Shortlisted of Finalists 
Winners of the Alex Buzo Prize 2006

Judges’ Comments 

Gideon, Haigh:                         Asbestos House                         [Scribe Publications] 

The story of a small leather trading business which grew to become a giant of the building industry, and a clear explanation of the uses and dangers of asbestos, the mineral on which the James Hardie Industries fortune was founded, all told in a style as compelling as that of a novelist.  

Malcolm Knox:                        Secrets of the Jury Room           [Random House] 

When the sometime Sydney Morning Herald Literary editor was summoned for jury duty, he took the opportunity to compile an absorbing account of his experiences as a juror, an account which developed into an exploration of the central element in Australia’s justice system  

Anne Manne:                          Motherhood                                 [Allen & Unwin] 

A passionate argument, supported both by detailed research and by the author’s own first-hand observations, for a re-examination of present attitudes to the way children are cared for when their mothers have to work, this eloquent polemic is intended to stimulate debate on a topic which concerns everyone’s future.  

Meg Stewart:                         Margaret Olley                            [Random House]

The biography of one of this country’s most admired living artists, told partly ion her own words, and handsomely illustrated, which can also be read as a social and cultural history of the nine decades spanned by the remarkable life of its subject.  

Gerald Stone:                         1932                                              [Pan Macmillan]     

A racy encapsulisation of a single, pivotal year in Australia’s history when, amid all the suffering of the Depression, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened in a scene of half-comic drama, the racehorse Phar Lap died in America, the Premier of New South Wales was dismissed from office by the State Governor, and the English cricket team unveiled the tactic later to be known as “Bodyline”  

Brenda Walker:                       The Wing of Night                      [Penguin/ Viking]   

An evocative novel which interweaves the farmlands of Western Australia with the First World War battlefields at Gallipoli, entering imaginatively into the minds of long-distant soldiers, and the women they left behind.