Canberra historian Bill Gammage's debunking of terra nullius, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, has won the $80,000 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Australian History.

But the ANU professor was not at today's ceremony to receive his award from Prime Minister Julia Gillard – instead he is holidaying in Britain. As he told The Canberra Times before his departure, "I'll be somewhere between Carlisle and Wolverhampton, taking my first break in many years."

Novelist Gillian Mears's Foal's Bread won the fiction award and Mark McKenna's An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark took the non-fiction award, while the inaugural poetry prize went to Luke Davies for Interferon Psalms....