A big congratulations to one of the Centre's environmental history postgraduate students, Ruby Ekkel, who has won the 2024 Inaugural Kay Schaffer Award!

The Kay Schaffer Award is presented by the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) and is designed to acknowledge and celebrate the best unpublished essay on storytelling in Australian Studies by a postgraduate or early career researcher (ECR), to commemorate the influential scholarship of Professor Kay Schaffer. It is supported by the generous philanthropy of Kay Schaffer’s family. It seeks to recognise colleagues who contribute to and enhance the interdisciplinary field of Australian Studies through a focus on the scholarship and practice of storytelling (broadly defined) in fields of great interest to Kay Schaffer: literary studies, gender studies, and historical studies. Ruby's winning essay is titled, "‘Friends with wild nature’: Intimacy, expertise, and women’s nature-writing in early-twentieth-century Victoria".

The judges' citation reads: 

Ekkel’s submission “‘Friends with wild nature’: Intimacy, expertise, and women’s nature-writing in early-twentieth-century Victoria” charts the story of Alice Manfield and her work as an early conservationist in the high country of Federation-era Victoria. By way of an engaging narrative historical argument, Ekkel presents Manfield as a skilled naturalist who encouraged a curious settler populace to become intimately familiar with native species via public writings, guided tours, and photographs. Weaving a disparate archive together, the history that is presented asserts that women, like Manfield, were considered to hold an authoritative and expert understandings of the natural world, albeit through a gendered prism of women’s presumed capacity to be intimate and caring. Manfield’s publication, Lyrebirds of Mount Buffalo, is given close attention, as are images taken of and by Manfield herself. Methodologically, Ekkel demonstrates a sound understanding of how to analyse visual materials as primary sources. So many historians see visual materials as just illustrative and not as evidence that one can interpret. Ekkel does not, and that is most welcome. Bringing Indigenous, settler colonial, gender, environmental and ornithological history into the same narrative arc, Ekkel’s powerful framing of the past is an engaging story of how female settlers formed close relationships, friendships even, with the living world around them. In doing so, they contributed to the invasiveness of settler colonial culture. Congratulations Ruby Ekkel on a fine piece of historical research and writing!

Well done, Ruby!