2024 Chief Minister's Shortlist Announcement

The Bungalow began in 1914, as a tin shed in the small colonial outpost of Alice Springs. It was built initially to house Topsy Smith, of Arabana descent, and her seven children after their Welsh-born father, Bill Smith, had died. Over the years that followed, many more children with Aboriginal mothers and (largely absent) white fathers were brought to live at the Bungalow until, by 1929, when it was relocated out of town, about sixty children were living and growing up there. They were cared for primarily by Topsy Smith as well as the town’s first schoolteacher, Ida Standley. The other central adult figure of this story is Sergeant Stott, who oversaw the establishment and operation of the home. 

Drawing on archival documents, oral histories and interviews with living descendants, this story gives voice to women, children and First Nations people. Researched history is interspersed with passages of creative non-fiction that create a palpable sense of time and place and bring the story to life. The complexity and nuance of engagement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is also explored; relationships that have too often been downplayed in works of Australian history. 

As well as presenting the fascinating and pivotal story of the Bungalow in Alice Springs from 1914–1929, this work offers a model for new ways of creative, postcolonial storytelling about Australia, her history and her present, and the inextricable links between the two.

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Linda Wells has lived between Melbourne and Central Australia for many years. She is an author and teacher.  She authored Kultitja: Memoir of an Outback Schoolteacher before publishing Living in Tin: the Bungalow Alice Springs 1914 – 1929.  She also has a range of short stories, poems and scholarly papers, published in various collections. Linda’s vision is for a post-colonial Australia that has embraced and incorporated First Nations ways of doing, being and knowing. She has a particular interest in intercultural relations in our colonial past and supports truth-telling about our national history. These are central themes of her writing.  

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Living In Tin: The Bungalow, Alice Springs 1914 – 1929 is available for purchase at Red Kangaroo Books (Mparntwe, Alice Springs), The Bookshop Darwin (Gulumoerrgin / Darwin) or through Ginninderra Press.

YOU ARE HERE is a book with truth-telling at its core. Designed and illustrated by Ritchie, it factually examines Australia’s frontier wars and the massacre of Indigenous peoples alongside the nation’s history of coal extraction and infrastructure development implemented by European settlers, mining companies and successive Australian governments. YOU ARE HERE is an unflinching examination of how we got to where we are now.

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Therese Ritchie completed a Batchelor of Fine Arts at the Northern Territory University (Charles Darwin University) in 1985. She undertook further studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne where she completed a Graduate Diploma in Film and Television/Animation in 1999 and was awarded the Australian Children’s Television Best Animation.

She lectured in Graphic Design between 2000 and 2002 at Northern Territory University and completed her Masters by Research in Visual Arts at Charles Darwin University in 2004.

Ritchie worked as a freelance photographer for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Time and Who Magazine before joining Green Ant Research Arts and Publishing with Peter Cooke and  Chips Mackinolty in 1991. Ritchie won the Fremantle Print Award in 2000 for a collaborative work with Mackinolty and in 2007 was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts, Australian Artist in Residency in Los Angeles where she worked with the Los Angeles Poverty Department documenting police activity in Skid Row.

A survey exhibition with Chips Mackinolty, Not Dead Yet, was held at the Charles Darwin University Gallery in 2010 and in 2019 a major retrospective exhibition Therese Ritchie: burning hearts opened at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. In 2021 her exhibition, YOU ARE HERE, at Charles Darwin University, was the venue for CDU’s public program on truth telling.

Her work has been included in group exhibitions including Contemporary Australia: Women at the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art and exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Photography; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art and Flinders University Art Museum amongst others.​

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YOU ARE HERE is available for purchase via Therese Ritchie’s website, Red Kangaroo Books, (Mparntwe / Alice Springs) and The Bookshop Darwin (Gulumoerrgin / Darwin).

Louise Omer was a Pentecostal preacher and faithful wife. But when her marriage crumbled, so did her beliefs.

Haunted by questions about what it means to be female in a religion that worships a male God, she left behind a church and home to ask women around the world: how can we exist in patriarchal religion? And can a woman be holy?

