The Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society is delighted to announce the winners of the Annual Prize in Legal History. In 2024, the prize has been awarded in two categories: best monograph, and best journal article or book chapter. The Society gratefully acknowledges David Plater and Richard Boast, and Kathy Bowrey and David V Williams who judged the monograph and journal article categories respectively.

The winners are:

Alecia Simmonds, Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law (La Trobe University Press, 2023)

This is an engaging and insightful study to the now archaic sounding tort known as ‘breach of promise to marry’. The author brings this action and its vexed history to light in a manner that is both erudite, illuminating and engaging. The author offers new perspectives on, and dimensions to the rationale and history of this cause of action in Australia. Despite its Pride and Prejudice overtones, the action for breach of promise to marry remained part of the law in Australia until well into the 20th century. The action provided jilted lovers a legal means to claim compensation for ‘breach of promise to marry’. Through the history of this tort the author explores the changing relationships between men and women, gender and law and changing social values and expectations. 

This book has many strengths. It draws skillfully on both original court reports and the sometimes sensational and lurid newspaper accounts. Its extremely clear and engaging writing style is telling. It is a book of appeal to a general audience as well as an academic or specialist audience. The author opens an amazing window into human relationships, to say nothing of the lives and status of women in Australia. It makes extremely innovative and powerful use of press reports, primary legal material and the somewhat unpromising one of court documents relating to breach of promise proceedings. The book uses legal materials as a vehicle for writing social and cultural history that is hugely impressive. The use of testimony giving in the courtroom is really innovative, and the book shows how this neglected type of primary material can be used by a skilled researcher and historian as is utilised here to bring social history to life.  The author’s compassion and wide sympathies were also impressive. 

The book provides a significant and original contribution to a forgotten side of Australian law and history. The book thoroughly deserves the 2024 prize in a very competitive field. 

Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall, 2023 ‘Identification Photography and the Surveillance of Chinese Mobility in Colonial Australasia’ Australian Historical Studies 54 (2): 299–329.

This rich archival research presents a detailed and balanced consideration of the power of the state to implement anti-Chinese immigration laws and practices, highlighting the role of photographs attached to identification and exemption processes. An engaging contextualisation of the law and the significance of the records comes from the successful weaving of personal narratives to show how Chinese subjects positioned themselves in relation to ever shifting regulations and arbitrary administrative practices. The authors show the duality of submitting to unjust laws and resisting their capacity to control personal lives, through denying mobility and access to opportunity. Photographs are read from a top down and a bottom-up perspective. From a top-down perspective, the photograph is part of the demand for official documentation where the primary concern of the state is to enable control of Chinese populations by challenging the veracity of the record. From a bottom-up perspective, the photograph is a necessary tool to enable mobility, but also an assertion of self-awareness of identity, read through the photographic subject’s choices in mode of dress (western or Chinese) and engagement with photographic conventions in framing and props. Photographic copies had circulation beyond official use. The authors use historical records to bring to life the way belonging and acceptance is negotiated with the state through everyday practices and with officials, and negotiated by the exercise of agency of those subject to dehumanising laws as Chinese applicants to entry interact with the various iterations of a racist administration.

Congratulations to Alecia, Sophie and Kate!