The Bettison & James Award

The Bettison & James Award recognises individuals whose lifelong work has benefited the Australian community.

Commencing in 2015, the Award was established to recognise Australians who have contributed a lifelong body of work of high achievement and community benefit.

The Award is administered by the Adelaide Film Festival on behalf of the Jim Bettison and Helen James Foundation. Presented by the Foundation on an annual basis, it provides the beneficiary with the possibility to extend, record or disseminate aspects of their life’s work.

The award recipient’s area of expertise may be in the arts and humanities, social justice, the environment, the sciences or any other area where benefit to the community results from their work.

The Foundation’s Selection Committee reviews all submissions before making its final decision. $50,000 is awarded to single or multiple recipients, based on eligibility and strength of application.

Bettison & James 2025 Awardee Richard Leplastrier

Forum, Screening and Conversation

AFF will host a rare public forum and conversation with Richard Leplastrier, who is now well into his eighties. Including a screening of the documentary Richard Leplastrier: Framing the View (2020) directed by Anna Cater. An exploration of the life and influences of seminal Australian architect Richard Leplastrier over the course of 15 years.

Revered by architects around the world, Richard Leplastrier’s search for beauty in his career is interwoven with his own life in a bush camp on the edge of Sydney. Register HERE for a free film screening and forum with Richard Leplastrier and director Anna Cater.

When: Sat 18 Oct, 12:15pm–3:00pm
Where: Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas
Register for Free below

Richard Leplastrier: Framing the View

Revered by architects around the world, Richard Leplastrier’s search for beauty in his career is interwoven with his own life in a bush camp on the edge of Sydney.

Director:

Anna Cater

Country:

Australia

2025 Bettison & James Award Recipient

Richard Leplastrier AO is one of Australia’s most revered and respected architects. His buildings, like his life, are modest, carefully crafted and deeply responsive to landscape and environment.

Leplastrier has always let his work speak for itself, avoiding the media and focusing instead on making quietly radical and exquisite structures that are rooted in place. His generosity as a teacher and mentor has shaped generations of architects, encouraging a more considered and respectful approach to design.

Leplastrier's early career was shaped by his work with two of the 20th century’s most significant architects, Jørn Utzon and Kenzo Tange. He worked with Utzon from 1964 to 1966 at the Palm Beach boat shed office on a series of unrealised houses designed by Utzon for his family plot at Bayview on Pittwater. This formative experience profoundly influenced his approach to architecture. He later worked with Tange, refining his understanding of how architecture can be rooted in tradition and innovative in its expression at the same time.

Leplastrier’s contribution to Australian architecture is widely recognised. He was awarded the Australian Institute of Architects Gold Medal and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his service to architecture, education, and environmental advocacy. Leplastrier was the third recipient and the only Australian to receive the Spirit of Nature Timber Award (Finland) and was awarded the Dreyer Foundation Award for Sustainability (Denmark). In Australia, his Palm Garden House at Bilgola received the Enduring Architecture Award, and his collaboration on the Aboriginal Studies Faculty at Newcastle University won the Sir Zelman Cowen Award for public architecture.

His work with the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust reflects his deep care for the land and its histories. At a time when development pressures continue to reshape the city, he has stood as a steadfast advocate for the protection and thoughtful stewardship of public lands. He understands that Sydney’s harbour is not just a resource but a living place, a cultural landscape that must be handled with sensitivity and respect. His involvement has helped ensure that these lands remain accessible, protected, and valued for their natural and cultural significance.

And then there is his architecture. It is exquisite and radical in its restraint. His buildings are like tents or yachts - light, ephemeral and highly attuned to their surroundings. They are crafted with great care but employ an economy of means. Nothing is extraneous. His buildings demonstrate that true beauty lies in what is essential, in what is necessary. His work quietly reshapes expectations, recalibrates the occupant’s relationship to their environment, showing that architecture can be both deeply human and profoundly environmental.

