With the 30th anniversary of the Aurealis Awards upon us, last issue I looked at the origins of the Awards. This time I want to focus on the judging process and the people who did the hard work in the early days: the judges. Although I coordinated the Awards in the early years, I only ever put my hand up once to be a judge. It was for the Fantasy Division and, unfortunately, very early on I had to pull out because I had totally misjudged the amount of reading involved. The other two Aurealis editors, Stephen Higgins and Michael Pryor, have been on a judging panel once each, but ultimately we knew that we needed to be hands-off as far as the judging process was concerned.

An awards system needs to be transparent and above reproach, and the key to the success of any award system is the fairness of the judging process. This was uppermost in our minds when we put together the judging rules. The Aurealis Awards had to run completely independently of the magazine. I even considered having Aurealis stories ineligible at one point, but we decided that, while we didn’t want to unfairly advantage authors published in Aurealis, we also didn’t want to unfairly disadvantage them. So we decided the Aurealis stories were eligible, but there was no automatic entry and the authors had to enter the stories themselves.

We also wanted to make sure the judges were not involved in a conflict of interest. Given the nature of the SFF community, this had the potential to be a can of worms. If judges could be declared ineligible, we could potentially run out of experienced and qualified candidates for the panels. So we decided that works could be ineligible due to a conflict of interest but judges couldn’t. Our rule was that a work written by a judge was automatically ineligible to be entered for an award in the category for which the person was a judge, although it would still be eligible in other categories.

I knew the judges were crucial to the credibility of the Aurealis Awards. We were expecting them to seek out every work that could conceivably meet the respective definitions of science fiction or fantasy or horror or young adult fiction written by an Australian. They had to authenticate their decisions by signing the following statement: ‘We, the 199* Aurealis Awards Panel for Division*: Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror/Young Adult have agreed on the following short list/winners. In preparing this list, we have made all reasonable attempts to consider every eligible novel and short story.’

In the first few years, the panel for both novels and short stories were the same. This set-up resulted in an increasingly unrealistic workload with the explosion of SFF publishing in Australia. The burden on the judges was significant, so the requirement to read both novels and stories had to be jettisoned. The actual decision-making process was left entirely up to each panel to decide—it could be consensus, voting, or some arcane method, so in theory, the decisions across all the panels could be made quite differently. We originally had a condition that no ties were allowed, but we soon relaxed that.

At the time, having anonymous judges wasn’t an option. We had to give out their addresses to publishers (and anyone else who wanted to enter). Books needed to be mailed directly to each judge, like the World Fantasy awards but with many more judges involved. The only alternative to direct mailing would involve a large logistic and costly task of mailing books multiple times. Remember, there was no ebook option in those days. And because the judges were tasked with considering every eligible book, and not just those that had been entered, often single books would have to be mailed by one judge to the next at their own expense.

Obviously different people have different tastes when it comes to SFF and different ideas of what is good SFF. We were aware that in a juried award system like the Aurealis Awards we had to make sure that one person’s view didn’t dominate. This was particularly a potential problem in the early years because the pool of potential judges was relatively small, and it wasn’t as easy as it is today to put out a call for expressions of interest. We addressed this with the rule that no one could judge the same category for more than two consecutive years, and that a break of two consecutive years was needed before a judge could reapply to be on that panel again.

The list of the judges that took part in the very first Aurealis Award in 1995 is a bit of a who’s who in the SFF community at the time:

Division A Science Fiction: Graham South, Jonathan Strahan, Martin Livings

Division B Fantasy: Sean Williams, Martin Livings, Bill Congreve

Division C Horror: Leigh Blackmore, Steve Proposch, Bill Congreve

Division D Young Adult: Sean McMullen, Lucy Sussex, Pam Maclntyre

And, yes, you’re right, it’s noticeably not close to a 50-50 gender split. This disparity certainly changed over time, although we never applied any quotas. If you look at the 2024 Judging Panel, the ratios have reversed. Interestingly, a study in 2015 by Ladybusiness on gender discrimination in the winners of main science fiction and fantasy awards included Aurealis Award results from 1995–2014, and out of all the awards, we came closest to a 50-50 gender split.

And, of course, it was nice for the Aurealis Awards to be considered by the study to be one of the main science fiction and fantasy awards along with the Hugos and Nebulas.

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