Gudanji and Wakaja woman Debra Dank has won a record four out of 14 NSW Premier's Literary Awards for her memoir of family, community and Country, We Come With This Place — including the top gong, Book of the Year.
It's the first time any author has won this many categories at the annual awards.
Dank's book, which she describes in its preface as a "strange kind of letter, written to my place", also won the Indigenous Writers' Prize and the awards for non-fiction and new writing, netting a total of $85,000.
It's a tremendous haul for a debut book published by a small press (Echo Publishing), consolidating previous accolades for We Come From This Place, which was shortlisted for the Stella Prize.
It caps a banner year for Indigenous writers at this year's NSW Premier's Literary Awards, with Corey Tutt and Blak Douglas topping the children's literature category for their book The First Scientists: Deadly Inventions and Innovations from Australia's First Peoples; Lystra Rose winning the Young People's Literature prize for her fantasy novel The Upwelling; and Dylan Van Den Berg taking out the playwriting prize for Whitefella Yella Tree.
- Scroll down for the full list of winners
In awarding We Come With This Place the Indigenous Writers' Prize, the judging panel (chaired by Miles Franklin winner Melissa Lucashenko) said it "exemplifies all that First Nations writing can and should be":
"The writing is culturally rigorous and deeply thoughtful. Dank seeks to expand the horizons of the reader in a way which centres, not the author as an individual, but rather her Country and the wider community she has grown within. Most of all, her memoir shows a powerful path forward from colonial trauma towards a space of mutual respect and self-determining futures."
Speaking to ABC Arts ahead of the ceremony on Monday night at the State Library of NSW in Sydney, Dank said that as an avid reader since childhood, "winning anything because of having produced a book is pretty phenomenal".
"I didn't set out to write a book. But I've almost stopped describing myself as the 'accidental writer'."
She said the awards felt like "a vindication of the validity, and the value, and the importance and the critical nature of stories from remote parts of Australia".
In particular, she hopes the book and its success draws attention to the stories — old and new — of Gudanji Country (the country of her father and his ancestors), including the impact of fracking on the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory.
"The absolute intentful destruction of my Country is just soul destroying," she said.
"There is a referendum coming along as to whether or not Aboriginal people have a Voice to Parliament; to have that level of representation. And I think there's a particular kind of irony in that, because Aboriginal communities around the Beetaloo have been really struggling to have their voices heard around how fracking is impacting our livelihoods in these places, and we're absolutely being silenced, and ignored and marginalised."
Other key winners at this year's awards include Naarm/Melbourne-based author and bookseller Katerina Gibson, who won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction ($40,000) for her darkly comic debut short story collection Women I Know; and Illawarra-based author Jackie Bailey, who won the Multicultural NSW award ($30,000) for her debut novel The Eulogy, a work of autofiction that she has described as "a fictional guide for how to write a eulogy, as the protagonist prepares for her own sister's funeral".
Accepting her prize, Gibson thanked the judges for "giving my strange book this incredible award".
"I was just glad someone published this — I did not think that it was going to be appreciated in this specific way. And it does mean a lot — this is more money than I earned in a year. So it is very tangibly life-changing."
A letter to Country
We Come With This Place started its life as part of a PhD in Narrative Theory and Semiotics at Deakin University in Melbourne. Dank, a lifelong educator, writes in her preface that she "wanted to show how story works in my community and how it has contributed to our living with country for so long".
To write the book, she decamped from Gubbi Gubbi Country in Queensland's Sunshine Coast (where she and her husband have been based on and off for the last 40 years) to Gudanji Country: an area of the Northern Territory about 10 hours south-east of Darwin.
"Rick [my husband] and I purchased a generator and packed up the back of the troopie [truck] with some camping gear and off we went," she told ABC RN's Awaye! last year.
The resulting book, written over six months on Country, is a collection of stories (or as she calls them, "episodes") from her own life and members of her family and community, as well as Gudanji Dreaming stories — all peppered with the languages of the south-western Gulf of Carpentaria.
Dank grew up off her ancestral Country, in Camooweal in north-west Queensland, which she conjures in the book through vivid imagery of red dust, "milky" streams, jagged outcrops, and flocks of budgerigars in "emerald" and "young sap" greens.
She paints fresh pictures from childhood memories of campfire feasts, casual injuries, small miracles (fish falling from the sky) and everyday ignominies (there's a very funny account of Dank's stage debut, playing a princess in the school play).
She stretches back in time some 65,000 years, to tell creation stories; and she speaks of more recent personal history, including raising her own children on Gudanji Country, and the deaths of her parents.
The book's structure reflects the "nonlinear storying that we [as First Nations peoples] do within our families and around our communities," Dank told Awaye!
"I wasn't worrying too much about the structure of a formal, Western-produced narrative. I just wanted it to grow as it would naturally within my community."
Dank says the book evolved, over time, from a PhD project to something more personal — and more urgent.
"I sort of got to realise, at the end, that it was going to be necessary for me to record some of our stories, because I was not going to be able to take my grandchildren home for much longer for them to access those places that have nurtured and provided for Gudanji people for so very, very long," she says.
"I'm deeply concerned at the sense of this country being disposable … This country is not disposable. And we need to be a little more aware, and more cognisant, of what our grandchildren are set to inherit. I don't think they're going to be terribly impressed with our passivity around environmental destruction."
Full list of winners
Book of the Year ($10,000)
We Come With This Place by Debra Dank (Echo Publishing)
Indigenous Writers' Prize ($30,000)
We Come With This Place by Debra Dank (Echo Publishing)
Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction ($40,000)
We Come With This Place by Debra Dank (Echo Publishing)
UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing ($5,000)
We Come With This Place by Debra Dank (Echo Publishing)
Christina Stead Prize for Fiction ($40,000)
Women I Know by Katerina Gibson (Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Australia)
Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry ($30,000)
The Singer and Other Poems by Kim Cheng Boey (Cordite Books)
Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Literature ($30,000)
The First Scientists: Deadly Inventions and Innovations from Australia's First Peoples by Corey Tutt and Blak Douglas (Hardie Grant Explore)
Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature ($30,000)
The Upwelling by Lystra Rose (Hachette Australia)
Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting ($30,000)
Whitefella Yella Tree by Dylan Van Den Berg (Griffin Theatre Company/ Currency Press)
Betty Roland Prize for Scriptwriting ($30,000)
Blaze by Del Kathryn Barton and Huna Amweero (Causeway Films)
Multicultural NSW Award ($30,000)
The Eulogy by Jackie Bailey (Hardie Grant Books)
NSW Premier's Translation Prize ($30,000 — biennial award)
People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated by Tiffany Tsao (Penguin Classics)
University of Sydney People's Choice Award ($5,000)
Every Version of You by Grace Chan (Affirm Press)
Special Award
Bankstown Poetry Slam
