Miles Franklin Literary Award 2003

2003 Winner - "Journey to the Stone Country" by Alex Miller

Commenting on the winner's novel, the Judging Panel wrote:
"The journey central to Alex Miller’s novel is one of both time and space, through a confrontation with the brutalities of the past to the possibilities for a happier future. Journey to the Stone Country is a moving story of the coming together of Annabelle Beck, granddaughter of a white station owner, and Bo Rennie, an Aboriginal stockman whose own grandparents had ignored racial divisions. Annabelle must not only learn to view the past without sentimentality, but to accept a different way of being in the world, to acknowledge not only that are there are some things it is not appropriate for her to know, but also the depth of her own attachment to place.

Issues crucial to any reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians could be difficult territory for a novelist, but Miller handles them with skill and tact, ensuring that they come alive on the page and that the journey is never less than an engrossing one."

Miles Franklin Literary Award 2003 Shortlist

An Angel in Australia
Tom Keneally
Transworld Publishers (A division of Random House Australia)

An Angel in Australia revisits one of Keneally’s recurring themes, Irish-Australian Catholicism set in a Sydney parish. In the conservative and restrictive society of the 1940s Australia, against the backdrop of war and fear of a Japanese invasion, plus the seductive presence of American servicemen, Keneally’s characters play out their moral and ethical dilemmas. The story is woven around a young priest, the pale lean-faced Father Frank Darragh, innocent and naïve, who struggles to do the best by his parishioners. His rite of passage is, somewhat surprisingly, a murder mystery.

Tom Keneally is at the peak of his powers as a master story-teller.

Moral Hazard
Kate Jennings
Picador (Pan MacMillan)

Commuting between circles of hell is how Kate Jennings describes the nightmare of Cath, an Australian woman living in Manhattan, when her husband develops Alzheimer’s and she must earn the serious money required for his care. A friend finds her a speech-writing job on Wall Street where, as the money markets start to implode, she spends her days putting weasel words into the mouths of merchant bankers. At night she returns home to watch her beloved husband steadily disintegrate as his brain dies and words fail him.

This is a brave and moving novel, beautifully sustained and contemporary to its core.

Of a Boy
Sonia Hartnett
Viking (Penguin Books Aust)

In Sonya Hartnett’s world, childhood is not beautiful; it is a period of loneliness, of danger, of sadness, and of treachery. Three children go missing; the newspapers carry reports of a prehistoric creature dredged from the seas. In a neighbouring suburb a fearful boy, taken from his loving alcoholic mother, abandoned by an indifferent father and grudgingly cared for by his grandmother, tries to find some safety in a hostile world.

Every word, sentence, and paragraph of this book is crafted to convey the underlying terror of childhood. With all the dramatic tension of an elegant thriller, Of a Boy recreates the anxiousness and alienation that many children, especially vulnerable and sensitive ones, experience. In so doing she brings back our own childhood fears.

The Prosperous Thief
Andrea Goldsmith
Allen & Unwin

Beginning in Weimar Germany and ending in present day Melbourne, The Prosperous Thief, tackles themes of revenge, forgiveness, love and faith. Holocaust survivor, Henry Lewin, has built a new life in suburban Melbourne, establishing a business, raising a family, and caring for and loving his traumatized wife. Hidden in Henry’s past is a terrible act that inextricably connects him and his family to another family. Can the decency and compassion that he demonstrates now absolve him from the sins of his past life? Do his sins also belong to his children? Who has the right to make judgments? The holocaust and its aftermath present enormous challenges for fiction. Andrea Goldsmith writes with maturity, insight and sensitivity. The Prosperous Thief  is a big, rich, multilayered novel that succeeds on many levels.

Wild Surmise
Dorothy Porter
Picador (Pan MacMillan)

Alex Leefson’s career is the search for signs of life on cold planets. Love for her dying husband Daniel has cooled. Back into her life strays assured, cool Phoebe. What follows is an extravagant love song in the language of the galaxy where the possibilities of life out there become Alex Leefson’s metaphor for the unexpected passion that had struck her.

A verse novel of great distinction, Wild Surmise is terse, dazzling and funny. Dorothy Porter writes with narrative zest and intimate affection for the figures caught up in her story. It is a fine and surprising work.