The beneficiaries of his life’s work are many: students, architects and communities who experience and live amongst his buildings, as well as the broader public who benefit from his commitment to protecting and enhancing the Australian landscape. His legacy is not just in the buildings he has created but in the values he has passed on - of generosity, restraint, humility, and deep environmental awareness.

Celebrating 10 years, Bettison & James Award

“Community is the bedrock of civilisation and we’re losing it fast. We have to find our way back to community.”

During the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival, the past recipients of the Bettison & James Award gathered to celebrate the 10th anniversary and take part in two enlightening panel discussions.

Taking place at The Mercury cinema, Adelaide’s beloved member-based centre for screen culture, AFF presented the Bettison & James Award Talk – Art and Culture, featuring Jackie Huggins, Greg Mackie, Angela Valamanesh, and Pat Rix moderated by film journalist and critic Stephen A Russell and the Bettison & James Award Talk – Science and Environment, featuring David Vaux, John Long, Tim Jarvis, Uncle Moogy, and Bob Brown moderated by The Guardian journalist Tory Shepherd.

Art and Culture

This year’s Bettison & James Award recipient, visual artist Angela Valamanesh opened up the discussion about the importance of reaching people through her work, “The work most visual artists do is quite solitary...but I don’t want to just make work that sits in boxes..it’s really important to me that people see my work and engage with it.”

The panelists also discussed how the prize money from the award helped them not only extend their work but in many cases give back to the community, create opportunities, or lend a voice to the marginalised.

Long-serving arts and culture advocate in South Australia Greg Mackie OAM, talked about how the award helped fund his efforts in founding the biennial Adelaide Festival of Ideas, “Receiving the award for me came at an incredible time. To be the inaugural recipient was at the time life-affirming and life-changing…it enabled myself and dear colleagues to pick up and rescue the Adelaide Festival.”

Jackie Huggins, AM FAHA, a Bidjara / Birri-Gubba Juru woman from Queensland and writer, discussed how receiving the award during one of the first times she found herself unemployed, aided her and her co-author Ngaire Jarro in writing Jack of Hearts: QX11594 – the story of her father’s experience in World War II. This was an important dream of hers to achieve, due to the treatment she faced as an Aboriginal child in school, “[I] was told by my headmistress that I couldn’t possibly do year 12 because I was Aboriginal…I thought one day I’m going to teach and write our history.”

The theme panelists kept coming back to in their discussion was one of community and the importance of connection for art and wider society.

2022 recipient Pat Rix said, “Community is the bedrock of civilisation and we’re losing it fast. We have to find our way back to community.” While Greg Mackie concluded the discussion with his thoughts on the responsibility of elder leaders in this after a question from the audience, “We have a part to play in reweaving community.”

Science and Environment

The common thread throughout the Science and Environment Talk led by The Guardian journalist Tory Shepherd was a warning of the danger of misinformation, and how we can better connect science with art, much like 2024 recipient Angela Valamanesh does with her body of work, which focuses an “abiding fascination with nature and our connections to all life forms”.

2016 recipient Tim Jarvis AM an environmental scientist, author, public speaker and filmmaker, touched on how this connection can help spread advocacy and information on environmental issues, “If you want to have an audience with people you need a vehicle and art is a vehicle…film is a vehicle. You’ve got to find language and metrics that speak to the person's behaviour you're trying to change.”

Professor David Vaux AO, the 2020 recipient of the award explained how the prize is helping his work in establishing a national office for research integrity, which he believes will advocate for transparency and countability in research science – an integral step in battling misinformation.

The panel also discussed how a First Nations voice in parliament, like the one South Australia established in 2023, is vital to the sustainability of our environment and how we can learn from elders such as 2023 recipient Major (Moogy) Sumner AM – whose work centres around contribution and commitment to cultural education, repatriation and the environment – in practicing this sustainability.

The gathering of the recipients of the Bettison & James Award in celebration of the 10th anniversary in this context speaks to the power the award has in aiding change and highlighting those who continue to make a true difference in our community – a legacy that Jim Bettison and Helen James sought in the establishment of their Foundation.