The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World, by Robert Kenny. (Melbourne: Scribe Publishers, 2007), website.
If you only read one work of Australian history in 2007, make it this one. The Lamb Enters the Dreaming is a powerful attempt to get to the heart of questions central to Australian identity, through the story of one extraordinary man.
In early 1860, at a tiny German mission in the Wimmera region of Victoria, a young Wotjobaluk man named Nathanael Pepper converted to Christianity. After a vision of Jesus sweating blood in Gethsemane, Pepper declared his experience to the missionaries and began evangelising his people in their own language.
In Melbourne, prominent citizens crammed into an overflowing hall to hear reports of these events. Accounts of Pepper’s conversion were reported in the local and national press. A pamphlet on Pepper circulated through evangelical groups world-wide. In literate Victorian circles, Nathanael Pepper was probably a household name.
A hundred and fifty years later, Robert Kenny became intrigued by this story. Why, he wondered, did Pepper’s conversion matter so much to the missionaries and their supporters? And what did it mean to Nathanael and his people? In answering these questions, Kenny has written a profoundly important book about the nature of culture and identity, about Christianity and its place in Australian history, and about science and faith.
Many historians have examined interactions between Aborigines, settlers and missionaries during the colonial years. The Lamb Enters the Dreaming stands out for its lyrical prose, original approach and passionate engagement with broader philosophical questions. It is difficult to do justice to such a complex book in a brief review and I will only mention a few central themes.
In the first place, Kenny takes religion seriously. He wants to interpret, in something like their own terms, both Pepper and the Moravian missionaries who evangelised him. The Moravians were the crack troops of the Protestant missionary world, setting a high standard for self-sacrifice and perseverance. In Victoria, they found themselves in the thick of a larger battle being waged between evangelical humanitarianism and settler violence. The Melbourne Argus newspaper published editorials celebrating the ‘inevitable’ decline of the Aborigines and condemning missionaries as troublemakers. Pepper’s experience provided the Moravians with powerful evidence for their claim that Aborigines shared ‘one blood’ with all humanity.
More radical is Kenny’s attempt to understand Pepper’s experience. Here he enters into informed speculation. Given what we know