The International Australian Studies Association (InASA), alongside the editors of the Journal of Australian Studies, is delighted to announce the 2024 winners of the Barrett Award for Australian Studies: Lurong Liu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Aaron Humphrey and Simon Walsh (University of Adelaide).
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.
This year, the judging panel comprised Professor Gillian Whitlock (The University of Queensland), Professor Stephen Muecke (University of Notre Dame Australia) and was chaired by Professor Jane Lydon (University of Western Australia). Special thanks to Professor David Carter (The University of Queensland) for timely and invaluable assistance in the assessment of the Postgraduate Category. The panel was highly impressed by the quality of research across the four issues of the Journal of Australian Studies published in 2024 and recommended Highly Commended awards in both categories.
Postgraduate Category Winner
Lurong Liu, “ʻFeelings are strong here’: A Proximate Reading of Solastalgia in The Last Pulse”, Journal of Australian Studies, 48:1 (2024), 121-34.
Lurong Liu undertakes a reading of Anson Cameron’s novel, The Last Pulse, to explore much broader responses to climate change and ecological loss through the key concept of “solastalgia” – Glenn Albrecht’s neologism denoting the emotional distress prompted by environmental destruction. Liu applies Ken Gelder’s method of “proximate reading” to examine the ways in which the supposedly distant can become close to readers, within a broader cosmopolitan perspective. Through a sophisticated and wide-ranging analysis of water crises, Liu explores the emotional dynamics of a global and sentient water ecology, making a persuasive and original argument that the novel prompts solastagia among its readers as a “multiscalar” affect which may move them to action.
Highly Commended
Rebecca Houlihan, “ʻComplete Strangers Can Get through Your Front Door’: The Carly Ryan Murder, Teen Girls and the Internet in 2000s Australia”, Journal of Australian Studies, 48:4 (2024), 466-81.
Rebecca Houlihan offers a case study within the recent, and under-researched, period of the adoption and integration of the internet into wider society – the 1990s and 2000s. By examining public responses to the 2007 murder of 15-year-old Carly Ryan in South Australia, Houlihan explores the ways in which media coverage dramatised the dangers that cyberspace posed to young women, to reveal wider anxieties over the boundary between public and private. Placing this example within a longer historical context to show its antecedents and associations, this sophisticated interdisciplinary analysis effectively demonstrates the ways that the recent history of cyberspace continues to be shaped by older cultural fears.
Open Category Winner
Aaron Humphrey and Simon Walsh, “Lost Precursor to Autobiographical Comics, Kangarooland (ca. 1918–1919), Illuminates Transnational Creativity in Australia’s WWI Internment Camps,” Journal of Australian Studies, 48:2 (2024), 209-29.
Aaron Humphrey and Simon Walsh focus on a remarkable “long-lost” autobiographical graphic novel, or autographic, The Voyage and Adventures of a Well-Behaved German in Kangarooland (Reise-Abenteuer eines Braven Deutschen im Lande der Kangaroo), a series of proto-comic books created circa 1918–1919 by the cartoonist C. Friedrich while interned during World War I. Not only do the authors unravel the rich visual text of Kangarooland itself and its depiction of the experience of detention in Australia, they also show how specific features of cartoon idiom facilitated the expression of conditions of precarity and displacement, and the ways in which Friedrich “expansively, cheekily and creatively resists, bends and transmutes” the familiar impulse to construct homogenised national identities based on either language or cultural superiority (226-27). They place Kangarooland within a transnational tradition of autographics produced by refugees and the displaced to argue persuasively for the connections between experiences of detention, disjunctive or common identities, and the narrative structure of comics. Their analysis also presents a critique of the current research on autographics, documenting a different history, an Australian one, that challenges the current understanding that autographics as a US-born genre. In this way it expands the association of autographics and incarceration, and changes the way we understand this transnational genre.
Highly Commended
Melissa Bellanta and Lorinda Cramer, “A ‘Bacchanalian Mardi Gras’: The Melbourne Cup and the Popular Culture of Satirical Dress in 1970s Australia”, Journal of Australian Studies, 48:3 (2024), 314-34.
Drawing from a remarkable archive produced by the photographer Rennie Ellis, Melissa Bellanta and Lorinda Cramer re-visit the carnivalesque culture of the Melbourne Cup during the 1970s to analyse its subversive meanings and effects. This highly entertaining account of what the journalist Keith Dunstan termed a “Bacchanalian Mardi Gras” makes us see “ockerism” with new eyes – not merely as a vulgar masculinist embarrassment but more productively as a site of feminist and countercultural contestation, and an integral part of expanding sexual, gender and social mores across the seventies.