A generous bequest by the family and friends of the late Professor Bryan Gandevia in 2009 enabled the establishment of a prize to commemorate his contribution to the development of Australian military and medical history and acknowledge the research and publication activities of the Australian War Memorial. The prize, worth $5,000, is one of the most generous awards for early career researchers specialising in Australian history.
The Bryan Gandevia Prize is awarded biennially and is open to outstanding honours, masters, or doctoral theses on a significant subject on military, social, or medical aspects of Australian wartime history.
The call for submissions comes as the Memorial publishes 2016 prize recipient David Woolley's thesis Not yet diagnosed: Australian psychiatric casualties during the Kokoda campaign, 1942 as an ebook on the Memorial's website.
Woolley's work examines the complex issue of the psychological impact of operations during the Kokoda campaign. He asserts that in 1942 there was 'no universally applied definition or means of describing breakdown in combat'. The lack of a set of standardised criteria made the identification, classification, management and treatment of the health and wellbeing of servicemen a challenging process for military authorities. Issues in the management of physical and mental health of veterans as a result of war have also been examined in Dr Peter Yule's book on the Vietnam War experience The Long Shadow which was commissioned by the Australian War Memorial and published in 2020.
The 2021 Bryan Gandevia Prize is open to theses submitted, examined and passed as meritorious since 1 July 2018.
Applications close on 16 July 2021 and the award will be announced by the Director of the Australian War Memorial in November 2021.
Submitted theses will be judged by a panel consisting of Memorial historians and external academic referees. Details for submitting applications are on the Australian War Memorial website
