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

Reviewed by Nick Mattiske

In the grand sweep of history, much detail can be missed. Robert Kenny, in this gentle and nuanced discussion of one Victorian Aboriginal man’s conversion to Christianity in the 1860s, says he is struck by how much individuals mattered in Nathanael Pepper’s story. We see how, time and again, Pepper’s story does not conform to received, sweeping views of the colonisation of Australia and the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples.

Pepper, a member of the Wotjobaluk tribe of the Wimmera, is drawn to the German Moravian mission at Ebenezer, in the scrubby land north of Horsham just opened up to European pastoralists.

As his people struggle with the invasion of non-indigenous humans and animals, he becomes a Christian, becoming an evangelist and a source of joy for the missionaries who have had little prior success with Aboriginal people. He is seen as a new source of hope for his people. Kenny’s view that history is not simplistic informs his reading of events in Pepper’s life—when he is tempted to view events through 20th-century prejudices, he looks again, finding surprising subtleties. As such, this book is exemplary and fascinating scholarship.

“We shape myths out of the fog of the past,” writes Kenny. While we view history through the lens of our own supposed enlightenment, Kenny suggests it is moral arrogance to see ourselves as enlightened, especially when we base that arrogance on the 19th century’s scientific revolutions. The picture is not as simple as 19th-century science trumping superstitious religion.

In one of many examples of his questioning historical fallacies, Kenny shows that enlightened Darwinists often fell into racism while those we would call “conservatives” were pushing radical causes, such as the abolition of slavery and rights of Indigenous peoples. Our present perceptions of left and right are “flimsy.” It was evangelicals who celebrated all of humankind as “one blood,” being based on biblical narratives of the Flood and Babel. The new developments in science that challenged those narratives were misused—just as the Bible would be misused in similar manner—to suggest aboriginal Australians were hardly human and therefore not worth saving.

Kenny delves into these issues, because they are necessary background to his questioning of current Western perceptions of Christianity as part of the European “colonising project.”

“By blaming its past aggressions and ignorance on Christianity . . . the secular West simultaneously announces itself guilty and absolved.” This follows the view that Christianity was forced upon Indigenous people whose traditional religion has remained pure. Kenny considers this a form of apartheid.

Kenny suggests Western theories of culture have a type of racism linking culture to race. Pepper’s story presents evidence that he chose Jesus, and separated Christianity and colonialism. And it confirms that culture is a “complex of changes” and can be translatable.

It is to Kenny’s credit that he seamlessly links this perceptive yet sensible view of culture to the missionaries’ belief that humanity was of “one blood”—a belief that led them to share the gospel. And while there were difficulties in translating the Scriptures, this ultimately led to the successful translation of Christian faith into an Aboriginal context. Kenny finds it important that Pepper took the baptismal name Nathanael, and asks, “Did any good come to Pepper out of Nazareth?”

Yes is his answer: “When [the missionaries] came to the Wimmera in 1858, they did not rupture the Wotjobaluk world—that happened during the decade-or-so before. What they brought was a means to understand the suffering that this rupture had caused.”

The mission, set up on Aboriginal land, became a way to negotiate a future set by the arrival of the Europeans and their animals. Though it would prove unable to stem the tide, the mission offered hope against the mainstream view that Aboriginal people would be swept aside by the march of “progress.”

Kenny pokes and prods at many historical stereotypes, showing their fallacies. Further examples include the sexual attitudes of evangelicals, which can be traced to 20th-century fiction rather than 19th-century fact, and the idea that Aborigines were tricked into handing over land at Melbourne’s founding (a perpetuation of the naive savage view). Most importantly, Kenny persuasively argues the Victorian frontier was not simply a “culture of genocide”

in which the missionaries participated but a “culture of violence” against which the missionaries fought to save their Aboriginal brothers and sisters.

This story of one Aboriginal man is a testament to how the Christian message transcends cultural boundaries and Robert Kenny’s telling is a masterly example of history in microcosm.

Extract from Signs of the Times, July 2008 .

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