With $500 in her pocket and the conviction that she was following a divine path, Louise began a pilgrimage that has taken her to Mexican basilicas, Swedish cathedrals, Bulgarian mountains, and Moroccan mosques. Holy Woman combines travel writing, feminist theology, and confessional memoir to interrogate modern religion and give a raw and personal exploration of spiritual life under patriarchy.

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Louise Omer is a writer born on Kaurna Country with essays, criticism, and poetry published in The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, The Lifted Brow, and more. Beyond Australia, she has lived in Scotland and Ireland, and has a heart connection to many lands, seas, and people.

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Holy Woman is available for purchase at Red Kangaroo Books (Mparntwe / Alice Springs), The Bookshop Darwin (Gulumoerrgin / Darwin) or through Scribe Publications.

futurespective is a collection of poems about healing through transforming, balancing head and heart, chasing desire, finding love, and designing the future.

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Sophie Benkemoun is a poet and multi-disciplinary creative. Her poetry has been published in zines and anthologies over decades and more recently via her own publishing venture – travel maker press. Her work explores transformation, the human condition, connection to nature and cosmic realms. In 2016, mid-way through a lap around Australia, she and her family fell in love with the Top End and called it home.

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futurespective is available for purchase through travel maker press, The Bookshop Darwin, (Gulumoerrgin / Darwin) and Red Kangaroo Books (Mparntwe / Alice Springs).

The jury’s in, sequestered-slash-quarantined overnight on a serious criminal case in the suitably imposing Alice Springs courthouse. But the jury’s well and truly out on whether or not justice will be served, what with all the baggage the jurors have brought to the case, the misapprehensions. To say nothing of their phones to help combat Covid. Then there’s the judge’s baggage.

The case, prosecuted in this collection’s novella, is encountered via short stories set even more remotely. They’re unsettled little satellite settlements around any really remote town, outliers – outlaws – to the town’s edifice of law. But the police are never far away. Supposedly just eight minutes away, for instance, while a break-and-enter victim and the young trespasser watch very early morning commercial TV together waiting. Or left for dead – well, left floundering in a roadside ditch at least – by the Black Elvis, a modern, musical, Aboriginal, outback Robin Hood. Of sorts.

Loosely law-themed, and loosely but lovingly illustrated, Crested Bellbird has many voices.

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David Jagger is an Alice Springs-based anthropologist, journalist and writer. He has worked for 25 years to secure and optimise Central Australian Aboriginal land rights and in Aboriginal community development, for five years in the Kimberley in native title and Aboriginal media, and in the Pacific to protect forests. He has been a mainstream and freelance journalist. His short stories The Lure, The Campaign and Privacy were shortlisted in the NT Literary Awards and The Development Drip won the inaugural national Wet Ink Short Story Prize. He has had a number of short stories published in journals and collections, including four found in this, his own collection.

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To Kill A Crested Bellbird and other stories is available for purchase through Red Kangaroo Books (Mparntwe / Alice Springs) and The Bookshop Darwin (Gulumoerrgin / Darwin).

Nina’s waters have broken early. She knows it’s a girl. She doesn’t know if she wants it.

Lying in a pool of her own amniotic fluid in Darwin hospital, Nina slowly loses her grip on reality. Alone and paralysed by indecision, she is visited by her best friend who dreams of a different life for her, and an apparition of her mother as a young woman who will do anything to be forgiven. Is Nina too messed up to be a mother? Or is she old enough and ugly enough to see this through? And maybe that thing slithering around in her ultrasound isn’t a baby at all…

Ciella Williams’ Hush balances power, trauma, and unlikely friendships with care and humour. It cuts through our cultural narratives about motherhood, instead diving into the real fears and harsh realities of young women faced with this transformation.

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Ciella is a writer from Darwin/Gulumoerrgin. She is a member of the IGNITE Collective; an initiative of New Ghosts Theatre that creates new work for women aged 20-30. Hush is her first full-length work. It debuted at Flight Path Theatre in Sydney and Brown’s Mart in Darwin in 2022.  Earlier works have been performed at Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP), Brown’s Mart, Darwin Fringe Festival and Short + Sweet Sydney. Ciella works as a freelance dramaturg, and ran the NT stream of the ATYP Fresh Ink program for emerging writers from 2018-2021.

