Play Together Dark Blue Twenty: This is a genuine entertainment, a fine feat of memory in its recapturing of environment. It is humorous and well-crafted, though some opportunities for irony were missed.

Julia Paradise: This novel is fascinating – original, innovative and daring. It is perhaps a little too spare in parts.

The Irish in Australia is thorough, bold and important. It explodes a number of myths through well directed scholarship.

The Lyre in the Pawnshop is beautifully written, calm, authoritative and an excellent commentary on our literature. Ultimately it is difficult to recommend a book of critical essays for an award such as this.

The problems involved in choosing two winners from the shortlist were equally daunting. Any of the shortlisted books was a possible winner and all were, at least in the early stages of our discussions, strongly supported by at least one of the judges. Of the shortlisted books the judges have said:

Grey’s Valley: a wonderfully crafted, suspenseful short novel written in a fine, epic style. Atkinson is a first-rate storyteller working by understatement and restraint; a very entertaining work and, at the same time, a fascinating yet critical view of the way legends are made.

A Mavis Singing: an easily read family history, original and innovative, using the memory of the mother to reach back into the past. It is warm, humorous and entertaining. The story of the family embraces a large slab of our common history and the changes in our society. It is an outstanding example of this increasingly popular genre at its best.

Fortune: is an exceptional novel by a very confident writer. So fine is his structural art that the reader is almost deceived into considering that there is no structure and that the novel is almost journalese. Only gradually do we realise that Drewe is making perceptive comment on modem life and art –·the strange pattern that can only be seen in retrospect as connecting circumstances, situations, people and events. The dry, flat style is deliberately ironic and wryly humorous, reflecting life itself.

The Song Circle of Jacky: ranges widely in mood and subject within the context of Aboriginal experience in modern Australia and also of Johnson’s private experience in the physical world and the world of the spirit. He writes verse of considerable power and distinction, emotionally charged and strong. This book cannot be ignored; the verse is exceptionally accessible and the collection as a whole has unusual coherence and indisputable originality.

Lachlan Macquarie: A solid and scholarly biography, an eminently readable book about one of our most important founding fathers. The prose is ornate and imaginative. Ritchie’s carefully sculpted account of Macquarie recreates the man and his environment in memorable style.

The Nightmarkets: is a finely imaginative work, a verse novel, remarkable for the way the writer sustains his poetic energy and captures the cadences of Australian English. The Nightmarkets ranges widely across the social strata, creating clearly defined individuals, but also locating them firmly in their social context, whether this be the drug set, the world of politicians or of journalists. It is a spectacular novel in its aims and its achievements.

Any of the shortlisted titles might well have attracted the awards, but two had to be chosen. I think it is important to say here that each one of the judges insisted on rereading the entire shortlist after it had been chosen in order to come to a final decision about the winners. Therefore, it can honestly be said that after much deliberation and by a majority decision, the NBC Awards for 1987 have been made as follows to Alan Wearne’s The Nightmarkets, published by Penguin, which receives the gold award and a cheque for $6,000. The silver award for a book in a category other than that of the gold award goes to Robert Drewe’s Fortune, with a cheque for $4,000.