The Judith Binney Trust is proud to announce the recipients of the 2026 Judith Binney Fellowships and Writing Awards. This is the eighth year of the awards established by the Judith Binney Trust in 2018 to support innovative research and the writing of history in Aotearoa / New Zealand.

This year the Selection Panel has granted two Fellowships of $60,000 each for a 9 month period. They are:

Dr Vincent O’Malley

Māori and the Irish: A Unique Affinity?

Dr Vincent O’Malley is an award-winning Wellington writer and historian who has authored many bestselling and acclaimed works on the history of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Dr O’Malley will use his Judith Binney Fellowship to support a new project exploring historical interactions between the Irish and Māori in Aotearoa / New Zealand. The work will draw on archival research in New Zealand, Britain, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and will focus very specifically on the history of the Irish in New Zealand and their relationships with Māori.

Dr O’Malley’s landmark book on the Waikato War, The Great War for New Zealand: Waikato 1800-2000 (BWB), was published in 2016. It was followed in 2019 by The New Zealand Wars/Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa (BWB) and in 2022 his book Voices from the New Zealand Wars/He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa (BWB) won the general non-fiction prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In the same year he received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Non-Fiction

Dr O’Malley is a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a founding partner of HistoryWorks, which specialises in Treaty of Waitangi research.

Professor Rangi Mātāmua (Tūhoe) ONZM

Te Whānau Mārama – Māori Astronomy

Professor Rangi Mātāmua (Tūhoe) is Chief Advisor Matariki to the Government and Professor of Mātauranga Māori at Massey University. He is acknowledged as a pioneering Māori scholar whose ground-breaking research has revolutionised understandings of Māori astronomy, and in particular Matariki.

Professor Mātāmua will use his Judith Binney Fellowship to complete a landmark book on Māori star lore and its cultural, historical, and scientific significance. Interweaving three decades of scholarly research with inherited tribal knowledge, the book will explore Māori cosmology, seasonal systems, ceremonial practices, and the enduring cultural importance of the stars.

At the heart of this project lies a rare 400-page 19th century manuscript written by his ancestor, Te Kōkau Himiora Te Pikikōtuku, a tohunga kōkōrangi of the Tūhoe people from Ruatāhuna in the Te Urewera region. The manuscript has passed down through generations and was entrusted to him by his grandfather. It provides a unique and authentic insight into ancestral knowledge systems.

Winner of the 2019 Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize and the 2020 Callaghan Medal for science communication from Royal Society Te Apārangi, he became the Kiwibank New Zealander of the year in 2023.

Two Judith Binney Writing Awards have been made, with each recipient receiving $20,000. The recipients are:

Natalie Looyer

Rock Climbing in Aotearoa New Zealand c 1965-2024

Natalie Looyer is an experienced oral historian based in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Her PhD in History from Te Herenga Waka / Victoria University of Wellington, was completed in 2025, and is the first in-depth historical study of rock climbing in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Judith Binney Writing Award will allow her the time and resources to convert the thesis into a book manuscript for publication.

Rock climbing is a lesser explored yet equally significant component of New Zealand’s great outdoors culture. At the heart of the book will be an exploration of the people, places, and events that define a complex and uniquely New Zealand sport history.

Oral history interviews, which formed the basis of her research, enable this history to be told through the experiential perspectives of everyday rock climbers.

Mikayla Journée

Reframing Harold Marsh: Photographing and researching Māori histories and geographies of Kaipara in the 1920s

Mikayla Journée is a research fellow at the University of Auckland whose work explores art histories of Aotearoa in relation to localised place histories, legacies of colonialism, and how artists collaborate with communities. Mikayla will use her Judith Binney Writing Award to support the writing of a new book on the photographic and archival collections of Harold Marsh (1876-1948), a photographer-farmer based on the Oruawharo River, Kaipara.

Mikayla’s new research examines the photographic and archival collection of Harold Marsh who, in the 1920s, undertook expeditions to Pouto North Head, Wharehine and Ōkahukura (Taporapora) to take photographs, map pā, lakes and shorelines, and research and record Māori histories. These trips generated a complex and compelling record of a rapidly changing land and place.