1995 Winner - "The Hand that Signed the Paper" by Helen Demidenko

Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"Helen Demidenko’s novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, is about the response of a family of Ukrainian migrants to the war crimes tribunals in Australia at the end of the 1980s. When her uncle Vitaly is one of those charged, Fiona, the idealistic young Queensland university student who narrates the book, feels compelled to understand what Vitaly and his brother and sister - her father and aunt - actually did as Nazi collaborators during the war, and why. Appointing herself the family’s “recording angel”, Fiona gathers their accounts of their lives, as peasant children in the famine-stricken Ukraine under Stalin, as adolescents with the SS, as post-war migrant refugees. From this literary device comes a multi-voiced novel of shifting perspectives which renders, with great authenticity, both the inhuman horrors and the human pleasures of her characters’ lives. Its focus is the story of Vitaly, who becomes a guard at Treblinka. Ever present is the contrast with Fiona’s untroubled Australian childhood and adolescence. Her innocence is the story’s moral centre; her sense of righteousness, its driving force. Helen Demidenko’s first novel displays a powerful literary imagination coupled to a strong sense of history, and brings to light a hitherto unspeakable aspect of the Australian migrant experience. "

Miles Franklin Literary Award 1995 Shortlist

The Hand that Signed the Paper, Helen Demidenko
Death of a River Guide, Richard Flanagan
Dark Places, Kate Grenville
A Mortality Tale, Jay Verney

Judges' Report

"This year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award attracted a record 60 entries. We found some innovative works by established writers, three interesting novels in verse, some strong first novels and, among the novels based on the migrant experience (almost a genre), a growing shift in viewpoint to the second generation, along with a perceptible shift to the Asia-Pacific region.

Indeed, novels about the migrant experience seem to us to be seizing the high ground in contemporary Australian fiction, in contrast to fictions about the more vapid aspects of Australian life. In particular, they are incorporating into the cultural memory first-hand experience of the major historical events of the century, events from which Australia has been largely insulated, but which are a growing component of contemporary Australian life - even to the extent of requiring of us intricate moral judgement, as the recent debate over the war crimes legislation highlighted.

The short-list we arrived at included three first novels: Helen Demidenko’s The Hand that Signed the Paper, winner of the 1993 Australian/Vogel Award, Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide, and Jay Verney’s A Mortality Tale, which was short-listed for the 1993 Vogel Award, as well as Kate Grenville’s fourth novel, Dark Places which is a sequel - or rather a prequel to her first novel, Lilian’s Story. All four are first-person narratives.

Helen Demidenko’s novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, is about the response of a family of Ukrainian migrants to the war crimes tribunals in Australia at the end of the 1980s. When her uncle Vitaly is one of those charged, Fiona, the idealistic young Queensland university student who narrates the book, feels compelled to understand what Vitaly and his brother and sister - her father and aunt - actually did as Nazi collaborators during the war, and why. Appointing herself the family’s “recording angel”, Fiona gathers their accounts of their lives, as peasant children in the famine-stricken Ukraine under Stalin, as adolescents with the SS, as post-war migrant refugees. From this literary device comes a multi-voiced novel of shifting perspectives which renders, with great authenticity, both the inhuman horrors and the human pleasures of her characters’ lives. Its focus is the story of Vitaly, who becomes a guard at Treblinka. Ever present is the contrast with Fiona’s untroubled Australian childhood and adolescence. Her innocence is the story’s moral centre; her sense of righteousness, its driving force. Helen Demidenko’s first novel displays a powerful literary imagination coupled to a strong sense of history, and brings to light a hitherto unspeakable aspect of the Australian migrant experience.

At the centre of Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide is another contemporary drifter: Aljuz Cosini. Out of condition, on the brink of middle-age and needing to prove himself, he is the anti-hero of what is at once a contemporary adventure thriller and a historical epic about Tasmania’s long-suppressed past. As Aljuz, drowning in the torrents of a waterfall, relives his fatal journey guiding two raft-loads of tourists down the Franklin, his mind is flooded with painful memories and visions from his own and his ancestor’s lives. If the historical passages belong to another, more polemical genre, Richard Flanagan’s account of the river journey is splendidly authentic, his vigorous style matching the rugged grandeur of the Franklin River.

Dark Places by Kate Grenville is a finely sustained blackly satiric study of misogyny. Set in Sydney in the 1900s, it is the autobiography - though by no means the confession - of Albion Gidley Sinter, an upper-middle-class family patriarch who abuses his wife, seduces his staff, rapes his daughter Lilian, and destroys the lives of most of those around him. He’s also the most Darwinian of economic rationalists, which makes for some of the more comic moments in his dark tale of self-incrimination. If Albion is grotesque, so is the society he depicts around him: for Kate Grenville there are clearly close links between patriarchy, misogyny, class and capitalism. But when at last Albion becomes aware of “the void at the heart of self”, of the “empty husk” he’s become, it rather confirms what has long been apparent to the reader: that he is a chimera even to his author.

A Mortality Tale, by Jay Verney, is a psychological thriller set in Queensland. After a party, the woman narrator - a time-serving public servant - is involved in a fatal hit-run accident in which the possibly drunk, possibly suicidal victim is a young man who was at the same party. Subtle and ironic, the narrative traces her moral trajectory from casual nonchalance, which includes hosting her victim’s wake, to contrition in a self-imposed exile in the old family pub in the bush. Jay Verney writes provocatively about the mores of the 60s’ and 70s’ generation of drifters: A Mortality Tale is indeed a morality tale."

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