The University of Queensland Non-Fiction Book Award

Black Convicts: How slavery shaped Australia

Santilla Chingaipe (Scribner Australia, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Australia)

Judges' comments: 

Examining the force of slavery in shaping modern Australia, Santilla Chingaipe broadens our sense of Australia’s colonisation. Brilliantly, Black Convicts draws links between the erasure of personhood that slavery and convict transportation entailed, and the ways in which history still contributes to this erasure. The result is an engaged and vivid reassessment of slavery, race, capital and power. 

The Season

Helen Garner (Text Publishing)

Judges' comments: 

Through the diary form, Helen Garner crystallises the texture and complexity of daily life. Her considerations of masculinity, mortality, sport and family are vigorous, compelling, funny and moving.  “I’m only a witness”, Garner writes. It is a position she savours, rendering everyday things with exactitude and profundity.  

Murriyang: Song of time 

Stan Grant (Bundyi, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Australia)

Judges' comments:

Murriyang is a fine literary memoir imbued with meditative philosophy and theology. Wiradjuri man Stan Grant creates a cyclic psalmic structure to explore his relationships with his father, family, people and Country. Interleaving Songlines, Dreaming, time and music with his embrace of the sacred and Baiyaame/God, the author shares his newfound reconciliation and hope.  

Warra Warra Wai: How Indigenous Australians discovered Captain Cook, and what they tell about the coming of the Ghost People 

Darren Rix and Craig Cormick (Scribner Australia, an imprint of Simon & Schuster)

Judges' comments: 

A generous capacious book, the product of an impressive collaborative effort which conveys a multitude of Aboriginal voices. This is the other side of the history of the colonisation of eastern Australia, showing the resonance of the past in the present – a great example of truth-telling in action. 

Näku Dhäruk The Bark Petitions: How the People of Yirrkala Changed the Course of Australian Democracy

Clare Wright (Text Publishing)

Judges' comments: 

A major achievement. A wonderfully immersive reconstruction of a previously underappreciated but crucial moment in the evolution of democracy in Australia, the 1963 bark petitions of the Yolŋu people of Yirrkala claiming rights over their land in the face of intrusion and desecration.