Recently, Erik Jensen, founding editor of the Saturday Paper and convener of the Horne Prize for essays, had been so struck by what he considered to be an intolerable amount of ‘chauvinism and condescending accounts’ contained within the essays themselves, that he set about changing the guidelines for submission.

Without consulting any of the four judges or the paper’s proprietor, Mr Jensen decided that henceforward, the prize would no longer accept essays by non- Indigenous writers about the experience of the ‘First Nations Australians’ and it certainly would not accept essays about the LGBTQI community from people who ‘have not had...