The Director-General of the National Archives of Australia, Ross Gibbs, has announced that Dr Christina Twomey of Monash University and Dr Nicole Moore of Macquarie University have each won a Margaret George (Fellowship) Award.

The Margaret George Award encourages and facilitates use of the National Archives collection, stimulating scholarly use of archival material.

‘Dr Twomey’s keen interest in the wartime experiences of Australian civilian internees neatly dovetails with the rich holdings on that topic in our collection,’ Mr Gibbs said.

‘This award will allow her to complete her research for a book commissioned by Cambridge University Press, and provisionally titled Australia’s Forgotten Prisoners: Australian Civilians Interned by the Japanese in World War II ,’ he said.

The second recipient, Dr Nicole Moore, will use her award to study Australian literature censorship.

‘Dr Moore’s award will assist her in researching and writing for a planned monograph about what was considered obscene in 20 th century Australia and why it was found to be so,’ Mr Gibbs said.

According to Dr Moore, the history of Australian literary censorship is rich and long. ‘It has been a history of institutional decision-making and regulative regimes, federal surveillance, stolen libraries and police raids … famous court cases, libel and defamation, prison terms,’ she said.

Margaret George was a young Australian historian whose work Australia and the Indonesian Revolution was published posthumously by Melbourne University Press in 1980, six years after her premature death. Her book was the first detailed account of Australia’s approach to Dutch Indonesian relations between 1945 and 1949.