E&OE...
Thank you very much Julie, ladies and gentlemen. I am quite delighted that all of you have joined me for the presentation of the inaugural Prime Minister's Prize for Australian history.
I announced this prize at the National History Summit in August of last year and it's designed to recognise an outstanding piece of work published, produced or broadcast between the 20th September 2004 and 31st December 2006, and which contributes significantly to an understanding of Australian history.
I'll be making the announcement a little later, but firstly I want to congratulate the four short-listed nominees who are all here today. David Branagan for T.W. Edgeworth David: A Life. Les Carlyon for The Great War. Peter Cochrane for Colonial Ambition: Foundations of Australian Democracy and Josephine Flood for The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People.
The quality of the short-list, drawn from a total of 130 nominations for 151 works, underlined immediately for me, the value of this award and I do want to thank the eminent Advisory Committee - Geoffrey Blainey, Greg Melleuish, Jackie Huggins, Tom Frame and Lisa Paul for their time in assessing the nominations and providing me with a short-list of works.
It's no secret that I see this prize as part of a larger project aimed at fostering curiosity, understanding and excitement about Australian History, both in our schools and in the wider Australian community. It is a project that bears directly on our national life. No liberal democracy and no government should be indifferent to the state of historical knowledge in our society.
All our public debates have a history. All reflect the social, economic and political forces that have brought Australia to this point over a long period of time.
The very essence of active citizenship in a democracy rests on a sense of a common national journey. Without a shared knowledge of the national story, we risk hollowing out the very foundations of citizenship based on feelings of nationhood.
Ironically enough it was the great philosopher of liberal individualism, John Stuart Mill, who articulated in his own time the power and importance of national history to feelings of nationhood.
Such feelings, he noted, can be generated by various causes - religion, language, race and geography among them. But, he argued, the strongest of all is