NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2010

Anna Haebich’s multi-award-winning book Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000 was the first national history of Australia’s Stolen Generations. It won the New South Wales Premier’s Book of the Year in 2001. Anna’s career brings together university teaching and research, centre directorship, museum curatorship, visual arts practice, and work with Indigenous communities. Her research interests include histories of Indigenous peoples, migration, the body, the environment and the visual and performing arts. Anna is currently Research Professor at Griffith University and is in residence at the State Library of Queensland.

In Spinning the Dream, Anna Haebich re-evaluates the experience of assimilation in Australia, providing a meticulously researched and masterfully written assessment of its implications for Australia’s Indigenous and ethnic minorities and for immigration and refugee policy.

‘Histories such as these will help us to keep in mind where we have come from and to delineate more clearly where we should be headed.’ Katherine Ellinghaus, The Age.


Spinning the Dream: assimilation in Australia 1950 -1970 is published by Freemantle Press

• Read the introduction of Spinning the Dream
• Read an extract from Anna's talk at the book launch of Spinning the Dream
• Listen to Anna in discussion with Fiona Allon and Anne Summers on ABC Radio Perth