News
Indifferent Inclusion wins NSW Premier’s History Award
Wednesday 5 December 2012
Associate Professor Russell McGregor’s Indifferent Inclusion has just won the 2012 NSW Premier’s History Prize.
This ‘fresh and insightful’ book is published by Aboriginal Studies Press – the publishing arm of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in Canberra.
Senior judge Professor Richard Waterhouse noted the strengths of the shortlisted books: ‘The winning entries include works of outstanding quality. They cover a diverse and fascinating range of subjects as well as reflecting deep levels of research and a varied set of approaches that embrace social, cultural and intellectual history’.
Russell Taylor, the AIATSIS Principal, offered his warm congratulations to Associate Professor McGregor.
“Associate Professor McGregor is a renowned scholar of Aboriginal history and central to his work here are the efforts made to include Aboriginal people in the Australian nation in the middle part of the twentieth century; something Aboriginal people were focusing on strongly.”
“His insights reveal why assimilation was important to Indigenous activists and other reformers,” he concluded.
Professor Sandra Harding, Vice Chancellor of James Cook University, hopes that Indifferent Inclusion might encourage settler Australians to be more willing to consider, perhaps even embrace, the full inclusion of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation.
“Russell’s beautifully weighted work ends with an appeal — to do much better than continue to consider issues of the national inclusion of Aboriginal Australians as polarized polemic,” she said.
Indifferent Inclusion was also shortlisted in Australian History Prize in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards earlier this year.
For more information visit: http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/asp/aspbooks/RussellMcGregor.html