TRACE Award

THEORY RACE AND COLONIALISM ESSAY (TRACE) AWARD

This prize to honour the memory and continue the work of Tracey Banivanua-Mar was proposed and agreed to at the ANZLHS AGM in Christchurch in December 2017. 

Terms and Conditions of the award: The prize to be of an agreed value of $500 min. In 2018 the executive committee agreed to a prize of $AU1000. 

To be awarded by ANZLHS from ANZLHS funds for the best article published in law&history that engages theoretically with the themes of race and colonialism over the previous 2 calendar years (max. 4 issues of the journal).

The award recipient to be announced at the annual conference (usually held after issue no.2 for the year) by judges appointed by ANZLHS Executive, with the Editor(s) to decide their eligibility.

All authors will be eligible to be considered, except the Editor(s).

ANZLHS reserves the right not to make the award in any particular year.

The judges’ report will be published on the ANZLHS website.

The report for the 2022 award recipient appears below:

Congratulations to Sharleigh Crittenden for her article ‘Race, justice and democracy: how the historical and contemporary representativeness of the criminal jury sheds light on the citizenship status of Indigenous Australians’, law&history 2022 (2)

In this timely and insightful article, Sharleigh Crittenden offers a sophisticated analysis of how ‘race’ and racism has produced franchise inequality and unrepresentative juries in Australia. Drawing on examples from Aotearoa New Zealand and Canada, Crittenden illuminates how the principle of random selection often overrides representativeness on juries, thereby further marginalising Indigenous participation in the legal system and generating further injustice. The most significant barrier to Indigenous participation in juries, though, is enrolment to vote, which only became compulsory for Indigenous Australian in 1984. Crittenden’s article is an extremely worthy winner of this award as it exemplifies the TRACE model by examining the historical significance and meanings of racism as it is both embedded and continues to live on through institutions shaped by colonialism and its aftermath.

The judges agreed that a second article should be Highly Commended:

Jennifer Jones, ‘Acknowledging Sovereignty: Settlers, Right Behaviour and the Taungurung Clans of the Kulin Nation’, law&history, 2021 (2)

Jennifer Jones has written a highly engaging article that examines the concept and practice of ‘right behaviour’ to re-examine relationships between the Taungurung clans of the Kulin nation and white settlers in the colony of Victoria. By using oral accounts and also re-reading settler memories it evokes the lived experiences of racism and oppression, forms of Indigenous recognition, and creates an action template for researchers. This is an original and extremely well-crafted piece of writing that is deeply rooted in evidence and in the material effects of colonialism.

The report for the 2020 award recipient appears below:

Congratulations to Tim Calabria who has won our TRACE award for his article ‘The Bungalow and the Transformation of the “Half-Caste” category in Central Australia: Race and Law at the Limits of a Settler Colony 1914-1937’ which appeared in volume 7 issue 1 of law&history.

This engaging article makes a significant new contribution to our understanding of how racialized categories worked not only to eliminate or erase Aboriginality but were tied to the exploitation of Aboriginal labour in and around Alice Springs.  Its nuanced examination of the fluctuating and often ambiguous legal category of ‘half-caste’ was applied at the Bungalow in Central Australia reveals how the category was used not only to racialize Aboriginal people but to create a particular class of people who would fill settler colonial demands for labour. Its attentiveness to considerations of affect and emotions reveals the limited explanatory power of legal frameworks for understanding the mass institutionalisation of ‘half caste’ children. Rather, it sheds important new light on affectual encounters in this history. Through painstaking research and analytical insight, the article deftly weaves back and forth between the story of an individual caught up in these laws – Emily Geesing and her sovereign acts to escape these laws – to broad themes in the historiography, revealing how her experiences present us with important new ways to understand the logics of the settler-colonial project in Central Australia.

The report for the 2018 award recipient appears below:

Congratulations to Penny Edmonds who has won our inaugural TRACE award for her article ‘Emancipation Acts on the Oceanic Frontier?’ in volume 4 issue 2 of law&history.

In a strong field, which made judging very difficult, the judges were most impressed with the theoretical depth and originality demonstrated by Penny Edmonds’ article ‘Emancipation Acts on the Oceanic Frontier?’, vol.4:2 (2017). Edmonds’s essay covers considerable historiographical ground to produce a new way of thinking about the colonial history of the Bass Strait, combining Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip histories to explore questions of political diplomacy and gendered governance.  She brings together questions of race, gender, humanitarianism, interpersonal and frontier violence, and colonial governance in an original and compelling way that sets a high standard for scholars to follow, and makes this a worthy winner of the ANZLHS Theory Race and Colonialism Essay (TRACE) Award for 2018.