Victorian Community History Awards 2017
Victorian Community History Awards 2017 Proudly participating in History Week Victorian Premier’s History Award Judges’ Special Prize This award, previously known as the Victorian Community History Award, The judges can award a special prize for any outstanding entry. recognises the most outstanding community history project in any category. This is a book about country. It begins For eighty years her home, Cruden Farm, with consideration of the pre-colonial provided Dame Elisabeth Murdoch with a environment and traditional owners of complex garden for which she had a deep a largely unknown area in north-west and special love. Her gardener for more Victoria, and concludes with the area than 46 years, Michael Morrison, kept becoming nationally and internationally diaries that recorded the daily work in the recognised for the unique qualities of its garden, as it related, for instance, to the natural and cultural landscapes. water features, walled garden, specialised beds, notable trees, and nursery. The The human stories of the Kulkyne diaries provide an invaluable record range from the finely balanced ways of the decisions made about planning of the Indigenous Latji Latji and and planting, watering and weeding, Nyeri Nyeri clans; to squatters and composting and cultivating. pastoralists; hunters, foresters, rangers and railwaymen; and to the earnest The photographs by Simon Griffiths and endeavours of interest groups, each the discussions that emerge from diary focused on the Kulkyne’s natural or entries, combine to delight the reader. The cultural heritage. These stories are woven balance that the two gardening partners seamlessly together into a narrative based achieved in landscaping and maintaining on painstaking research in oral histories the farm grounds is expressed in Lisa and documentary sources, and draws on Clausen’s prose, often reflecting on a deep appreciation of the workings of seasonal change, birdlife, and particular the natural world.
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