Why I’ve withdrawn my memoir from the Walkley Award nominations

My publisher Pan Macmillan Australian has withdrawn my memoir Line in the Sand from the 2023 Walkley Book Award nominations at my request.

I’ve done this because one of two platinum sponsors of the awards is Ampol, Australia’s biggest fuel supplier, which is involved in the purchase, refining, distribution and marketing of petroleum products. I make no distinction whether Ampol explores for oil or sells petrol & diesel at the suburban pump. It’s part of the fossil fuel industry. I’m also disappointed with the way the Walkley Foundation has dealt with the racism of William Walkley, who established the awards in 1956. Mr. Walkley also founded Ampol. (For international friends, the Walkley Awards are our equivalent of the Pulitzer Prizes.)

Ampol became a platinum sponsor last year, recently catching the eye of some cartoonists and journalists, who’ve either withdrawn their work or said they wouldn’t enter.

The willingness of Australia’s top journalism awards to partner so prominently with the fossil fuel industry, to accept fossil fuel money, sends a very poor message when the climate emergency is the biggest challenge of our times.

As respected Australian climate scientist Joelle Gergis wrote recently in The Monthly: "Scientists can now definitively say that humanity’s use of coal, oil and gas is cooking the planet."

A national survey of young Australians by Headspace showed more than half fear for the future due to climate change, the ABC reported on Sept. 7. A global survey of 10,000 young people in 2021 showed 59 percent were very or extremely worried and 84 percent were at least moderately worried about the climate crisis. More than 45 percent said those feelings negatively affected their daily life and functioning. Climate anxiety and distress were correlated with perceived inadequate government responses and associated feelings of betrayal, the survey showed.

Canadian science communicator Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, recently told my old Reuters colleague Matthew Green in his Resonate World newsletter: “We have a choice in how we respond. We don’t just need to be funneled into a deepening case of despair that fuels a sense of fatalism that then creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom that will just convince everyone that nothing can be done.”

By withdrawing a book that took me 7 years to write and has been acclaimed around the world, I’m telling the Walkley Foundation that accepting fossil fuel money in 2023 is not good enough. I want to also show my government that I’m deeply unhappy with their leadership on this issue.

Back to William Walkley, who graces the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

In 1961, Mr. Walkley wrote a column for the Sydney Morning Herald, saying Australia would “cease to become a white man’s country” unless its “deficiencies in manpower and economic resources are made good in the shortest possible time”.

“Today Australians are but a drop of white in a sea of colour that teems with more than 1,200 million land-hungry Asiatics,” he opined.

After reading these remarks in an article by Osman Faruqi, Culture Editor for the Sydney Morning Herald on the morning of Sept. 2, I checked to see if the Foundation had ever noted their founder’s racist past. It had not. Another journalist, Belinda Noble, had mentioned his comments in a piece in Mumbrella on May 22.

As one person said in response to Osman’s story: “About the time Walkley’s clearly racist comment was published, my father was standing at Australia House in London being refused even the paperwork to apply for migration by the clerk at the reception desk. Because he was not white and they told him so. I could weep for him standing there being humiliated like that. He eventually got the forms a few years later and we had to attach a colour photo of our family so Australian immigration could access “how coloured” we were- how dark was our skin. It was 1964. The White Australia policy was still in place until Prime Minister Gough Whitlam ended it in 1973. Our racist past is actually still in living memory for people damaged by it, no matter when it happened. It will never be ancient history. Australia officially would have rather not have had me, or my family here. We were who Walkley despised, for the colour of our skin. We cannot have an award for journalism named after such an ignorant stupid man.”

The Foundation issued a statement later that evening condemning and expressing deep regret for the racist views expressed by Mr. Walkley “in a newspaper column in 1961”.

Note -- it only apologized for what Mr. Walkey said in one column that other journalists had easily found.

“As an ethical organisation, we must call out the mistakes of the past,” the statement added.

At a time when opposition politicians and right-wing media commentators have lied so blatantly about next month’s referendum on constitutional recognition of our First Nations People, I think the Walkley Foundation could have done a much better job in reconciling the racist past of its founder. Which is why its statement will be little more than a typical exercise in corporate PR unless it tells the full truth about a man whose name is synonymous with the best of Australian journalism. I don’t believe for a second that Mr. Walkley only once went on the record with his racist views.

The cartoon above is by Jon Kudelka, one of the cartoonists who has said he won’t enter the Walkley Awards.