This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Aurealis Awards. The first Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction were for works published in 1995, with the ceremony the following year. What started originally as an initiative of Aurealis magazine has, over the years, taken on a huge life of its own and not only become Australia’s top SFF award, but is also widely recognised by the global SFF community. So, how did this institution come about? Like many great things, it started with a failure.

Let’s go back to 1990. Aurealis magazine had published its first issues and was working hard to foster the development of Australian SFF by establishing itself as a reliable professional market for Australian fantasy and science fiction. We realised at one point, however, that our mission was only half fulfilled. Aurealis magazine fostered short fiction and was encouraging of new and developing writers. That left a gaping hole for the recognition of longer works by more established writers.

In an attempt to fill this gap, Stephen Higgins, the late Peter McNamara and a few others tried to start an award. There was no doubt that there was room for one. We already had the Ditmars, but there was no juried award. There was no equivalent of the World Fantasy Award. The discussion didn’t go anywhere and sort of petered out. Remember, though, this was the early 1990s. Not everyone had email, and the discussion was made via a chain of letters by people in different states. This is not an easy way to get things done. Ultimately, this initial push for an award system failed because everyone had a different idea of how it should work, and the discussion just went around in circles.

A couple of years later I felt that, as an increasingly well-known magazine, we were in a position to have a go at setting up an awards system. I thought that maybe if we started with something modest, it would gather momentum. We couldn’t expect a wide awareness of a new award in its first few years, and we suspected that there might be some resistance because fans were understandably protective of the Ditmars—and this new award was attached to a professional magazine with Australia-wide newsagency distribution. As part of my day job I had been involved with the Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing, so I knew that the structure was the key. Although the Aurealis Award structure we developed has been tinkered with over the years, it has stood the test of time.

What I felt was absolutely crucial was that all of the eligible works had to be read by the people making the decision. To achieve this, the awards had to seek out works that had, for whatever reason, not been entered. The whole point was that at the end of the process, we could say that what we declared a winner had been carefully chosen by having every conceivable work that met our criteria read and considered. This is not easy to achieve in practice because of the workload involved, and it’s one of the reasons we came up with different categories with separate judging panels.

The other important reason for having different categories was so that spaceships were being compared with spaceships, dragons with dragons and so on. To achieve this in the early years we had four divisions with two awards in each division, giving us a total of eight Aurealis Awards:

Division A Science Fiction: Best Novel and Best Short Story

Division B Fantasy: Best Novel and Best Short Story

Division C Horror: Best Novel and Best Short Story

Division D Young Adult: Best Novel and Best Short Story

Although this type of structure is more common now, at the time most of the SFF Awards just lumped things together into broad categories. We were breaking new ground. As far as I’m aware Division D was the first specific Young Adult award anywhere in the world, not just the first Young Adult SFF Award.

So, what happened in that first year 1995? Arguably, you could call it a Greg Egan triumph. The Western Australian writer of hard science fiction won the Best Science Fiction Novel with Distress and the Best Science Fiction Short Story with ‘Luminous’ and had two other Short Story Finalists ‘Mister Volition’ and ‘Wang’s Carpets’.

Greg went on to win several more Aurealis Awards in the early years but, for reasons I’m still not clear on, he declined the Best Science Fiction Novel Award for Teranesia in 1999. We know it wasn’t Aurealis-Awards-specific because he also declined Teranesia for the Ditmar Award that year. Technically you can’t decline an Aurealis Award, but I guess you can say you’re declining it and have it on record. Early last year I finally had to throw out the trophy that I’d been keeping in case Greg changed his mind. I’m assuming he actively chose not to have his works considered since, although he did win another Aurealis Award for Best Collection for Oceanic in 2009, which he again declined. I may be wrong, but I’m not aware of him declining any of his other 176 award wins and nominations.

I still have clear memories of the first awards ceremony on 22 March 1996. One thing I remember was to reach the upstairs venue of Justin Ackroyd’s Slow Glass Books on 305 Swanston Walk, we had to walk through what could be described as a BDSM store. I often wondered what Sean McMullen’s young daughter Catherine at the time made of it!

Another memory I have of the first Aurealis Awards ceremony was that Garth Nix told me he wouldn’t come down to Melbourne from Sydney for the awards ceremony unless I told him whether he had won. Fair enough, but I was really keen to make sure that the night had some surprises. I also wanted as many winners there as possible, so I told him he had won. What I didn’t tell him was that he had won two awards for Sabriel: Best Fantasy Novel and Best Young Adult Novel. I also rearranged the order of the announcements so that his second win was the climax of the night. Garth was genuinely shocked and overwhelmed when I announced it, and the first Aurealis Awards finished with a bang. This was exactly the sort of thing we were hoping would happen. It was the first award Garth had ever won. Awards are important, and Garth’s double win no doubt helped kick off his New York Times best-selling career. With his 15 wins (two over my own fantasy novels) and 39 nominations, we can say Garth Nix has dominated the Aurealis Awards.

Here are the winners of the 1995 Aurealis Awards:

Best Science Fiction Novel: Distress by Greg Egan (Millennium)

Best Science Fiction Short Story: ‘Luminous’ by Greg Egan (Asimov’s Sep 1995)

Best Fantasy Novel: Sabriel, Garth Nix (Moonstone/HarperCollins)

Best Fantasy Short Story ‘Harvest Bay’, Karen Attard (Eidolon #19 Spring 1995)

Best Horror Novel: An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Terry Dowling (Aphelion)

Best Horror Short Story: Olympia, Francis Payne (Bambada Press)

Best Young Adult Novel (tie): Deucalion, Brian Caswell (UQP)

Best Young Adult Novel (tie): Sabriel, Garth Nix (Moonstone/HarperCollins)

Best Young Adult Short Story: No award

There are some big plans for the 30-year celebration of the Aurealis Awards this year. Watch out for announcements.

All the best from the cloud!

Dirk Strasser