The Bettison & James Award

The Bettison & James Award recognises individuals whose lifelong work has benefited the Australian community.

Commencing in 2015, the Award was established to recognise Australians who have contributed a lifelong body of work of high achievement and community benefit.

The Award is administered by the Adelaide Film Festival on behalf of the Jim Bettison and Helen James Foundation. Presented by the Foundation on an annual basis, it provides the beneficiary with the possibility to extend, record or disseminate aspects of their life’s work.

The award recipient’s area of expertise may be in the arts and humanities, social justice, the environment, the sciences or any other area where benefit to the community results from their work.

The Foundation’s Selection Committee reviews all submissions before making its final decision. $50,000 is awarded to single or multiple recipients, based on eligibility and strength of application.

Celebrating 10 years, Bettison & James Award

“Community is the bedrock of civilisation and we’re losing it fast. We have to find our way back to community.”

During the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival, the past recipients of the Bettison & James Award gathered to celebrate the 10th anniversary and take part in two enlightening panel discussions.

Taking place at The Mercury cinema, Adelaide’s beloved member-based centre for screen culture, AFF presented the Bettison & James Award Talk – Art and Culture, featuring Jackie Huggins, Greg Mackie, Angela Valamanesh, and Pat Rix moderated by film journalist and critic Stephen A Russell and the Bettison & James Award Talk – Science and Environment, featuring David Vaux, John Long, Tim Jarvis, Uncle Moogy, and Bob Brown moderated by The Guardian journalist Tory Shepherd.

Art and Culture

This year’s Bettison & James Award recipient, visual artist Angela Valamanesh opened up the discussion about the importance of reaching people through her work, “The work most visual artists do is quite solitary...but I don’t want to just make work that sits in boxes..it’s really important to me that people see my work and engage with it.”

The panelists also discussed how the prize money from the award helped them not only extend their work but in many cases give back to the community, create opportunities, or lend a voice to the marginalised.

Long-serving arts and culture advocate in South Australia Greg Mackie OAM, talked about how the award helped fund his efforts in founding the biennial Adelaide Festival of Ideas, “Receiving the award for me came at an incredible time. To be the inaugural recipient was at the time life-affirming and life-changing…it enabled myself and dear colleagues to pick up and rescue the Adelaide Festival.”

Jackie Huggins, AM FAHA, a Bidjara / Birri-Gubba Juru woman from Queensland and writer, discussed how receiving the award during one of the first times she found herself unemployed, aided her and her co-author Ngaire Jarro in writing Jack of Hearts: QX11594 – the story of her father’s experience in World War II. This was an important dream of hers to achieve, due to the treatment she faced as an Aboriginal child in school, “[I] was told by my headmistress that I couldn’t possibly do year 12 because I was Aboriginal…I thought one day I’m going to teach and write our history.”

The theme panelists kept coming back to in their discussion was one of community and the importance of connection for art and wider society.

2022 recipient Pat Rix said, “Community is the bedrock of civilisation and we’re losing it fast. We have to find our way back to community.” While Greg Mackie concluded the discussion with his thoughts on the responsibility of elder leaders in this after a question from the audience, “We have a part to play in reweaving community.”

Science and Environment

The common thread throughout the Science and Environment Talk led by The Guardian journalist Tory Shepherd was a warning of the danger of misinformation, and how we can better connect science with art, much like 2024 recipient Angela Valamanesh does with her body of work, which focuses an “abiding fascination with nature and our connections to all life forms”.

2016 recipient Tim Jarvis AM an environmental scientist, author, public speaker and filmmaker, touched on how this connection can help spread advocacy and information on environmental issues, “If you want to have an audience with people you need a vehicle and art is a vehicle…film is a vehicle. You’ve got to find language and metrics that speak to the person's behaviour you're trying to change.”

Professor David Vaux AO, the 2020 recipient of the award explained how the prize is helping his work in establishing a national office for research integrity, which he believes will advocate for transparency and countability in research science – an integral step in battling misinformation.

The panel also discussed how a First Nations voice in parliament, like the one South Australia established in 2023, is vital to the sustainability of our environment and how we can learn from elders such as 2023 recipient Major (Moogy) Sumner AM – whose work centres around contribution and commitment to cultural education, repatriation and the environment – in practicing this sustainability.

The gathering of the recipients of the Bettison & James Award in celebration of the 10th anniversary in this context speaks to the power the award has in aiding change and highlighting those who continue to make a true difference in our community – a legacy that Jim Bettison and Helen James sought in the establishment of their Foundation.

2024 Bettison & James Award Recipient

Angela Valamanesh has been an independent visual artist based in Adelaide for over forty years. She works across a number of different mediums with a focus on the connections between art and science and an abiding fascination with nature and our connections to all life forms.

A graduate of South Australian School of Art in 1977 her practice primarily involved ceramics. In 1996 she was awarded an Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Art Scholarship with a one year residency at Glasgow School of Art.

Her art works are included in private and public collections including Art Gallery of South Australia and National Gallery of Australia and often evolve from research undertaken during residencies such as Smithsonian Institute Washington DC in 2014 and The Barr Smith Library's Rare Books Collection in 2017.

Her work explores the often-seductive connections between plants and animals, and recently includes her Jam Factory Icon exhibition of 2019 and The Mortician’s Garden exhibition of 2021, which featured at Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert in Sydney. Angela also recently completed the Mordant Family / Creative Australia Affiliated Fellowship in Rome.