Mark Cutler's Store and Tea Room

'I said to this old fella at the ticket box, '... Take these ropes off! ... Our money is as good as anyone else's and we want to sit where we want to sit'. I kept standing there in front of the ticket office, and by then my sister-in-law was there too. The two of us, making trouble! And my poor little heart, I don't know how it stayed in my chest...'

2005 Inaugural Magarey Medal Shortlist

Isabel Flick and Heather Goodall, Isabel Flick: The Many Lives of an Extraordinary Aboriginal Woman, Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2004.

Isabel Flick: The Many Lives of an Extraordinary Aboriginal Woman is the story of a 'trouble maker' that begins in the riverbank camps of the country town of Collarenebri, traverses the kitchens of Sydney's Rose Bay, the streets of Redfern, and the halls of Parliament House, and ends back in the town of her birth. It tells the story of Isabel Flick's lifelong challenge to the racism of the wider society and to injustice among her own people, and of the wide networks she helped to build within the Aboriginal community and extending beyond it.

The collaboration between Isabel Flick and her co-author Heather Goodall began when Flick asked Goodall to help her research and write her life story by recording her memories and

editing the transcripts. When she became seriously ill (she died two years later), she passed the task of completing the book to Goodall, who worked closely with Flick's family to fill out the missing years of the recorded autobiography. The result is a remarkably successful synthesis of autobiography, oral history and biography. The life and words of Isabel Flick provide the power of personal testimony to injustice, and the insights and wisdom achieved through a lifelong commitment to social justice, while Heather Goodall deploys transcripts recorded by Flick, oral testimonies of others, and her own narrative to give a complex picture of Isabel Flick and her times in a way that echoes Flick's commitment to community and collective effort. Goodall structures her rich materials and her own narrative to give the story a powerful shape and a thematic coherence, supported by a range of historical devices: a family tree, maps of significant locations, footnotes, an index, and well placed photos. The result is an engrossing 'tale' that has the narrative drive of a novel and the depth of a history.