Railway historian Dr Andre Brett wins 2021 Max Crawford Medal

And yet the railway was there in so much that he researched from 1850s-First World War-era Australia and New Zealand - carving up the environment, shaping economies and the politics of the day. All roads, it seemed, led to railways.

"The more I researched ... the more I just kept bumping back into railways again," said Dr Brett, better known in the Twittersphere as DrDreHistorian.

"It's not just that trains are a bit of fun and have a vibrant enthusiast community; they actually explain so much ... and they needed to be taken seriously by scholars."

"Those railways defined our floodplains and altered the hydrology of our environment. Communities which had never experienced flooding were suddenly inundated after the railways were constructed."

Dr Brett's work on railways is among a wide variety of his research that has earned him the 2021 Max Crawford Medal, considered Australia's most prestigious award for "achievement and promise" in early-career humanities scholars.

The award has marked the 34-year-old academic as one to watch, and comes despite him being legally blind as a result of albinism.

"It's not too bad indoors; it's outdoors that I'm really stuffed and that's one reason why academic research really was a path that I ended up heading down," Dr Brett said. "A historian can be in a nice, well-lit repository, going through materials, and modern technology is amazing because if I can't read a document I can just take a photograph of it and blow it up on my computer. I don't know if I could have done much of the work I do 30-40 years ago, when much of the technology didn't exist."

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The UOW honorary fellow has researched at every major state and national repository in Australasia and has been published through major university presses and high-ranked journals, but says he cherishes the work he's done as a public historian producing content for the masses, including a stint as researcher on SBS's slow-TV documentary, The Ghan: Australia's Greatest Train Journey.

"Often when you're doing academic publications not a lot of people get to read them - they're hidden behind university paywalls and can be hard to access. But getting to work on a documentary like that, broadcast across the country - it's honestly an unreal feeling knowing your research is reaching people."

Dr Brett's latest research traces the carving up of territories in colonial Australasia - both the successful movements that created Victoria and Queensland, and failed bids that could have made stand-alone colonies out of modern-day New England, the Riverina, North Queensland and Otago.

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