The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World

A unique, seminal work about co-opted beliefs when European missionaries encountered Australian Aboriginals.

The Lamb Enters the Dreaming traces the life of Nathanael Pepper of the Wotjobaluk people, who was born as the first pastoralists were driving cattle and sheep into Victoria's Wimmera region. In their wake came Christian missionaries, who were just as hostile to the settlers' violence as they were to the traditional beliefs of Aboriginal people. Nevertheless, Pepper converted to Christianity in 1860. The extraordinary story of Pepper's conversion, and his subsequent attempts to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable, reveals much about the deeper symbolic and moral forces at work in this collision of cultures.

Robert Kenny challenges many orthodoxies in this profound reconsideration of how indigenous people and Europeans thought about each other. He traces Aboriginal attempts to accommodate the 'people of the sheep' and their pastoralist totem, Jesus, while arguing that it was European animals more than the settlers themselves that ruptured the Dreaming. On the European side, Kenny argues, increasingly powerful scientific and philosophical challenges undermined evangelical Christianity's belief that all humanity was of 'One Blood'. And behind it all lurked the spectre of slavery and the question of the moral order of imperialism.

Brilliantly original in conception, and written with a rare lucidity and lightness of touch, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming is a detailed and sensitive exploration of a life, a meditation on the matter of culture and conversion, and a major reappraisal of the relations between Aboriginal and European societies in the first decades of contact in southern Australia.

'A startling new history ... an immense contribution to reconciliation consciousness in our twenty-first-century Australia.'
-Rhys Isaac, Pulitzer Prize winning historian

'This is a probing, tantalising, imaginative form of history that deals in possibilities, probabilities, plausibilities ... There is much that is admirable in The Lamb Enters the Dreaming. Histories such as Kenny's remind us that cultural difference matters, the frontier was often a violent place, and that racism is part of our history. But only part - for he also reveals the potential for understanding, belief, compassion, friendship and sharing that transcends racial difference.'
-Frank Bongiorno, Sydney Morning Herald

'Robert Kenny enters with tender respect the cruelly ruptured world of the Australians as represented by the Wotjobaluk people ... The Lamb Enters the Dreaming has a depth and breadth of reflection that goes well beyond our usual topical histories ... It really is a mystery tour through such matters as translation, language, mission strategy, conversion, totemism, tradition, culture, sorcery, scripture, Darwinianism and evangelicalism. All this is done with a light touch, always with a sense of ongoing puzzlement and of closure still to come ... Take your time. Enjoy the ride.'
-Greg Dening, The Age