The 2021 Minoru Hokari Scholarship has been awarded to Jessica Urwin.

Jess is a doctoral student in the School of History at the Australian National University. The award will support fieldwork for Jess’ project, titled, ‘Chain Reactions: Nuclear Colonialism in South Australia’.

Jess’ research aims to chart a history of nuclear colonialism in South Australia. Through her research, she hopes to draw attention to ways of considering nuclear processes as colonial.

Jess has adopted a methodological framework that is similar to Minoru Hokari’s ‘cross-culturalising history’, with Aboriginal people both as key agents and interlocuters. With this methodology, Jess aims to consider Australia’s nuclear history not as something existing parallel to Aboriginal people’s experiences of colonialism, but intimately entangled with it.

The scholarship will facilitate Jess’ travel to speak with Aboriginal communities in Port Augusta who have, generation after generation, been subject to, and fierce resistors of, nuclear colonialism in South Australia. This funding will allow Jess to record oral histories and view the archives of one particular family of activists.

In making the award to Jess, the judges were impressed by Jess’ effort to address the spirit of Hokari’s vision of cross cultural engagement. The project is an outstanding example of an oral history being drawn out of a precious family archive by a committed young scholar of promise with a strong sense of reciprocal obligation.

The judges also highly commended an application from Catalina Labra Odde.

Judges: Lawrence Bamblett, Anne McGrath, and Maria Nugent