The inaugural Australian Political Book of the Year Award goes to Dean Ashenden for his book Telling Tennant’s Story: The Strange career of the great Australian silence.

In the lead up to this first year of the award, we had been discussing how we would define what would make the definition of a political book – let alone a political book of the year.

We knew the field would spread beyond the field of books about transactional politics and the meretricious players on the stage at any one time. But working out how far the field might go into history, academic work, journalism and other forms of writing was hard to fathom. And we were daunted by the potential onslaught of entries.

The competition did produce a big field of candidates. By the time we got to the short list of four, they were all clear candidates for the Award.

Dean Ashenden’s book, though, answered all those early questions about what a Political Book of the Year should look like in 2022.

His work – combining memoir, history and journalism – gives Australia one of the most powerful accounts yet of the sorry story of White Australia’s repeated assaults – and clumsy interventions - on Indigenous Australia since the arrival of the First Fleet.

He tells that story intimately through the lens of what has happened at Tennant Creek, and to the people who had lived there for thousands of years: people who come to life with real names and faces and stories over the historic episodes he recounts, as well as people he once glimpsed in the distant spinifex as a small boy ,who a returns as an ageing man to meet, who have survived it all.

But while Ashenden may be telling Tennant’s story, he also puts it in a much wider and more troubling context,both over time and into the present day, with a knowledgeable and clear-eyed view of the failings of the legal system, the degradations of political opportunism, the battle over history, and the confronting question of why most of us know so little of this story.

As we discuss Indigenous Recognition, an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, a Makaratta Commission and the importance of truth telling, there is no greater candidate for this prize than one which does so much to smash the Great Australian Silence.