Eureka! Melbourne historian Clare Wright wins $50,000 Stella Prize for book on feisty female heroines of Eureka Stockade

CLARE Wright beat off stiff competition from Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, to claim the Stella Prize for her book on the Eureka Stockade’s feisty females.

Historian and author Clare Wright has won the $50,000 Stella Prize for her book about the

Melbourne historian Clare Wright has stuck gold, winning the $50,000 Stella Prize for her book about the feisty females who helped shape this nation.

Forgot Rebels of Eureka documents the oft-ignored contributions women made as agitators, petitioners, fundraisers and rabblerousers on the Victorian goldfields of the 1850s.

The book triumphed over five other nominees, included Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, which has been short-listed for the prestigious Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, formerly the Orange Prize, in the UK.

“I was just completely thrilled to be on the long list, over the moon to be on the shortlist, so to have emerged as the winner in such an incredibly strong field with a book of nonfiction, I really can’t believe it. I feel unbelievably honoured and humbled and blessed,” Ms Wright, 45, told the Herald Sun.

She said the purpose of the book, which took 10 years to write, was to leave people with a completely different view of Eureka than from their school days.

“My daughter is nine years old in grade three and they still teach about Eureka and the gold rush pretty much the way I learnt about it in school in the 1970s,” the mother of three said.

“I hope people have a completely different view of it and see our nation-building events not just as being about a bunch of men and the noble heroic things they did, but being based on communities as people and working families and women as agents of change, as well as the men.”

Ms Wright is donating 10 per cent of her prize to two causes: the indigenous Literacy Foundation and the state school her sons attend, Northcote High School, for an annual prize to be called the Eureka Prize for Women’s History.

“Apart from giving a bit back, which I feel is important, I could really use a new fridge to contain all the food that my teenage sons seem to go through in the blink of an eye, and a holiday down the track mightn’t be such a bad thing, either,” she said.

The awards ceremony was held in Sydney on April 29 and the other five short-listed authors received prize money of $2000 each, courtesy of the Nelson Meers Foundation.

That formalised the generosity of inaugural Stella Prize winner Carrie Tiffany, who last year shared $10,000 of her prize money with her fellow short-listed authors.

The other short-listed books were Night Games by Anna Krien; The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane; Boy, Lost by Kristina Olsson and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright

The Stella Prize is named after one of Australia’s most famous authors, Stella Maria “Miles” Franklin and was created because of the perceived male bias of the Miles Franklin Award.