their outstanding contributions to the research, writing and filmmaking of Australian (Frontier) Wars history and for communicating history to broad audiences.

Since the 1970s Henry Reynolds has been at the forefront of historians’ efforts to bring the Australian Frontier Wars to broader public attention. Reynolds’ numerous award-winning works include such ground-breaking works as The Other Side of the Frontier, This Whispering in Our Hearts, Why Weren’t We Told and The Law of the Land. His work is widely regarded as having overturned Australians’ historical understanding of a peaceful colonisation. Reynolds has consistently engaged with contemporary legal and political issues, showing the power of history – and deeply thoughtful history clearly communicated. He provided moves toward Reconciliation with a historical underpinning. 

For more than 20 years Rachel Perkins has produced, directed, written and narrated award-winning film and television that has had a profound impact on Australians’ understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Peoples and their histories. Apart from the iconic films Radiance and Bran Nue Dae, Perkins wrote, directed and produced the ground-breaking First Australians – the first documentary series on Australian history from the perspective of Australia’s First Peoples. Generating historical understanding and awareness has been a cornerstone of Perkins’ work. This continued with the series First Contact, and now more recently, the powerful and important documentary The Australian Wars

In The Australian Wars series the work of Reynolds and Perkins came together and the History Council of NSW is honoured to celebrate their achievements in this combined Annual History Citation.

 

 

 

 

Joint-winner:  Rachel Perkins (Photo:  Leon Mead)

 

Joint-winner:  Professor Henry Reynolds (Photo:  supplied).

 

 

 

 

 

Create NSW Funding & Support

The HCNSW is supported by an annual grant from Create NSW through the Arts & Cultural Development Program which enables it to manage the Awards & Prizes program, among other History Professional Development programs.

Information about funding and support available about this program can be accessed here.

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