Top book prize for ideas about race and nation-building
Cover of Drawing the Global Colour Line.
Professor Lake.
An award for the ‘most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia, New Zealand or colonisation’ has been won by a book by La Trobe University historian Professor Marilyn Lake.
Co-written with Professor Henry Reynolds from the University of Tasmania the book, Drawing the Global Colour Line, received the University of Melbourne’s annual Ernest Scott Prize at the Australian Historical Association conference in July.
The book was launched by former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. It has received widespread critical acclaim, including last year’s Queensland Premier’s History Book Award. It has also been favourably reviewed overseas, the International History Review judging it a ‘once-in-a-generation book’.
Professor Lake describes the book’s publication and welcome recognition as timely. ‘Australian history – at both school and university levels – is increasingly orienting itself to larger global narratives,’ she says.
The judges acclaimed it as a work of ‘moral imagination … a considerable addition to international debate.’
‘This is a very important book for what it says about the evolution of ideas about race and nation-building, mainly but not entirely in North America, Australia and South Africa, from the last decades of the nineteenth century to the inter-war period, and especially in the way it combines those ideas with new understandings of gender.’
Their citation added: ‘The argument is woven through biographical sketches and accounts of intellectual exchange. The focus is on propagators of theory rather than on victims, although the outrage among leading non-Whites in response to ideas about White supremacy is very powerfully conveyed.’
Professor Lake’s was the third such award to La Trobe University historians in the past six years. Previous winners were Professor John Fitzgerald’s Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia in 2008 and Professor Judith Brett’s Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class in 2004.