The Prize for a First Book of History: Winner and Shortlist 2008

The judges of this prize were astonished by the quality and range of both the research and writing. While it was not difficult to find an outstanding shortlist, there were many books that impressed.

Judges: Tony Birch (Convenor), Helen MacDonald and Alistair Thomson

Winner

The winner of the 2008 Prize for a First Book of History is:

• The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World
  by Robert Kenny (Scribe)

Shortlist

	Van Diemen’s Land James Boyce (Black Inc) Van Diemen’s Land: A History by James Boyce produces what readers enjoy from reading history. The book is based on impeccable and arduous research, and utilises archival material to present a thorough analysis of a colonial past in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). It is particularly concerned with the legacy of the period of convict transportation, and the at-times violent relationships between settler societies and the Indigenous nations of Tasmania. The book has clear resonances in the present, and brings a sophisticated argument to the too-often crude discussion that dominates the ‘history wars’ in Australia.
	The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World - WINNER Robert Kenny (Scribe) The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World explores the conversion to Christianity in 1860 by Nathanael Pepper, a Wotjobaluk man from the Wimmera. Kenny illuminates the ‘wrench in the sky’ as Wotjobaluk and European society and spirituality collide on the colonial frontier. This is a bold and challenging history, immensely erudite yet sparkling with lyrical prose and sharp insight. Kenny recovers - with absolute conviction and profound implications - the moral and symbolic worlds of two societies, and Nathanael Pepper’s extraordinary efforts to reconcile the lamb of Christ and Aboriginal dreaming.
	Pistols! Treason! Murder! Jonathan Walker (Melbourne University Publishing) This deeply satisfying book takes readers into the world of seventeenth-century Venetian master spy, Gerolamo Vano. In the process, Jonathan Walker reveals how he creatively made history, out of a newly discovered and fragmentary archive in the form of Vano’s surveillance reports. Closely reading these documents, Walker constructs a spell-binding tale of people and place, in a book that reflects on the practice of history-making and poses large questions about the compact between historians and their readers, and what counts as a trustworthy version of a past.