OHA Book Award

Judges comments

The large number of entries to this year’s award, which included scholarly works, popular histories, and community-led publications, is testament to oral history’s valued role in telling diverse stories for a wide range of audiences.

Choosing winners has been a difficult decision and several entries, although not on this list, were of very high standard and made excellent use of oral history as a method and source.

Joint winners:

Carla Pascoe Leahy, Becoming a Mother: An Australian History

Pascoe Leahy has undertaken over 60 interviews with Australian mothers across three generations, from multiple, diverse backgrounds and with varied family make-ups. Demonstrating expertise with oral history methods, and drawing on psychology, gender studies, and sociology as well as history, she skilfully lays out significant changes across generations of mothering in Australia while retaining the individual voices of her interviewees. By integrating her own experience as a mother into the pages of the book, Pascoe Leahy shares in the intimacy of her interviewees’ stories, as the book reveals the private, often difficult, and deeply emotional experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, caregiving, and maternal identity. Beautifully written, this book speaks to the joys and pain of mothering. In doing so, it offers recognition for the role mothers have played in shaping the history of Australia. 

Jordana Silverstein, Cruel Care: A History of Children at Our Borders

At first glance, the premise of this book may sound somewhat conventional: interviews with federal politicians and senior civil servants who were involved in the development and implementation of child refugee policies during the ‘Children Overboard’ era. It is, in fact, a powerful and subversive book. Silverstein skilfully and unsparingly analyses these oral histories to reveal how decision-makers cloaked inhumane policies in the language of empathy. She argues that children have long been a tool of the colonial project and that indifference to the Stolen Generations prepared the way for acceptance of cruel measures against child refugees. Engagingly written and fearlessly incisive, this book reveals the potential of oral history to understand, challenge and resist dominant discourses and harmful policies.

Highly commended:

Geraldine Fela, Critical Care: Nurses on the Frontline of Australia’s AIDS Crisis

Geraldine Fela’s Critical Care explores an under-researched aspect of the Australian response to HIV/AIDs with insight, nuance and sensitivity. The work spans across labour history, histories of medicine, and histories of sexuality, skilfully deploying oral history in ways that both illuminate and complicate understandings of Australia’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. Fela gives voice to nurses on the frontline of a battle, not only against a devastating illness, but also against prejudice and hate. Her research encompasses both the broad focus of national public debate and the intimate, embodied experience of providing care. This is an important and deeply moving work that handles complex stories with great skill.