The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World, by Robert Kenny

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

by Robert Kenny;

Scribe, 2007, $39.95.

This book is a study of the early days of white grazing occupation in the Wimmera district of north-western Victoria, especially using the experience of Nathanael Pepper, one of the early Aboriginal converts to Christianity and a hope for the emergence of a “native church”.

In the mid-1840s, the pioneer squatter Horatio Ellerman had shot the mother of another future convert dead. The limited record suggests it was probably a retaliatory raid on the Aborigines for taking sheep, with angry, boisterous squatters firing off guns, intending to frighten. Ellerman, presumably contrite, later adopted the lad, found religion himself and eventually gave up the fleece for the cloth to become a Presbyterian minister in the district.

Principal agents of change were the Moravian Brethren, a German mission and conversion-minded Lutheran offshoot, whose pastors established the Ebenezer mission at Antwerp, between present-day Dimboola and Jeparit, in 1858. The lad Pepper (taking this baptismal name from another local squatter) became their first convert and remained a lifelong Christian, despite shaky moments. Mission experience elsewhere had previously been discouraging, leading the churches to wonder whether the Aborigines could be converted.

In time several of the local Wotjobaluk people joined Pepper, though never as many as the brothers and their backers in Melbourne and Saxony hoped for. The mission was, in principle, on Wotjobaluk rather than church land and is part of the modern land rights claim. The missionaries introduced the Wotjobaluk to indoor living, literacy, education, land cultivation and Western burial of the dead, as well as religion and providing a refuge.

The available records are substantial, coming from various church and public archives and newspapers in Melbourne and the Moravian archives in Saxony. Pepper’s grandson Phillip Pepper also wrote on it with the historian Tess de Araugo in the 1980s.

Inevitably, however, the information is sketchy and the author fills it out with speculation, more general historical and religious material and comparable experiences in other parts of Australia and elsewhere.

Grazing occupation began about fifteen years before the mission. The picture of the early frontier here seems about the average for Australia. There was a little early violence—well remembered—and some resentment against and awed mystification about the newcomers and their woolly flocks (the book’s title has a double meaning). But there was also intelligent integration, with Aborigines taking to station and bush work and education as well as to Christianity.

The Aborigines divided over whether to co-operate with the mission, particularly over the Christian view of marriage, compared to Aboriginal polygamy and child betrothal. It is noteworthy that the women were more interested than the men. Kenny says that, allowing for the obvious differences, the underlying gap between Aboriginal religion and 1860s Christianity was not as huge as might be assumed.

Problems for the mission included the decline in the Aboriginal population, through a high death rate at the same time as a low birth rate and partial assimilation, including mating with Europeans. As with others who have studied the period, Kenny sees the main causes of population decline as tuberculosis and venereal disease, though some of the contemporary identification of disease is suspect.

Depopulation and partial integration of the Aborigines led to the mission closing in 1904, when the local white population had soared, with closer settlement for cropping and the high birth rate of the time.

A generation earlier, Pepper and a German Ebenezer leader had moved to the Presbyterian mission at Ramahyuck on the Gippsland lakes, where Pepper eventually had a large family before he died at thirty-six in 1877. Although he was effectively a minister, he was never ordained. Kenny sees this as creeping prejudice against Aborigines owing to the excitement of the later nineteenth century as to whether some races were “inferior”—compared to the “one blood” belief prevailing when Ebenezer opened.

The typical nineteenth-century missionary approach was to be impatient and give up when the Aborigines proved to be like most other people and in no rush to convert or even be terribly interested. But the various churches eventually became good at the job and a lot of more or less happy convergence resulted, until the reaction against missions in the 1970s.

Kenny in this book is defensive, almost embarrassed, at being so politically incorrect as to write sympathetically about the missions and not make more of violence and victimisation. He says that, though a Catholic apostate, he has long been interested in the role of faith in the history of ideas and in social movements. He sees Christianity as a means for people like Pepper to retain, rather than lose, an Aboriginal sense of identity in a world turned upside down.

He joins the chorus against the protectorate system, without much to support his remarks, and is unacceptably astray in blaming the smallpox devastation of earlier periods on white settlement. I wonder about his assumption that smallpox would have affected Aboriginal views of the whites decades later. He bases most of these comments on indigenous experience with smallpox in the Americas and the Pacific islands or on Noel Butlin’s Our Original Aggression. Butlin’s book, while a useful pioneering exercise in revised population estimates, has been criticised as sensationally anti-white.

There has been abundant writing before and since showing that the Sydney settlement was the least likely source of the horrific smallpox epidemics of the 1780s and 1820s, each of which has been estimated to have killed half the contemporary indigenous population. Judy Campbell’s Silent Invaders (2002) makes a strongly supported case, yet to be answered, that the epidemics came to the north coast with fishermen from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. It was not just an era of blacks and whites.

While this book is a good small-scale contributor to better knowledge, there are still yawning gaps in writing about—and thus adequate collective understanding of—the early days of Aborigines under white settlement. In particular, first-class histories are sorely needed of Aboriginal health and mortality in the colonial era; and of the protection system. In the meantime, much defective or plain mischievous writing thrives.