JOINT WINNERS
Dr Carolyn Collins, Visiting Research Fellow, School of Humanities, College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities, Adelaide University, and Associate Professor Paul Sendziuk, Program Director, School of Humanities, College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities, Adelaide University, for Vision and hope. A history of St Mark’s College, 1925–2025, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2025. Both Carolyn and Paul have connections to the HSSA. Carolyn edited the society’s journal in 2020 and 2021; this is the second time Dr Sendziuk has been awarded a Keain Medal, the first being in 2019 for A History of South Australia, co-authored with Dr Robert Foster.
The fifteen chapters of the systematically researched and sympathetically written Vision and hope (338 large format pages) include evocative titles such as ‘The road to foundation’, ‘Forging new traditions’, ‘Shadows and light’, ‘Kicking and screaming’, and ‘Cultural renewal, COVID and the second century of St Mark’s, 2019–25’. They indicate the authors’ treatment of the undercurrents and the many not so passive influences working over a century that determined how this North Adelaide residential college of the University of Adelaide (firstly single-sex, later co-ed) originated, fared and survived.
CO-WINNER
Patricia Sumerling, Hotels of Adelaide. An illustrated history, [Mile End, South Australia], Wakefield Press, 2025.
City of churches or city of pubs? Patricia Sumerling’s several years’ writing for this book about currently trading, former and lost hotels is not a comparative study, but a compelling history that gives a definite answer. Patricia, a previous Keain Medal winner, and author of researched publications on the city of Adelaide, heritage and land surveys, biography and historical fiction – and more – has produced, in Hotels of Adelaide. An illustrated history, a social history of wide dimensions. The study is a record made even more valuable by the author’s prediction of the unlikelihood that further pub licences will be issued in the city: demographic changes being the cause (p217). The book gives figures and facts up to mid 2022, is richly illustrated by early and comparative photographs, newspaper cartoons and advertisements, and paintings including the contemporary paintings of Adelaide’s hotels of Leanne Heading. Narratives of brewers’ connections to pubs and of publicans’ promotional seductions of clients are spread throughout: the final general index entry is for ‘Zahringer organ’, a hotel attraction much like a whale for a table, and two female ‘aeronauts’ of 1890 which are noted. The identification of Town Acre pub sites and of changing pub ownerships is the important scaffold on which pubs’ and peoples’ changing fortunes, fluctuating as they did with the South Australian economy, are compellingly described.
HIGHLY COMMENDED
Dr Madeleine Regan – I buy this piece of ground here. An Italian Market-gardener Community in Adelaide, 1920s-1970s, Australian National University, ANU Press, 2025.
Dr Regan is an experienced oral historian and holds Adjunct Academic status in the College of Human Sciences and Culture at Flinders University.
In I buy this piece of ground here – the title comes from an interview with a migrant market gardener – Dr Regan relates the industrious, often difficult, life of emigrants who came to Adelaide from the 1920s from the Veneto region in north-eastern Italy and settled in what are now the western suburbs of Adelaide, notably at what they knew as Lockleys, now Kidman Park. Her telling of the family stories as market gardeners owning land for the first time and their Veneto community – work, social life, religion, education, war-time difficulties and prejudice, is based on heartfelt personal recollections collected over a 20-year period. Her book provides a remarkable insight into how this migrant community has developed and changed over time.