2024
Dr Nicholas Hoare, for his project: Australia’s Voice of the Pacific: A history of the Pacific Islands Monthly, 1930–2000.
2023
Dr Effie Karageorgos, for her project: Anti-Vietnam War Protest in New South Wales.
2022
Dr Shuxia Chen, for her project: Women and 1930s–1940s Sino-Australian Relations
2021
Matthew Devine, for his project: Ted Farmer: Architect, facilitator, bureaucrat.
2020
Dr Jarrod Hore, for his project: Grounding Colonial Science: William Branwhite Clarke in the field 1839–78.
2019
Dr Isobelle Barrett Meyering, for her project: Pipi Storm Theatre Company: A cultural history of children’s rights.
The project will examine the growth of the idea of children’s rights from the 1970s through the Library’s extensive collections of papers of the Pipi Storm Theatre, which delivered theatre across NSW schools and welfare institutions.
2018
Dr James Keating, for his project: Linda Littlejohn: Australia’s forgotten feminist.
Dr Keating’s project will explore the life of an influential and very active mid-war Australian feminist, whose story has now largely been forgotten.
2017
Associate Professor Robert Crawford, for his project: Probing the Consumer’s Mind: The Ashby Research Service and the post-war Australian market.
2016
Associate Professor Russell McGregor, for his project: Bush Naturalist: A life of Alec Chisholm.
Alec Chisholm (1890-1977) was a prolific writer on natural history, especially ornithology, and was also an influential editor, literary critic and historian of the mid-twentieth century.
2015
Dr Ruth Thurstan, for her project: Development, Industrialisation and Recreation: An environmental history of Australian east coast fisheries.
This project highlighted interactions between humans and the marine environment, and concentrates on a period of great significance in global fisheries, particularly as the mechanisation of the industry at this time had a major impact on fish stocks.
2014
Dr Gabriela Zabala, for her project: Left, Radical & Unacknowledged: The unpublished New Theatre plays of Jim Crawford.
This project looked at the work of Jim Crawford, a prolific playwright associated with the New Theatre who wrote up to twenty plays about the situation of the working classes, and the impact of the White Australia policy on Indigenous people and capitalism.
2013
Dr Toby Martin, for his project: Performing Aboriginality: Tourism to Aboriginal missions, reserves and settlements from the 1880s to the 1950s.
Martin’s project uncovered and illuminated the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century visits by tourists to Aboriginal reserves to experience coroborees, hear gum leaf bands, buy boomerangs and similar activities. Tourism to these settlements offered a rare possibility of black/white contact and exchange.
2012
Dr Gareth Knapman, for his project: Conciliating Exchanges: Mapping the politics of trading between Aboriginal peoples and settlers in nineteenth-century South-Eastern Australia.
The project looked at Aboriginal agency through the production of objects for sale within nineteenth-century intellectual networks. Aboriginal Agency argues that Aboriginal people had a voice and were trying to present that voice through material culture. This voice however was lost through the politics of colonial intellectual networks.
2011
Dr Andy Kaladelfos, for their project: Citizens of Mercy: Bushrangers, punishment and public opinion in colonial New South Wales.
2010
Dr Craig Munro, for his project: A Biography of Influential Editor, Publisher and Literary Journalist: AG Stephens.
2009 (Inaugural)
Dr Michael Davis, for his project: A History of European Representations