A story of Aboriginal self-determination has won the Australian Christian Book of the Year Award for 2012.

Gumbuli of Ngukurr: Aboriginal Elder in Arnhem Land by Murray Seiffert is a “timely contribution to the story of Aboriginal engagement with western culture and Christianity” according to the judging panel. “The story of the man Michael Gumbali Wurramara and the place Ngukurr…challenges and corrects numerous popular assumptions about the relationships between government missions and Aborigines. At times this makes for profoundly uncomfortable and provocative reading.”

Sieffert gave an example of this in his acceptance speech at the awards ceremony held in the stunningly modern St Alfred’s Church, Blackburn in Melbourne.

“If you read Quadrant this week you would have read that the communists agitated for the governments to take the missions,” Sieffert said. “But this is not what happened. CMS (the Church Missionary Society) said that if these people are to be real Australian citizens they will need to control the missions.”

Sieffert described how the mission was criticised by officialdom. They said “CMS did the wrong thing. You prepared the Aborigines for independence. You should have been preparing them for the government to take control of the missions.”

Gumbuli tells the story of the Macassan fisherman traders from Sulawesi, Indonesia, who made annual visits to the north coast of Australia prior to European settlement: “there were two types of Balanda [Europeans]. One had a gun, the other had a book. The one with the book could be trusted, they said. Also there was a story…of a man who lived in the sky, who had a wooden cross. The Macassans did not know who he was but they said he was good and that he was coming this way and that the Yolngu should keep their eye out for him.”

The idea of writing a book about Gumbuli began with a conversation between Sieffert, the Bible Society’s John Harris (the author of One Blood) and Joy Sandefur in the Northern Territory diocesan (local church) offices, about the fact that the story of Christianity in the Northern Territory had not been told from the point of view of the most important people—the Aborigines.

“In the early 1970s, CMS had run out of chaplains in Arnhem Land,” Sieffert says. “The old ladies said ‘we don’t need another white chaplain, we have the boy gumbuli here’. Gumbuli was the second Aboriginal man ordained in the Anglican church of Australia. The other person ordained earlier died young so for most of his life Gumbuli had no role model. He was 100 per cent aboriginal and 100 per cent Christian. Definitely.”

Second prize for the Christian Book of the Year went to A Short History of Christianity by historian Geoffrey Blainey.

Newspaper columnist Claire van Ryn won the Young Christian Writer Award (awarded for unpublished material by someone under 30) for her Faith like a mushroom manuscript, “which serves as a companion on the path to Christian maturity” according to the award citation.

Van Ryn, who writes a weekly column for the Launceston Examiner told the award audience that “God is my inspiration…every week he gives me new things to write”. She is a contributor to the Bible Society Live light in 25 words Bible reading campaign. Her series of “Read the Bible with” studies is online here.

The award for under 18s, the Australian Christian Teen Writer Award was won by Daniel Li  for a piece called A Short Walk described as “at times raw and shocking but ultimately hopeful”.

When Daniel was called to the stage he said that when he received a certificate of participation in last year’s competition “instead of standing here I was sitting down there. I went home and stayed up to 2am writing this piece”.

He called for Christians to form a united front of determination and belief to respond to writers such as Sam Harris and the other new atheists.

This comment took up the theme of a keynote speech by the ABC’s Scott Stephens who condemned the ‘Dan Brown-isation’ of intellectual life.

“Once Dawkins expelled the necessity of the sacred, for many people the great challenge is to make room for God in a materialist frame…

“But more damage to religion comes by calling religious belief “belief”. It is reduced to a lifestyle choice with the same status as an embarrassing hobby or peccadillo.

“The translation of religion into mere spirituality panders to the idea that religious belief is translated as mere belief.

“We live in time marked by the privatisation of belief. The problem is that we have lost the capacity to talk with each other about beliefs … we have lost the capacity to explain or the ability to explain. We have been left only with the capacity to tolerate … without the capacity to talk about (our beliefs).

“Moral values are expelled from the public space. The law and the market cannot say ‘that’s good’ or ‘that’s better’… they can only say ‘back off you are getting to close to each other’.

Publishing had been “Dan Brown-ised”, and media had become a slave to sensationalism.

Stephens called on the “Christian Imagination” to give an alternative to society’s orthodox of “our bodies are our own”.

“The whole point of the Christian Imagination is to give our society a choice to see that our future is to be mutually enslaved one to another.

The task of the Christian Imagination today is to demonstrate “you are not your own, you are brought with a price, therefore glorify God with your bodies.”

The lively awards ceremony included dramatic readings from the prizewinning works, with music by “The ANSA” a group of talented teenagers. “We combine what classical string quartet does, and take it into the 21st century.”

A special performer was Melbourne poet Stevie Willis, who through the mask of her cerebral palsy to the audience read:

“ You know my road is different,

Covered with rocks

Large, high, rough, rocks.

To climb,

Strength, faith, determination required,

Help from fellow travellers

I don’t deny your road.

I love mine.

Because I fell my need,

To lean on God,

Thus experience.

Know him.

To keep growing,

His fruits must grow in me,

Made more like him…..

(From “Rocks” by Stevie willis)

Stevie works with CBM Australia (the former Christian Blind Mission) as a writer performer build awareness of people with disability in poverty.