Robert is an award-winning historian whose work on Australian colonial Indigenous-Settler relations and on the relationship between religion and science have been influential on both Australian and international scholarship. He sees himself primarily as a social historian of ideas, by which he means he is interested in how ideas operate in society no matter from where those ideas originate, that is, he does not believe that socially potent ideas are necessarily the product of “great thinkers”. His many awards include the 2008 Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History for his groundbreaking The Lamb Enters the Dreaming. Robert received his PhD in History from La Trobe University in 2004. He has worked as a Research Fellow at La Trobe University, University of Melbourne, Mitchell Library, and at Deakin University. He was also a Visiting Fellow at Australian National University in 2011. He has researched extensively in archives throughout Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Germany. He has also published several volumes of poetry and literary prose. Robert lives in central Victoria with a dog and several goats on a ridge that forms the watershed between the Coliban and Campaspe Rivers.