The International Australian Studies Association is delighted to announce the 2023 winners of the Barrett Award for Australian Studies: Cam Coventry (Postgraduate Category) and Jordana Silverstein (Open Category). We are also very pleased to note the Highly Commended award to the joint-authored paper by Danielle Carney Flakelar and Emily O’Gorman.
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 annually to an article published in the Journal of Australian Studies that demonstrates outstanding achievement across several criteria, including originality of the research and argument, nuanced engagement with a research question, quality of expression, and accessibility to a broad, interdisciplinary Australian studies readership. 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.
In 2024, the judging panel comprised Associate Professor Jessica Carniel (University of Southern Queensland) and Associate Professor Maggie Nolan (University of Queensland) and was chaired by Associate Professor Anthea Taylor (University of Sydney). The judges were impressed by the quality of the articles and congratulate the following winners on their outstanding contributions to the field of Australian studies.
Postgraduate Category Winner
C. J. Coventry, “Sedimentary Layers: Bob Hawke’s Beer World Record and Ocker Chic”, Journal of Australian Studies 47, no. 3 (2023): 478–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058. 2023.2215790
Offering a compelling reassessment of the myth-making around former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke, this article turns to Hawke’s beer record and its role in the establishment and maintenance of his popularity as a larrikin leader. Coventry provides ample evidence of the ways in which this record was strategically deployed by Hawke and those around him to help create an “authentic” larrikin persona that would resonate over time. In this piece, the author astutely applies and develops the notion of “ocker chic” to comprehensively analyse Hawke’s deeply masculinist public persona and its construction across his career. Aptly demonstrating the cultural, political and affective work done by this ocker chic, Coventry makes a significant contribution to our understandings of how this dual “larrikin-leader” persona helped to secure public support for Hawke. The article establishes what is at stake in such persona-building processes and why they need to be recentred in historical accounts of Hawke’s leadership— and beyond.
Open Category Winner
Jordana Silverstein, “Files, Families and the Nation: An Archival History, Perhaps”, Journal of Australian Studies 47, no. 4 (2023): 721–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2023. 2240344
This methodologically innovative article deploys autoethnography to compose a deeply politically engaged “microhistory”, with the author exploring their grandparents’ archived naturalisation documents as a way into wider questions about settler colonialism and the fraught positioning of migrants therein. The author, with care and an admirable self-reflexivity, contemplates the kinds of knowledges made possible or sponsored by the available archival traces of the naturalisation processes encountered by their grandparents, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust who thereby endured “genocidal bureaucracies” in both contexts. This thoughtful, nuanced and moving account stages a fruitful dialogue with Indigenous and other Jewish scholars, through which it intervenes in debates about settler-colonial archives, their constitution and role in knowledge production, and their very status as forms of coloniality and violence. Contemplating the tensions and ambivalences of engaging with bureaucratic archival materials in writing family histories, the author foregrounds the limits of these kinds of “official” records as colonising documents. Deeply conscious of the ethical issues raised by undertaking this research, and telling these kinds of stories, Silverstein’s beautifully written article offers a model for autoethnographic historical scholarship.
Highly Commended
Danielle Carney Flakelar and Emily O’Gorman, “Wayilwan Women Caring for Country: Dynamic Knowledges, Decolonising Historical Methodologies, and Colonial Explorer Journals”, Journal of Australian Studies 47, no. 1 (2023): 160–80, https://doi.org/10. 1080/14443058.2022.2153378
In this insightful collaborative piece, written by senior cultural Wayilwan knowledge holder Danielle Carney Flakelar and academic of European descent Emily O’Gorman, the authors carefully reflect upon the decolonising methodologies that are at the heart of their important research project. Rereading colonial explorer journals through the lens of four key aspects of Wayilwan knowledges—river knowledge, fire knowledge, grain and yam knowledge, and care of children and the elderly—the authors demonstrate the epistemological and political possibilities of staging such cross-cultural dialogues. In this highly engaging piece, the authors successfully develop and mobilise decolonising historical methodologies, offering valuable approaches that can be adopted by others moving forward. Laudably seeking to recentre Wayilwan women’s knowledge, the authors are attentive to the vital political and ethical considerations, and potentialities, of undertaking collaborative research of this nature. Seeking to redress the harmful disengagement with Indigenous women’s knowledges in Australia, they reflect upon and respect Wayilwan knowledge-sharing protocols and provide a valuable example of how to do this crucial decolonising work.
All three contributions embody the spirit of intellectual curiosity and scholarly rigour that the journal strives to nurture, and they highlight the importance of critical inquiry and interdisciplinary scholarship to promoting a deeper understanding of Australia’s past, present and future.