The International Australian Studies Association (InASA), alongside the editors of the Journal of Australian Studies, is delighted to announce the 2025 winners of the Barrett Award for Australian Studies: Dr Emily Yu Zong and Daisy Bisenieks (Hong Kong Baptist University) and Phoebe Hayman (La Trobe).
The award was established by Dr John Barrett (1931–1997) in 1987 as a bequest to La Trobe University. Dr Barrett was a lecturer and reader at La Trobe University from 1969 until his retirement in 1990, specialising in 20th-century Australian history, particularly national involvement in the world wars. Dr Barrett was also a member of the Journal of Australian Studies editorial board from 1979 to 1990.
The John Barrett Award for Australian Studies is awarded each year to an article published in the Journal of Australian Studies that demonstrates outstanding achievement across several criteria, including originality, significance, sophistication, clarity and accessibility. A highlight of the journal each year, the award continues to celebrate the significant achievements of our research community, recognising scholarship that enriches our understanding of Australia’s diverse culture, history and society.
The judging was undertaken by a panel of three academics, who assessed articles for their originality, significance, sophistication, clarity and accessibility.
Open Category Winner
Zong, Emily Yu, and Bisenieks, Daisy. “Dark Humour and Invasive Species Storytelling in the Age of Extinction.” Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 2025, pp. 4–21.
Emily Yu Zong and Daisy Bisenieks have produced an exceptionally original and intellectually ambitious article that makes an outstanding contribution to Australian Studies. Bringing together environmental humanities, cultural studies, settler colonialism, and studies of Australian humour, it analyses cartoons and documentaries that represent invasive species (like rabbits, cane toads, brumbies, and red fire ants) to demonstrate how dark humour can illuminate nonhuman agency, colonial legacies, and the affective complexities of environmental crisis. Written with sophistication and eloquence, it presents a genuinely innovative framework for understanding the revolutionary potential that dark humour can play in fostering the possibility of multispecies survival amid rapid environmental change.
Postgraduate Category Winner
Hayman, Phoebe. “Political Outsiders? A Study of ‘Teal’ Independent Campaign Demographics in the 2022 Australian Federal Election.” Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 49, no. 2, 2025, pp. 234–253.
This article provides a timely and empirically rich examination of the 2022 Teal independent movement in recent Australian politics, shifting attention from its high-profile candidates to the broader communities of campaigners and volunteers who made the movement possible. Through an innovative combination of interviews and survey research, it offers important insights into the gender, class and ethnic composition of political participation in contemporary Australia, while demonstrating how informal social networks can simultaneously facilitate political mobilisation and reproduce existing inequalities.
Highly Commended
Hill, Rebecca. “‘Spirits of Resistance’: A Politics of Feeling in Behrouz Boochani’s Prison Writing.” Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 49, no. 4, 2025, pp. 423–435.
Rebecca Hill’s article offers a sophisticated reading of Behrouz Boochani’s prison writing, reframing resistance through a powerful “politics of feeling” grounded in collective freedom, care, solidarity, and more-than-human relations. Its nuanced reading of Boochani – as a writer and critical thinker – accounts for how incarcerated people, like the many people seeking asylum on Manus Island, create forms of autonomy in the face of Australia’s carceral regime. In doing so, the article makes a compelling contribution to Australian Studies, demonstrating, with intellectual force, that where there is repression there is always resistance.