Literature Prize 2009

Comments by Sally Breen & Frank Moorhouse

First prize: 'The Real Thing' by Catherine Harris
When I began to read 'The Real Thing' I realised the territory may have been familiar but I was with an unusual guide; a storyteller who could reveal a family to me, one of the most ordinary of human units, as if it was for the first time. The author was reaching out.

'The Real Thing' illuminates a space bigger than the words within it. The narrator's wry and delicate humour in the face of her father's accidental death and the legacy of that loss circling in the rooms and in the people around her is very moving. 'The Real Thing' opens out the confusions of mourning for a young woman as she struggles with the guilt of being interested, being curious about life even when she believes that curiosity may have been the cause for her father slipping, fatally that day, through the ice. She takes comfort in her father's scientific curiosity and the chemically derived metaphors run through the narrative like a kind of literary alchemy. 'The Real Thing' might be, on one level, a story about a family struggling with death but it is ultimately a story about facing the unknown, about discovery and the risky experiments in life. Even when the territory might be frightening, or undiscovered, or uncharted the author asks us not to veer away from thin ice but to keep skating and stay curious.

Second prize: 'Next' by Felicity Castagna
'Next' is a haunting lyrical story about a doomed love affair between two young Australians drifting through Indonesia for very different reasons. He is a young veteran on his way home from Afghanistan; she, an aimless young women in exile from bad love back home. Both of them are injured: he no longer has any thumbs having had them blown off in combat; she is trying to disappear inside her own body, refusing to eat and growing thinner and thinner. Perhaps it is these things which draw them together initially but 'Next' is not a love story; the space between the two characters stretches to such a point that the gaps between what they are running from cannot be soothed by connection or passion or even the lush landscapes. The young soldier cannot reconcile the terror he carries inside him with his lover's self-destruction and his internal reflections on his time in what the author refers to as 'the punched awake glow' of the desert are chillingly powerful reminders of a war we never see without a filter and one that he cannot forget. 'Next' takes us inside the damaged psychological landscape of two young lovers when leaving is the only thing you can do.

Commended: 'Clay' by Erica Woolgar
'Clay' deals with the sometimes fraught, dangerous, and intricate relationship, sometimes sexual, of a woman teacher who is teaching and nurturing an artistically-gifted student.

Commended: 'Lucy' by Hilary McDowell
'Lucy' is a strange story, strangely narrated, about a 15-year-old girl traveling with her famous father on his lecture tours to many cities and about how the girl weaves her own personal story from this travel - ‘Oh, I get it. We cannot retrace, we are always hurtling forward…’