Frank Bongiorno, professor of history at the Australian National University (ANU), has won the ACT Book of the Year award for the third time, for Dreamers and Schemers (La Trobe University Press, 2022), the first full political history of Australia.

“It’s a wonderful honour,” Professor Bongiorno said. “It’s a great support to writers and a great encouragement to writers in the ACT. It really does show the local commitment, the commitment of the Canberra community, to supporting writing in all its forms.”

Dreamers and Schemers, the blurb states, “presents a social and cultural history of Australia’s political life, from pre-settlement Indigenous systems to the present day”.

It has already been shortlisted for the Australian History Prize in the 2023 NSW Premier’s History Awards and for the Scholarly Book of the Year Award 2023 in the Educational Publishing Awards Australia; and longlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year Award 2023.

“It is very special to have someone of such high calibre here in our community, producing works like this,” arts minister Tara Cheyne said.

“Frank has committed to explaining history in a way that is accessible and exciting and helps make it understood.”

Although an academic historian, Professor Bongiorno said that he tries to write for a general audience.

“I wanted my readers to take away that politics matter; you can shun it and avoid it, but it shapes our lives,” he said.

The book encompasses pubs and meeting halls, pamphleteers and stump orators, the parliament and cabinet, party agents and operatives, and agitators and outsiders.

“It was very much an attempt to write politics from below as well as from above,” Professor Bongiorno explained; “to grapple with the kinds of demands and expectations that people have had of the Australian political system, and how that system has actually responded to those demands.”

The work took Professor Bongiorno five years to write, beginning in 2017, and continuing through the 2021 lockdown. Fortunately, he said, his family supported him.

“It was wonderful sitting there writing and usually having some book arrive on the doorstep each day that I’d had to order to keep my own work going and my own reading going. So it is very much a COVID project, and it’s a book that actually reflects the experience of COVID in some ways, too. So I talk quite a lot towards the end of the book about the impacts that COVID had on our politics.”

The panel of judges described the book as “compelling and comprehensive”, Ms Cheyne remarked.

“The book’s perceptive honesty and contemporary sensibility shine throughout the narrative, providing readers with a fresh perspective on the subject,” she said. “Frank has achieved the difficult task of synthesising a large volume of material in a coherent and accessible manner, and his fluid style allows deep insight into the complex dynamics of politics.”

Three-time ACT Book of the Year winner Marion Halligan and ANU academic Dr Julieanne Lamond received Highly Commended prizes.

Ms Halligan’s Words for Lucy, a memoir celebrating the life of the author’s late daughter, was “a masterful piece of storytelling, seeing the author at the peak of her writing powers,” Ms Cheyne said. “Profoundly empathetic and relatable, it tells the story of a mother surviving the aftershocks of death and finding space. It’s a book that leaves a lasting impression lingering in your thoughts long after the final pages have been turned.”

Dr Lamond’s Lohrey, a guideto Australian novelist Amanda Lohrey’s fiction, “created an in-depth analysis and immersive account of Amanda Lohrey’s life and how it shaped her writing and fictional expertise,” Ms Cheyne said. “Julieanne invites the reader to inhabit the worlds evoked in Lohrey’s novels, coaxing them to explore the labyrinth of Lohrey’s preoccupations and engagements, transporting them to a different time and place where the experience feels remarkably clear and lifelike.”

The other works on the shortlist, chosen from 38 nominations, were diplomat Robert Bowker’s Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, a memoir based on 50 years in the Middle East; sexual offences prosecutor Katrina Marson’s Legitimate Sexpectations, exposing the limits of the criminal justice system and social fault lines; and political journalist Niki Savva’s Bulldozed, about the 2022 Federal election, the Coalition’s defeat, and Labor’s election.

All the works were non-fiction, Ms Cheyne observed. “Canberra is the knowledge capital, and this shortlist’s array of non-fiction titles underlines this, showcasing the incredible minds at work here in our city, reflecting on the human condition, our hopes and challenges, and the past’s connection with our futures.

“Each shortlisted author has dedicated their artistic practice and careers to better understanding the world and the issues that we face. These six works range from the personal to the political, looking deeply into the structures and the systems around us. Be they nations or families, judicial or educational systems, they consider the responsibilities we have to one another.”

Those books, Ms Cheyne suggested, would make ideal gifts.

“It is my Christmas wish that these titles find their way from the shelves of our fantastic local booksellers and into the hands, homes, and hearts of those we love, for seasonal giving, holiday relaxing, and all other times.”