Congratulations to AHA Vice President Michelle Arrow and Pete Walsh, winners of the 2022 John Barrett Award for Australian Studies. The Barrett Awards are presented for the best written article published by a scholar and postgraduate student respectively. Michelle’s award was received for her article “‘Smash Sexist Movies’: Gender, Culture and Ocker Cinema in 1970s Australia”. The judges found hers a “compelling argument about the filmic ocker figure as a form of contestation against the Australian women’s liberation movement in the 1970s”. Pete Walsh won the postgraduate award for “The Blurred Space: Reading the Body Politic in Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap and The Jesus Man”.
Congratulations also to Noah Riseman, who was highly commended for his article “Transgender Activism and Anti-Discrimination Reform in 1990s New South Wales and Victoria”. The article offers an “important overview” of the formative transgender activist organisations of the period, and “demonstrates the ways in which campaigns for legal recognition broke away from medical and identity politics models of gender”.
Congratulations Michelle, Pete and Noah!