Hore wins inaugural Marilyn Lake Prize

Tuesday, 18 July 2023 Books+Publishing

Academic Jarrod Hore has won the inaugural $2000 Marilyn Lake Prize for Australian Transnational History for Visions of Nature: How landscape photography shaped settler colonialism (University of California Press).

Judges said: ‘The sovereign link between Indigenous Australians and their land, so powerfully evinced in the Uluru Statement from the Heart, sets the terms for Jarrod Hore’s timely and troubling account of the role of 19th-century landscape photography in doing the cultural work of settler colonialism through fantasising alternative truths.’

‘Visions of Nature posits the camera as important a tool as the cultivator in preparing land for settlement,’ said judges. ‘Whether through stage managing or erasing Indigenous presence, rendering settler territory as ancient and empty in a Romantic conceit of wilderness, or the visual trickery of creating a “landed imaginary” of access, asset and utopia, landscape photography is revealed as witness and weapon of territorial dispossession and an essential part of the vocabulary of white settler nativity storylines. A benchmark of Australian transnational and spatial history.’

The new biennial prize is awarded by the Australian Historical Association (AHA) for the best book in Australian transnational history and is named for Lake, who held professorial appointments at La Trobe University, Harvard University, Stockholm University, the ANU and the University of Melbourne and served two terms as president of the AHA, from 2010 until 2014. Lake’s published works include prize-winning books and essays in transnational history including: Drawing the Global Colour Line: White men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality (with Henry Reynolds, MUP); Connected Worlds: History in transnational perspective (co-edited with Ann Curthoys, ANU e Press); and Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform (Harvard University Press).

The winner was chosen from a shortlist that included The Humanitarians: Child war refugees and Australian humanitarianism in a transnational world, 1919–1975 (Joy Damousi, CUP), Saving the World? Western volunteers and the rise of the humanitarian-development complex (Agnieszka Sobocinska, CUP), Unfree Workers: Insubordination and resistance in convict Australia, 1788–1860 (Hamish Maxwell-Stewart & Michael Quinlan, Palgrave) and Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British colonial cctivism, 1830–1870 (Zoë Laidlaw, CUP).