InASA warmly congratulates Ruby Ekkel of the Australian National University for winning the inaugural Kay Schaffer Award.
The Kay Schaffer Award is designed to acknowledge and celebrate the best unpublished essay on storytelling in Australian Studies by a postgraduate or early career researcher (ECR), to commemorate the influential scholarship of Professor Kay Schaffer. It is supported by the generous philanthropy of Kay Schaffer’s family. It seeks to recognise colleagues who contribute to and enhance the interdisciplinary field of Australian Studies through a focus on the scholarship and practice of storytelling (broadly defined) in fields of great interest to Kay Schaffer: literary studies, gender studies, and historical studies. It is administered by the International Australian Studies Association (InASA).
The judging was undertaken by a panel of three academics – Dr. Andonis Piperoglou (Chair and InASA Vice-President); Prof. Emily Potter; and Prof. Stephen Muecke – who took into consideration the following:
- how the unpublished work contributes to and enhances the interdisciplinary field of Australian Studies through a focus on the scholarship and practice of storytelling;
- the methodological and conceptual approach undertaken in the work, and its innovation in Australian Studies through storytelling (broadly defined) from a range of perspectives; and
- the amenability of the work to publication as a refereed journal article format.
The Award of $1000, accompanied by the judges’ citation, will be presented at InASA’s biennial conference and promoted on the InASA website (http://inasa.org/). The winning article will also be published in the Journal of Australian Studies, subject to usual peer review process.
The full citation for Ruby’s winning essay is available here:
‘Friends with wild nature’: Intimacy, expertise, and women’s nature-writing in early-twentieth-century Victoria
The judging panel is pleased to announce that Ruby Ekkel is the inaugural winner of the Kay Schaffer Award. Ekkel’s submission “‘Friends with wild nature’: Intimacy, expertise, and women’s nature-writing in early-twentieth-century Victoria” charts the story of Alice Manfield and her work as an early conservationist in the high country of Federation-era Victoria. By way of an engaging narrative historical argument, Ekkel presents Manfield as a skilled naturalist who encouraged a curious settler populace to become intimately familiar with native species via public writings, guided tours, and photographs. Weaving a disparate archive together, the history that is presented asserts that women, like Manfield, were considered to hold an authoritative and expert understandings of the natural world, albeit through a gendered prism of women’s presumed capacity to be intimate and caring. Manfield’s publication, Lyrebirds of Mount Buffalo, is given close attention, as are images taken of and by Manfield herself. Methodologically, Ekkel demonstrates a sound understanding of how to analyse visual materials as primary sources. So many historians see visual materials as just illustrative and not as evidence that one can interpret. Ekkel does not, and that is most welcome. Bringing Indigenous, settler colonial, gender, environmental and ornithological history into the same narrative arc, Ekkel’s powerful framing of the past is an engaging story of how female settlers formed close relationships, friendships even, with the living world around them. In doing so, they contributed to the invasiveness of settler colonial culture. Congratulations Ruby Ekkel on a fine piece of historical research and writing!
Congratulations also to the two Highly Commended entries:
Samuel J. Cox of the University of Adelaide for “The Flight of the Night Parrot through Australian Writing.”
Tracing the history and poetics of the representation of the Night Parrot in Australian literature, Cox presents his readers with a finessed and gripping entry into ecocriticism, ecopoetics and environmental history. His creative framing of how the Night Parrot has been, and continues to be, depicted by authors like John Kinsella, Dorothy Porter, and Alexis Wright, positions the elusive Night Parrot as a paradoxical being that can teach us a great deal about human and non-human relations. Great work Samuel J. Cox for producing a sophisticated and imaginative essay.
Jana Norman of Deakin University for “Thinking Multispecies Entanglement with Australia’s Subtidal Shadow Species, Ostrea angasi.”
Thinking with entanglements presented by Australian native mud, or flat, oysters, readers are invited to consider human and more-than-human assemblages through performative yet highly engaging prose. Playing with and reinventing narrative conventions, Norman’s writing offers an interpretation of oysters as not only an identifiable consumable, but also as a unique organism that stems from liminal and shadowy environs. Well done Jana Norman for producing such an engaging and innovative essay.