Bulletin

Issue: June 2004

People

Inga Clendinnen wins major literary prize

La Trobe Emeritus Scholar, historian and author, Inga Clendinnen, right, has become the first Australian to win the prestigious Kiriyama Prize for non-fiction.

The US-based Kiriyama Prize, now in its eighth year, is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding books that promote greater understanding among nations of the Pacific Rim and South Asia.

The award was made for her most recent book, Dancing with Strangers, a study of the first years of European settlement in New South Wales, which also won this year's NSW Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction.

The book, published by Text, is a metaphor for the initial contact in the late 18th century between two vastly different peoples: the British settlers and Aboriginal Australians.

'The Australians and the British began their relationship,' Dr Clendinnen writes, 'by dancing together.'

The Kiriyama citation said the centrepiece of the book is the recreation of events surrounding the spearing of Governor Phillip at Manly Cove in 1790. 'By retracing the difficulties in the way of understanding people of different cultures, the author's stated hope is for greater tolerance and social justice.'

Reviews in the Australian Book Review and The Age in Melbourne, respectively described the book as 'Reaching out to its listeners, drawing them within the world of the settlement at Port Jackson...' and 'No reconciliation is possible unless we can discover a version of Australian history that can be shared. Clendinnen's wonderful book offers the most truthful and nourishing first chapter of such a history that we are ever likely to have.'

In an interview with The Australian newspaper, Dr Clendinnen said: 'The historian's obligation is to humankind, not to a particular group, and therefore, arrogant as it must seem and painful as it is, we have to make the effort to cross cultural boundaries in our investigations.'

Dr Clendinnen is also the author of Reading the Holocaust, a New York Times Best Book of the Year in 1999 and winner of the New South Wales Premier's General History Award. Her ABC Boyer Lectures, True Stories, were published in 2000, as was her award-winning memoir Tiger's Eye.

Also internationally recognised for her contribution to historical writing of 16th century Latin America, Dr Clendinnen, retired from La Trobe in the early 1990s, having taught at the University for more than 21 years.

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