Two New Zealand books have made it on to the six-strong shortlist for the AU$25,000 Tasmania Pacific Bicentenary History Prize: Philip Temple’s A Sort of Conscience: The Wakefields, and Anne Salmond’s The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas.

Temple’s biography was the Montana Biography of the Year in 2003 and has also won both the Ernest Scott History Prize and the ARANZ Ian Wards Prize. Cannibal Dog won the 2004 Montana Medal for Non-fiction.

The shortlist was announced by the Tasmanian Minister for Tourism, Parks and Heritage, the wonderfully named Ken Bacon. Ken is quoted as saying:

I understand it was not easy for the judges to narrow this excellent field down to six and it will be even more difficult to decide a winner in November.

That winner will be announced in Hobart on Sunday 21 November.

The other four books on the shortlist are:

• Mussolini by Richard Bosworth

• Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenth-Century Australia and New Zealand by Mimi Colligan

• Broken Song: T.G.H. Strethlow and Aboriginal Possession by Barry Hill

• Secrets and Spies: The Harbin Files by Mara Moustafine