2019 Runner-up of the Arts Central Queensland Lorna McDonald Essay Prize, and winner in 2018

Lesley accepting the Arts Central Queensland Lorna McDonald Essay Prize in 2018 for ‘Ructions and Resilience: A Family in Crisis and the Meteor Park Orphanage, 1916.’ The award is in honour of Lorna, an acclaimed historian, and was presented by Lorna’s son the very much acclaimed novelist Roger McDonald (1915). Lesley is displaying a family photograph that features her great-grandmother, the inspiration for the essay.

This essay is available online on the website of Arts Central Queensland. Or read it in Hecate 44.1 & 2, 2018.

In 2019 she was runner-up for ‘My Year with Lasseter’s Grandson on the Central Highlands Goldfields’.