True North: The Story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack by Brenda Niall

Judges' comments

Based on rich family archives, this well-written and intelligently argued book tells the life stories of two well-known members of a famous and influential pastoralist family — Mary and Elizabeth Durack. Niall neatly and cleverly weaves the themes of dispossession, place and identity with the personal and professional histories of the sisters, and the Durack family.

One of the book’s main themes relates to dispossession from their land, both of the Duracks and the Indigenous people, and it carries a carefully crafted sense of melancholy. In an important way, the book also complicates our understanding of the history of rural Australia and the relationships between pastoralists and Aboriginal people, for it demonstrates that some pastoral families were capable of articulating relationships with Aboriginal people that were more than simply paternalistic or exploitative. Niall succeeds in telling a compelling and moving story — one that adds to our understanding of pastoral and Indigenous history, and the relationship between the two.