2024
Associate Professor Nancy Cushing, for her project: Beauty and the Beasts: A history of animals in Sydney.
Other animals have lived alongside humans in the place now known as Sydney for tens of thousands of years. As the space was urbanised, animals persisted and in some cases flourished, constituting key elements of novel more-than-human hybrid networks. This project will challenge this anthropocentrism by focusing on interspecies relationships in Sydney, Australia.
2022
Professor Sean Scalmer, for his project: A history of the Eight Hours Movement.
This project will offer the first history of the movement for the eight-hour day in Australia, from its origins until its recognition as a general industrial standard. It considers the movement's genesis, traces its mobilisation and outcomes, and ponders its memory and significance. It also critically examines the changing tactics adopted by the proponents of the eight-hour day.
2020
Professor Sally Young, for her project: Sworn to No Masters: A corporate and political history of Australian newspapers, 1941–2021.
Professor Young will, following on from her recent major work of scholarship Paper Emperors: the rise of Australia’s newspaper empires (2019), write a history of the political and corporate power of Australia’s various newspaper dynasties. This project will draw extensively on the Library’s recently acquired Fairfax Media Business Archive.
2018
Professor Grace Karskens, for her project: The Real Secret River, Dyarubbin.
This project will use the Library’s extensive and rich collections of manuscripts, books, images and maps to tell new cross-cultural and environmental stories about one of Australia’s most beautiful and historically significant rivers: Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury River.
2016 (Inaugural)
Dr Rebe Taylor, for her project: The Wedge Collection: Moments of encounter on the Tasmanian and Victorian frontiers.
The Saffron Walden Museum in North Essex houses one of most significant collections of south-eastern Aboriginal wooden artefacts dating from Australia’s early colonial period. Surveyor John Helder Wedge collected the artefacts at the close of the Tasmanian Black War and in the first year of Victorian settlement in 1835.