2025 MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD, JUDGE’S COMMENT: 

The picaresque novel is one of the most far-reaching forms of social critique for it  skewers systemic corruption while entertaining readers with tales of the road.  Literature abounds with male picaros but the female picara – the woman who defies oppressive societal norms, using her own wits and resources to embark on a life of freedom and adventure – is less common. In Compassion, Julie Janson creates a picara Darug woman Duringah (Nellie James), whom we meet as a young child condemned to servitude on an early nineteenth-century settler farm.  Duringah escapes to search for her mother, is captured and sent to the Parramatta Female Factory, escapes again, falls in love, and becomes a bushranger. She wanders across Eora, Darug, Darkinjung and Awabakal country, witnessing the transformation of Indigenous lands into a surreal, mythopoeic hellscape for Aboriginal people, convicts, and the poor. This is a sprawling and magnificent genre-blending epic where colonial gothic meets the unashamedly erotic.  Recounted in prose that is lyrical at times, and rough and bawdy at others, it code switches between Darug and English, creating a new vernacular that embodies the indomitable Duringah. Compassion showcases compelling storytelling across history and country. 

‘A powerful, moving, and rich story. Julie Janson has captured the lived tragedy, horror, humour, and survival of Aboriginal people across nineteenth century south-eastern Australia. This book is a must read’.

- John Maynard, Historian and author of ‘Fight for Liberty and Freedom’.

‘”Compassion” is a long overdue, beautifully written chronicle of the violence and trauma of Black colonial Australian experience. With an unflinching eye Julie Janson beckons us to follow her magnetic heroine, Nell Duringah, through the terrible but complex Black colonial experiences of mid-19th Century Australia. It is at once harrowing, beautiful, inescapably violent and traumatic - and yet delicately balanced with adventure and unsettling, fabulous, laugh-out-loud, dark humour. Her characters dance and sing on the page with honestly, venality, empathy - and, yes, with compassion - but always with profound humanity. This is a remarkable and truly wonderful novel from a writer with enormous insight into how Australia was . . . and how little it might have changed.

Paul Daley, author of ‘Jesustown’and ‘The Leap’

‘I am completely bowled over by the ambition of “Compassion”, including the breadth of research woven through it about those years of colonisation, settlement, of the minutiae of how people lived, and the varied nature of those lives for men and women and people from the various nations, Indian, Chinese, etc. The protagonist Nell James reveals her encounters in relation to others and society, how she is acted upon and acts upon others as a woman of colour, a sexual woman, an outlaw woman who wants to determine her own life but meets the resistance of white society and sometimes Koori, too.’

Jane Messer, mentor and author of ‘Hopscotch’,  author, mentor and Developmental Editor - Story ‘SALOON’