Congratulations to Launceston writer Rohan Wilson (left) who was tonight named the winner of the 2011 Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under 35, for his novel The Roving Party.

The Roving Party is available to buy as an ebook right now from our ebook store. The paperback edition will be available from shops from tomorrow.

Tim Winton announced the Vogel winner at a cocktail party in Sydney tonight. It's the first time the winning Vogel novel has been available to buy immeditely after the announcement and it coincides with the award's 30th anniversary this year.

You can sample for free the first chapter of The Roving Party below.

Now the announcement has been made you can read Rohan's guest blog post below about The Roving Party, in which he explains the story behind his Vogel-winning novel.

So. I remember they herded my whole class aboard a bus one day. I would have been ten or eleven. I remember the ride, remember it being evilly boring. Most likely I would have stirred up some sort of trouble; I usually did at times like that. Spitballs were a classic. Or firing off rubber bands. After an eternity we arrived at Tiagarra, the Aboriginal cultural museum in Devonport, and Miss Nielsen called us together before the strange shingle building and threatened to wring our necks if we touched anything inside. It was a threat I ignored. Then the tour guide led us through in groups. What I recall most vividly is the atmosphere. It was like being underground, dark, silent and smelly. We saw spears and flints. Waddies. Reed baskets. There were paintings of the old people walking their country, clothed in skins with their firesticks held aloft. I touched the paintings and the fibreglass rocks and the stuffed wallabies. I was astonished. There was so much I had never known about.

Tiagarra raised questions for my ten-year-old self faster than it could answer them. Where had the tribes gone? Why did they leave? Were they friendly? Back at school we were taught the Great Lie of Tasmanian history; that Trukanini was the last of her kind. We believed that Aboriginal Tasmanians were extinct and their culture existed only in places like Tiagarra. It was knowledge that sat heavily with me. It didn’t seem fair that we were here and they were not.

And so in that visit lay the seeds of my book, The Roving Party. Those questions continue to sit heavily with me. I have learned in the years since that they are questions without clear answers. Not because we lack information (although we do) and not because we interpret it poorly (although we have). No, there are no clear answers because that is the very nature of history. It is unknowable, in a very real sense. The Roving Party represents my guesses, my ruminations, about the answers to the questions that all Tasmanians must ask themselves. My book is not true in the way that a mathematical problem is true. But it is true in the way that historiography is true; that is to say, I have taken facts and assigned values to them which align with who I am. Often my values far exceed the facts, but this can also be true of historiography.

I hope you read this book and consider the lives lived by John Batman and William ‘Black Bill’ Ponsonby. I hope you also consider the answers they would offer to a child who asked a question like ‘Why did the tribes leave?’. For it is in such considerations that we arrive closer to the truth.

Rohan Wilson is the author of The Roving Party, published by Allen & Unwin and winner of the 2011 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award. It is now available as an ebook or in paperback.