Award-winning book focuses on great injustice
A book co-authored by La Trobe University historian Professor Marilyn Lake has won this year’s Queensland Premier’s History Book Award, sharing the prize of $15,000.
Titled Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality, it was written with Professor Henry Reynolds from the University of Tasmania.
Launched by former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, the book has received widespread critical acclaim. The judges said it was ‘wonderfully ambitious’, dealing with ‘one of the great injustices of the modern age. (It) shows that Australian attempts to define and defend “whiteness” through the infamous white Australia policy were in the vanguard of a global movement towards racial exclusion.
‘Instead of a narrow national story, Lake and Reynolds focus on the interplay of attitudes, ideas and policies across the English-speaking world – Britain, North America, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand – that saw notions of democratic equality and racial difference translate into racist policies of segregation, deportation and white privilege.’
Professor Lake said the book’s publication was timely as ‘Australian history – at both school and university levels – is increasingly orienting itself to larger global narratives’.
Professor Lake’s win is the second State Premier’s literary prize for La Trobe historians this year. Dr Robert Kenny won the best first history book prize in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World, see previous Bulletin issue.