The Miles Franklin Literary Award, circa 2025, is a chicken parmi and pint of lager at your local pub: dependable, familiar, decent value, filling. Each year, the Miles completes its core business by generating a longlist, a shortlist and a winning novel ‘of the highest literary merit’ that ‘presents Australian life in any of its phases’. It does so serviceably: in 2024, for example, the Miles judges rightfully lauded Alexis Wright – Australia’s best twenty-first century and probably best ever writer – for the brilliant Praiseworthy.

But in an era when new releases hog oxygen month after month, when the cultural influence of the novel is fading, and when OzLit needs all the help it can get, merely choosing a winner each year is a limp use of the legacy of the Miles. I mean no offence to the list of sixty-seven winners – the brilliant, the plodding, the anachronistic, the inexplicable, the long-forgotten, the safe – when I say that the importance of the Miles lies not in the anointed few but in the grand tottering stack that is every book ever entered. Collectively, these works reveal to us, if we care to listen, an Australianness that is weird, wonderful, awful, impossible, contested and messy – less chicken parmi, more all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, including the odd cut of meat that’s turned.

Gatekeepers and book lovers should dig around in, not neglect, the sometimes controversial, sometimes bemusing history of the Miles. Whether it’s Helen Demidenko/Darville/Dale’s shocking win for The Hand that Signed the Paper, the withdrawal of John Dale’s The Dogs from the 2022 longlist following claims of plagiarism, the decision by Patrick White to decline the 1966 award and not enter his later novels, or many other moments, the Miles has the power to tell us much about literary culture and its contested place in the real world. But Prudential Trust, custodian of the Miles, maintains an unengaging and sanitised webpage that details winners, shortlists and longlists from the present to 2007 – as if the years 1957 to 2006 do not exist or matter.

One reason that Miles the prize seems so sanitised is that we have sanitised Miles the person. We laud Franklin as benefactor, icon and writer for gifting to the nation a peculiar award that has grown into eminence. But we should also be able to interrogate her version of Australian nationalism. And we should want to ask whether Franklin was pro-fascism in the 1930s and 1940s, not to retrospectively damn or exonerate her but to better understand who she was, what she believed, and how she perceived Australia in the world. All this allows us to reflect deeply on the political impact of imaginary worlds. All this, too, is Australian life in any of its phases.

Meanwhile, Miles judging panels have come a long way since the narrow interpretation of ‘Australian life in any of its phases’ that prevailed for decades. We are long past the point where a book such as Frank Moorhouse’s Grand Days is ineligible because it is set in Europe. Inexplicably, though, the Miles gatekeepers do not routinely release an annual list of ineligible books that do not address Australian themes. If the archive includes such lists, Prudential Trust should release them for all previous years.

There remains, and will always remain, a grey area between eligible and ineligible that nothing but the opinions of judges will resolve. Different judges, for example, might have deemed Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow (shortlisted in 2023) or Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron (shortlisted in 2021) as ineligible. Fair enough, either way – but let’s also see, know and debate what judges deem ‘ineligible’ Australian life. The Miles is not an award for an Australian novelist. International writers are eligible if their themes are Australian, though none have ever won. If novels by Australians are eligible if their books might have Australian themes, why not any novel that might have Australian themes?

Eligibility questions aside, we would all benefit from more cheerful but spirited Miles barracking about the present and past. Alexis Wright was (in my opinion) robbed when she did not win for The Swan Book in 2014, as was Carrie Tiffany for Mateship with Birds in 2013. I am bemused – no offence to the great man – that Tim Winton has won the Miles four times. I find it unbelievable that the judges of the 1983 award could not find a winner from twenty-four entries. And so on. Let’s use the Miles to celebrate and argue about our neglected literary past – the many backlisted and out-of-print novels that readers loved, hated, did not understand, or understood all too well. I’m not suggesting that lovers of fiction should turn shock jock when they comment on each year of their reading. But the Miles, stale and polite, sits in conflict with the agitating power of the great writing it aims to celebrate.

Photo by Tom Hermans via Unsplash