Published last year, Landscapes of Our Hearts: Reconciling People and Environment is part memoir, part environmental history, and was described by award judges as "a bold, inventive approach to the writing of history".

Canberra-based author Matthew Colloff said he had wanted to write about the relationship between Australian people and the landscape from the moment he first stepped off a plane in 1994.

The British migrant from Kent, in southeast England, caught the scene of eucalyptus oil - the same one everyone smells when they arrive in Sydney - and hoped to one day write about Australia.

In naming the book in the NSW Community and Regional History category, judges said "Landscapes of Our Hearts digs deep to ask big, important questions-and resist simplistic answers".

"The writing is sophisticated and accomplished; it moves confidently across the domains of science and culture," the citation read.

"Matthew Colloff synthesises research and ideas from multiple fields to create a highly readable work of history."

Colloff is an honorary senior lecturer at the Australian National University's Fenner School of Environment and Society, and said the $15,000 award was as much for his readers as for his collaborators.

"It's also an award for everyone who was involved in the work, and also readers who feel the same way I do, and and many of us do, about that triangular relationship between the land, indigenous and non Indigenous people," he said.

"That to me is the thing at the heart of this book."

He said he still felt the same way when he stepped off a plane.

"But next time I get off a plane and I smell that smell, it's the smell of home," he said.