A former corporate law lecturer has taken out the 2025 ACU Prize for Poetry.
Award-winning legal and creative writer Roger Vickery has claimed one of Australia's richest prizes for a single poem, winning $10,000 for his deeply personal history of New South Wales' most famous gold mining area, Araluen.
In his poem, 'Our Greater Souls' — which responded to the Prize's theme of 'Belonging' — Vickery compares his own experience of living in Araluen with that of colonial poet, Charles Harpur, who in 1858 was made gold commissioner of the southern goldfields.
Where Harpur lamented the environmental destruction and the violence against local Aboriginal people, Vickery also recalls the "good and terrible things that happened to us there".
"We've lived through fire and deaths and loss and some wonderful times and yet always there is a sadness about the land, about the environmental damage and the sense of a lost people, so it's a haunted place," Vickery said.
