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Australianama

2020 - Shortlisted

Shortlisted

Judges' comments

In 2009, Samia Khatun encountered a copy of the Kasasol Ambia, a nineteenth-century volume of Bengali poetry, at a mosque in Broken Hill. Her efforts to uncover the provenance of this book set her on an extraordinary trajectory: from Broken Hill to Dhaka; from Sydney to Lahore and Calcutta. To narrate the history of South Asians in Australia, Khatun draws on a rich array of sources and storytelling traditions, centring the voices and stories of South Asian and Aboriginal people. In doing so, she challenges her readers to think in new ways about Australian history and how we understand it.

At the heart of Australianama is an argument for putting aside European knowledge in favour of the epistemologies of the colonised. The achievement and innovation of this bold work is to put this into action. Khatun does not merely treat the ragas, dream-texts, song-poetry and myriad other eclectic texts she reads as sources, she lets their knowledge and rhythms infuse every page of Australianama.