“I don’t spend my life commenting on literature, and I’ll leave litterateurs to make their comments on politics,” remarked Tony Abbott on the day Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The prime minister was responding to comments made by Flanagan in a post-award interview in which he memorably observed – when asked about his reaction to the Abbott’s “coal is good for humanity” comment (made that same week): “To be frank, I’m ashamed to be Australian when you bring this up.”

Two months later, said litterateur has received the richest literary award for fiction in Australia (jointly at any rate) from the prime minister in person on Monday at the Prime Minister’s Literary awards in Melbourne. The question on many people’s lips: was this award Abbott’s comment on literature, or a comment on politics?

The awards are now in their seventh year, an initiative of the incoming Rudd ministry after the 2007 election. For the most part, they have embodied what makes literary awards great: shedding light on virtual unknowns (Steven Conte’s fiction win in 2008 for The Zookeeper’s War), confirming brilliance (Nam Le’s already much-acclaimed The Boat in 2009), and signalling seminal contributions to our national understanding (George Megalogenis’s The Australian Moment, awarded the prize for non-fiction in 2013).

For much of Monday’s awards night, everything seemed to go to script. Ray Martin, MC for the evening, alerted us to the fact that Abbott was the author of four books himself, and “the only Australian PM to write a book before getting into office” (a fact later corrected by George Brandis, who suggested Abbott was the third such prime minister). And Abbott himself continued the theme, stressing that “as an author himself” he knew all about the occupation’s vicissitudes.

The gambit in his speech though – his ‘I-may-not-be-of-your-political-hue but ...” appeal to Melbourne’s literary intelligentsia – worked only to a degree. Yes, there was his advice to young people to revisit “the classics, Shakespeare, and the Bible …” because “literature is a light for the soul”.

But for all his hearkening to the western canon, there was also Abbott’s lament – included, he said, in a letter of congratulation he wrote to Flanagan post-Booker – that the arts too often divided along political lines, and his hope that left-leaning writers and people of the right might open themselves up to each other more.

As revelations in the past 48 hours from literary journalists Stephen Romei and Susan Wyndham have shown, it was Abbott himself who decided not to accept the recommendation of the fiction prize jury to award Stephen Carroll’s A World of Other People this year’s gong.

This was the prime minister’s prerogative mind you – the prize rules clearly state so. But it’s hard to believe the decision to announce joint winners of the prize had anything to do with Abbott’s reading of the shortlist (even if one reason given for the long delay in the awards process was to allow him to finish it).

No, it clearly seemed to observers on the night that Abbott was trying to neutralise Flanagan’s political position – and this outwardly continued on stage as the two men exchanged banter and handshakes and slaps on the back.

Flanagan is no shrinking violet, however, and Abbott had another thing coming if he thought he’d achieved some kind of rhetorical checkmate. Flanagan, by invoking 60,000 years of Australian civilisation and the ideal of a good society in his acceptance speech, left no one under any illusion as to what was at stake: the right to a free state education, literacy for all, indeed a world left for us still to inhabit.

It was at this point of the evening that the script started to go awry. The “game” of the night – the notion this was a literary not political affair – got its comeuppance through the charade of the Australian history category. The ring-in candidate, Hal G P Colebatch – whose Australia’s Secret War, How Unions Sabotaged Our Troops in World War II was described by Mike Carlton as “a farrago”– was greeted with guffaws from many in the audience when announced as a co-winner.

As said audience was duly punished with surely the longest acceptance speech in recent memory, the evening turned equal parts hilarious and macabre. These are the highest literary awards in the land: shouldn’t they be a celebration of the finest writers we have, not an occasion for sham-spotting?

As Carlton concludes, the choice of Colebatch’s book as co-winner “devalues the prime minister’s history award, leaving it a bloodied casualty on this ideological battlefield”. Can the awards continue in their present form – or even be taken seriously? Having been hijacked for the first time in their short life, they will now struggle ever after for at least the appearance of integrity and transparency, under this or any future prime minister.

And contra to Louise Adler, jury chair of the fiction panel – who believes this week’s controversy is “terrific publicity” and makes her hope “now everyone [will] buy all the shortlisted books” – I believe many more will ignore it on account of the shenanigans that continue to come to light.



And a moment of sympathy for historian Joan Beaumont and the novelist Carroll, for whom the full $80,000 prize money (if they had each won their awards outright) might have meant rather a lot. One can only hope their books sell many many copies in sympathy.

