In lieu of my usual Monday Musings post, I am reporting on the 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards which were announced this evening, and which I attended via the live-stream from the Creative Australia website. I shared the short list several weeks ago, so I won’t repeat those here.

The awards ceremony was a long one, and I suspect longer than planned, because Mr Gums saw the winners come through on his phone before they had all been announced. The problem, I’m guessing, of automatic scheduling!

The event was emceed by an Australian comedian, writer, actor, and television presenter, Alex Lee, whom I don’t know. (I guess you are going to say, “where have you been?”) She injected lightness and humour into the opening, a bit like you see at America’s Academy Awards. Like the Academy Awards, some of the jokes worked and some didn’t. The thing is, I suppose, different jokes will work for different people.

She did say, however, that there were 645 entries this year, 100 more than last year. That says something, I presume, about the health of writing and publishing in Australia.

 There were then two speakers, the Chair of the Writing Australia Council, Larissa Behrendt, who commented on the appropriateness of holding the Awards at the NLA which embodies the “the heart of our nation’s stories”. She said that the Awards “celebrate writing, reading ideas and the voices that shape who we are”, and she thanked Selina Walker for her welcome. She reminded us of the 65,000 years of storytelling in our country.

Behrendt then introduced the Minister for the Arts (among his many hats), Tony Burke, whose passion for the arts is palpable to anyone who hears him speak. Behrendt noted his appreciation of the centrality of First Nations Arts to Australia’s cultural policy. And said that this is a minister who shows up at opening nights, awards nights, festivals and so on, because he deeply understands why the Arts matter.

I couldn’t possibly share all that Burke said. He recognised the main players, commenting first on the generosity of the word “welcome” Selina Walker’s Welcome to Country. He thanked Australian Greens leader, Sarah Hanson-Young, who was present and who has been there, in support, through the whole cultural policy journey. He thanked Alex Lee for injecting a bit of fun, and he acknowledged Larissa Behrendt (who is Chair of the National Library of Australia Council) and Clare Wright (who is Chair of the Council of the National Museum of Australia.) He noted that it has been a long time since a writer has chaired the NLA’s Council, and an historian that of the NMA. (I groaned inwardly as we are still waiting for an archivist – or appropriate professional – to chair the council of the National Film and Sound Archive!) But all progress in this sphere of Boards/Council appointments is good!

Burke talked at some length about the importance of the arts and, what he believes to be the strength of the Government’s Creative Australia cultural policy. He talked particularly about writing. he argued that the ability to learn from writing is the gift “we celebrate tonight”. He suggested that writing is the only art form that we don’t react to with physicality. Music, Dance, Visual Arts, and so on, engage through the senses – sight, hearing – but writers work on our imaginations, writing lives within our minds. (There are some debates in this, I think, but I still like his point.)

He also quoted from three books to illustrate his points. First was from Kelly Canby’s children’s book, A leaf called Greaf, which ends on the idea of things being held in the heart forever, and which is the gift writers give us. Then he mentioned Fiona McFarlane and Michelle de Kretser who spoke to untold stories. Highway 13 deals ingeniously with the fact that we hear more about the person who should not be remembered rather than the stories of those affected by that person’s actions. Then he quoted from Theory and practice, which I will abbreviate to “that was the meaning of assimilation … it trained us to disappear”. Writers, he said, make sure that people are seen. (For me, though, he raised yet another idea to explore in this wonderful novel.)

There was more, but I think that’s a great point on which to end the introductions.

And the winners

• Fiction: Michelle de Kretser, Theory & practice (Text, my review)
• Poetry: David Brooks, The other side of daylight: New and selected poems (UQP)
• Nonfiction: Rick Morton, Mean streak (Fourth Estate)
• Australian history: Geraldine Fela, Critical care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis (UNSW Press)
• Children’s literature: Peter Carnavas, Leo and Ralph (UQP)
• Young adult: Krystal Sutherland, The invocations (Penguin)

Links on authors’ names are to my posts on these authors. (I loved that Children’s Literature winner, Peter Carnavas, is a teacher-librarian. Go him.)

Now, this being the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and, anyhow, this being a gathering of writers who as a group are passionate about ideas, many political comments were made, lengthening the supposedly short speeches. These comments addressed what is happening in Gaza, the issue animal rights, the treatment of human beings by government social policy, and the gutting of humanities and humanities research in Australian universities. In the case of the last, Geraldine Fela’s video speech had been cut off at the allotted time, but she had asked Clare Wright to complete her speech, which Wright did!

Thoughts anyone?