Merlin Press/Pluto Press Australia title Convicts of the Eleanor has won one of the Australian Premier's History Awards.

The awards were set up in 1997 to honour distinguished achievement in history by Australians. They are the only set of history prizes offered by an Australian government (state or federal). The primary focus is the promotion of excellence in the interpretation of history and the assessment criteria are the quality of research and scholarship and the work's contribution to a new understanding of history.

Convicts of the Eleanor has won the State Records - John and Patricia Ward Prize for interpretive works based predominantly on research using original sources. In a lengthy report the judging panel said, in part:

A.G.L. Shaw noted that detailed investigations of convicts' places of origin as well as their destinations in the Colony were essential to a full understanding of convict society. Such studies are still relatively rare ( partly because they require extensive use of original sources), but David Kent and Norma Townsend have given us a fine example. The convicts chosen were the 'machine breakers' of the Eleanor, a group of 132 rural labourers and craftsmen transported in 1831 for their involvement in poverty-induced protests against the spread of labour-displacing machinery throughout the Wessex countryside during 1830.
...With diligence and skill the authors have tracked this unlikely group of convicts through numerous English and Australian archives and library collections.
...In tracing these men through the colonial records in such a comprehensive fashion, the book also sheds light on the day to day workings of the convict system in a way not possible with a more superficial overview ... Based on sound scholarship and exemplary use of original sources, this comprehensive, well-written account amply fulfils the suthors' aim of recovering the full experience of lives divided by exile, and makes a significant contribution to the study of convicts and the convict system in New South Wales