Jane Harrison is an Australian First Nations playwright, novelist, literary festival director and researcher.
Robert Michael Manne is an Emeritus Professor of politics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is a leading Australian public intellectual.
William Charles Wentworth, usually known as Bill Wentworth and sometimes referred to by others as William Charles Wentworth IV, was an Australian politician. He was a member of the Liberal Party for most of his career and held ministerial office in the governments of John Gorton and William McMahon, serving as Minister for Social Services (1968–1972) and Minister in charge of Aboriginal Affairs (1968–1971). Wentworth served in the House of Representatives from 1949 to 1977, representing the New South Wales seat of Mackellar. He frequently crossed the floor and served his final months in parliament as an independent.
Catherine Elizabeth Grenville is an Australian author. She has published fifteen books, including fiction, non-fiction, biography, and books about the writing process. In 2001, she won the Orange Prize for The Idea of Perfection, and in 2006 she won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Secret River. The Secret River was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
The Boyer Lectures are a series of talks by prominent Australians, presenting ideas on major social, scientific or cultural issues, and broadcast on ABC Radio National.
Marcia Lynne Langton is an Aboriginal Australian writer and academic. As of 2022 she is the Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne. Langton is known for her activism in the Indigenous rights arena.
William Edward Hanley Stanner CMG, often cited as W.E.H. Stanner, was an Australian anthropologist who worked extensively with Indigenous Australians. Stanner had a varied career that also included journalism in the 1930s, military service in World War II, and political advice on colonial policy in Africa and the South Pacific in the post-war period.
The Secret River is a 2005 historical novel by Kate Grenville about an early 19th-century Englishman transported to Australia for theft. The story explores what might have happened when Europeans colonised land already inhabited by Aboriginal people. The book has been compared to Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and to Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang for its style and historical theme.
The National Biography Award, established in Australia in 1996, is awarded for the best published work of biographical or autobiographical writing by an Australian. It aims "to encourage the highest standards of writing biography and autobiography and to promote public interest in those genres". It was initially awarded every two years, but from 2002 it has been awarded annually. Its administration was taken over by the State Library of New South Wales in 1998.
Rachel Perkins is an Australian film and television director, producer, and screenwriter. She directed the films Radiance (1998), One Night the Moon (2001), Bran Nue Dae (2010), and Jasper Jones (2017). Perkins is an Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman from Central Australia, who was raised in Canberra by Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins and his wife Eileen.
Kathleen Elizabeth Fitzpatrick was an Australian academic and historian.
Makinti Napanangka was a Pintupi-speaking Indigenous Australian artist from Australia's Western Desert region. She was referred to posthumously as Kumentje. The term Kumentje was used instead of her personal name as it is customary among many indigenous communities not to refer to deceased people by their original given names for some time after their deaths. She lived in the communities of Haasts Bluff, Papunya, and later at Kintore, about 50 kilometres (31 mi) north-east of the Lake MacDonald region where she was born, on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Marilyn Lee Lake, is an Australian historian known for her work on the effects of the military and war on Australian civil society, the political history of Australian women and Australian racism including the White Australia Policy and the movement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander human rights. She was awarded a personal chair in history at La Trobe University in 1994. She has been elected a Fellow, Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Fellow, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Richard Laurence Broome, is an Australian historian, academic, and emeritus professor of history at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is known as an authority on Aboriginal history in Australia.
Jennifer Ann Marshall Graves is an Australian geneticist. She is Distinguished Professor within the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science, La Trobe University, Australia and Professor Emeritus of the Australian National University.
Isabel McBryde AO is an Australian archaeologist and emeritus professor at the Australian National University (ANU) and School Fellow, in the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts. McBryde is credited with training "at least three generations of Australian archaeologists" and is affectionately referred to as the "Mother of Australian Archaeology". McBryde had a "holistic" approach to studying the archaeology of Aboriginal Australia, which has been carried on by many of her students. McBryde has also made considerable contributions to the preservation and protection of Australian cultural heritage, particularly Aboriginal cultural heritage.
Aileen Moreton-Robinson is an Australian academic, Indigenous feminist, author and activist for Indigenous rights. She is a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people from Minjerribah in Queensland. She completed a PhD at Griffith University in 1998, her thesis titled Talkin' up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism in Australia. The thesis was published as a book in 1999 and short-listed for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and the Stanner Award. A 20th Anniversary Edition was released in 2020 by University of Queensland Press. Her 2015 monograph The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty was awarded the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's (NAISA) prize in 2016.
Patricia Ann Grimshaw, is a retired Australian academic who specialised in women's and Indigenous peoples' history. One of her most influential works is Women's Suffrage in New Zealand, first published in 1972, which is considered the definitive work on the story of how New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.
Lynne Kelly is an Australian writer, researcher and science educator. Her academic work focuses mainly on the study of primary orality, as well as the mnemonic devices used by ancient and modern oral cultures from around the world. She proposes a theory on the purpose of the Stonehenge megalithic, which she believes served as a centre for the transmission of knowledge among Neolithic Britons.
Lynette Wendy Russell, is an Australian historian, known for her work on the history of Indigenous Australians; in particular, anthropological history ; archaeology; gender and race, Indigenous oral history, and museum studies.