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Hush is available for purchase through Playlab Theatre, The Bookshop Darwin (Gulumoerrgin / Darwin) or Red Kangaroo Books, (Mparntwe / Alice Springs).

I don’t tell Mum and Sam anything about my weekends with Dad. It would be giving them tickets into that world. The world Dad and I have created. And I don’t want to do that. It’s ours. It’s all we have. It’s all we’ve been allowed since my parents got divorced.

Cate gets to spend every second weekend with her dad, and each time something special and surprising happens. Something that fires the creative spark that Cate channels into her writing.

Everything is fine until Cate’s stepdad, Sam, gets offered his dream job in London and her mum decides they are going to move to England with him…

Cate must decide what she wants for herself. She loves both her parents – but she must choose between them.

A warm and funny novel full of unexpected twists and turns, joy and heartbreak.

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Barry Jonsberg has won numerous awards for his books, both nationally and internationally. He has been published in twenty countries and translated into many languages. In 2019 his bestselling novel, My Life As An Alphabet, was made into an award-winning film, H is For Happiness, released throughout the world to great critical acclaim. The same production company is now working on an adaptation of his novel Catch Me If I Fall.

Barry lives in Darwin, in the Top End of Australia, with his wife Anita and his crazy dog, Zorro.

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A Little Spark is available for purchase from The Bookshop Darwin (Gulumoerrgin / Darwin) Red Kangaroo Books, (Mparntwe / Alice Springs) or through Allen & Unwin Publishers.

Long, long ago, we didn’t have donkeys. We didn’t have a lot of the things we have today. We didn’t know donkeys existed. Our people used to walk with their camels and donkeys from Areyonga to Ernabella. They brought their donkeys here, and left them.

Donkeys are malpa wiru, valuable friends and helpers in the families and desert community of Pukatja (Ernabella) in the APY Lands of northern South Australia. People set off on their donkeys for picnics and longer journeys, always returning home safely.

Told in Pitjantjatjara and English and featuring the whimsical, distinctive sculptures that have made Tjanpi Desert Weavers famous, this dual language Australian story offers warm and humorous insights from an Anangu perspective.

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The Pitjantjatjara text is by Tjunkaya Tapaya OAM and Imuna Kenta based on stories by Akitiya Angkuna Tjitayi, Imuna Kenta and Anne Karatjari Ward, and the English translation is by Linda Rive. The artworks featured in Tangki Tjuta – Donkeys are created by seventeen artists of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, a social enterprise of Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council supporting 400+ women to create fibre art across the central and western desert regions of Australia. The artists made these sculptures from minarri, wangunu and intiyanu: desert grasses collected from their Lands. They bound the grass together around wire frames with string, wool or raffia. One of the donkeys was made from buffel grass, which was introduced by Piranpa (white people) and has become a weed. Tjanpi means desert grass in the Western Desert language.

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Tjangki Tjuta – Donkeys is available for purchase from Red Kangaroo Books (Mparntwe/ Alice Springs), The Bookshop Darwin (Gulumoerrgin / Darwin) or through Allen & Unwin Publishers.

Is your brain magic? Whether your brain buzzes around the room like a bee or tells you to be loud and roar like a lion, celebrate the many things that it can be! Take a journey by way of a child’s favorite animals to learn how your brain interacts with the world around you. This sensory-seeking celebration shines a light on Sensory Processing Disorder in a fun and action-packed way for all children to enjoy. A guide with helpful ways to follow the child’s lead and explore sensory-stimulating activities as a family are included.

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Prasha Sooful is a clinical audiologist and educator living in Australia with a Masters degrees in audiology and global learning. She worked clinically, in research, and in education for 17 years.

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My Brain Is Magic is available for purchase from The Bookshop Darwin (Gulumoerrgin / Darwin) or Red Kangaroo Books (Mparntwe / Alice Springs).