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Award for study of democracy in nineteenth-century Australia

August 10, 2005

aatkinson.thumb.jpgAlan Atkinson, ARC Professorial Fellow in History at The University of New England, has won an important award for his analysis of the cultural climate that fostered the development of democracy in nineteenth-century Australia.

The second volume of Professor Atkinson’s three-volume history "The Europeans in Australia" tells how the status-ridden, inward-looking society of the early Australian colonies transformed itself into the egalitarian, outward-looking society of the 1860s and ‘70s. The volume, subtitled "Democracy", has won the University of Melbourne’s Ernest Scott Prize for 2005.

The Ernest Scott Prize is the most important prize in Australia and New Zealand for a newly published history. This year it is valued at $4,000.

Professor Atkinson (pictured here), who is now at work on the third and final volume of the history, said that "Democracy" (published by Oxford University Press in 2004) looked at “how democracy came to seem natural in a community that had developed substantial contact with the outside world, and that was wedded to the idea of free enterprise”.

The main factor fuelling this development was “the dramatic increase in literacy rates, particularly among girls and women, in the 1840s and ‘50s”, he said. “An oral society is an intimate, inward-looking society,” he explained, “while a literate society communicates across long distances and thinks in a more systematic and abstract way. This influences the kind of constitutional system that society adopts. In fact, the underlying theme of the whole trilogy is how methods of communication shape the way people think.”

One of the casualties of these social and political developments in nineteenth-century Australia was race relations, Professor Atkinson said. The new democracy was “a white man’s democracy”, as governments abandoned their original benevolent, multiracial aspirations. The “apparently wholesale massacres of Aborigines” of the 1860s were in grim contrast to “the highly enlightened experiments in race relations that went before,” he commented.

The book also chronicles the rise of a form of Christian worship familiar to churchgoers today. “Hymns and flowers started to appear in churches, women became much more involved in church affairs, and you began to see more women than men in church congregations,” Professor Atkinson said. His treatment of religious ideas and their impact on society is more detailed than that in most histories of the period.

The Ernest Scott Prize is awarded to an author for a work of original research that, in the opinion of the examiners, is the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand, or to the history of colonisation, in the year preceding its award. “Atkinson’s prose is always engaging, often evocative, and sometimes lyrical,” this year’s judges said. “The form matches the quality of the content. This is an important work of Australian history and of cultural history in general.”

This is Professor Atkinson’s second Ernest Scott Prize; his first, in 1989, was for "Camden: Farm and Village Life in Early New South Wales".


Media contact: Professor Alan Atkinson, School of Classics, History and Religion, UNE (02) 6773 2125 or Jim Scanlan, Public Relations, UNE (02) 6773 3049.

For a photograph of Professor Alan Atkinson, go to:
http://photodatabase.une.edu.au/albums/incoming/2004/staff/atkinson%20alan%20%20%20001.JPG

Posted by Jim Scanlan at August 10, 2005 11:55 AM