Migration history work hailed at Premier's Literary Awards

Professor Eric Richards receives the CRC Silver Medal from Commission Chair, Stepan Kerkyasharian

A scholarly account of Australia's history of immigration has won the Community Relations Commission $15,000 Prize at the Premiers Literary Award in Sydney tonight.

The work - Destination Australia : migration to Australia since 1901- by Professor Eric Richards of Flinders University in South Australia, was described by the Awards judges as a thoroughly researched overview of Australias migration history.

They said the book: offers a fascinating, detailed account of the many waves of nationalities whose arrival into Australia was central to a grand plan of immigration that has led us to our multicultural present.

Congratulating the winner of the 2009 prize, the Chair of the CRC, Stepan Kerkyasharian, said tonight: Professor Richards, by simply writing this all down, has made a huge contribution to the immigration debate in this country, which far too often goes on only in the air, without recourse to the historical facts.

We do need to know how we all came here and I compliment Professor Richards on his attempt to draw our attention to the source of migration and the turbulence that often creates our migrants and refugees.

For instance, he says that Australia gives little attention to the heroic and often tragic qualities of the emigrant experience and tends to represent the immigrant story as a matter of assimilation.

Instead, he argues, we should look at the sum of the extraordinary lives which began in forgotten places among people whose extraordinary migrant stories long preceded their landfall in Australia.

These immigrants, he says, were part of that remote drama connecting Australia with grand and tragic events of the distant world.

If Australia is the sum total of its people and their stories, then, if we are to know our own country, we do need to hear the stories of our  people. Professor Richards book has set out to teach us those stories.

I would like to think that those people in our society, who often lead debate on immigration might take this book as an important reference tool in countering irrational and prejudiced  public comment.

The Community Relations Commission Award encourages writers to tell the stories of migration. We want the whole story told, whether its in a novel, a play, a film, a television programme or an academic work like this.

I congratulate Professor Richards for his painstaking approach to this task, which builds on the significant work in this field he has already published, Mr Kerkyasharian concluded.