A heartwarming children’s story describing the lives of a First Nations family living on a Lutheran mission in the 50s has won Australia’s richest literary prize.
Nukgal Wurra author-artist Wanda Gibson collected the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature for her debut picture book Three Dresses, making it the first time the winner of the $25,000 children’s category has also won the overall prize.
The autobiographical work describes how Gibson, a child of Stolen Generation parents, grew up on the Hope Vale mission on the Cape York peninsula. Every Christmas the church gave each girl in the mission three secondhand dresses – “one to wash, one to wear and one spare” – which the author cherished.
Gibson, who also illustrated the book, recounts how her family, on their annual two-week holiday, would camp on a beach two-day’s walk away, taking only what they could carry.
Back at the mission, the children attended school in the morning and were made to work for no pay in the afternoon, weeding pineapple, peanut and cotton plantations.
Gibson – a former supermarket worker and a mother of five, grandmother to 11 children and great-grandmother to five more – still lives in Hope Vale. The church ceased operating the mission in 1986.
Now 79, she only started painting 15 years ago, after the death of her husband.
“The ladies asked me to go down to the culture centre, and I said ‘No, I don’t want to come down there’,” Gibson told the Guardian on Wednesday. “It took me a while to make up my mind. But then I went and started painting. The first painting I did, of Aboriginal weapons, was sold to a tourist … so I just kept painting.”
At 68 she completed a diploma of visual arts at Cairns Tafe.
Gibson was persuaded to put her childhood story to her pictures by fellow children’s book writer Maggie Hutchings.
“I didn’t know I could write a book,” she said. Now she is working on another, about her life at the school mission and how, after leaving as a teenager, she was forced into unpaid domestic service, with marriage and childbearing the only way out.
The award’s judges described Three Dresses as a “visual feast of illustrations paired with words possessing a distinctive and steady pulse that mirrors the tides of the beach”.
Gibson was one of nine writers sharing a prize pool of $315,000 at Wednesday night’s awards in Melbourne, and one of four First Nations writers honoured in the awards.
Wiradjuri writer, poet and academic from south-west NSW Jeanine Leane won the poetry prize for her collection Gawimarra: Gathering, and the prize for Indigenous writing went to Darumbal and South Sea Islander journalist Amy McQuire for her collection of essays, Black Witness.
Tasmania’s Nathan Maynard, a Trawlwoolway multidisciplinary artist from Larapuna country, won the drama prize for his AFL-themed play 37 – the title paying homage to Adam Goodes’ Sydney Swans jersey.
Fiona McFarlane won the fiction prize for her fourth book and second collection of short stories, Highway 13, praised by the judges as a “great glimmering work” showcasing the writer’s capacity for evoking human cruelty and tenderness.
The nonfiction category was won by Susan Hampton for her memoir Anything Can Happen, covering her early life Newcastle’s Stockton, her time living in the lesbian subculture of Sydney’s inner-west and her subsequent years on a farm in rural Victoria.
The prize for young adult writing went to Emma Lord for her post-apocalyptic novel Anomaly, praised by judges as a “strikingly original debut that expertly pushes the genre boundaries of horror, fantasy and sci-fi”.
The new prize for humour writing, named in honour of New Zealand satirist John Clarke, who died in 2017, went to Robert Skinner for his memoir, I’d Rather Not. The prize was presented to Skinner by Clarke’s writer-director daughter, Lorin Clarke.
All category winners received $25,000. An additional $15,000 prize, along with a two-week creative residency with RMIT’s McCraith House, was awarded to Chris Ames for his unpublished manuscript I Made This Just for You.
This article was amended on 20 March 2025. Highway 13 is a collection of short stories, and is Fiona McFarlane’s fourth book.
