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Nathanael Pepper and the Antwerp Mission in Victoria's Wimmera."The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World' (Scribe Publications 2007) is an interesting and challenging 384-page book by Robert Kenny , history scholar at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The author explores the life and eventual conversion to Christianity of Nathanael Pepper, of the Wotjobaluk Aboriginal people, who was born at about the same time as the first pastoralists were driving their sheep and cattle on horse-back into Victoria's Wimmera region. In the pastoralists' wake came Moravian Christian missionaries, who were just as hostile to the settlers' violence as they were to the traditional beliefs of Aboriginal people. Hence, the Wimmera Aborigines faced a life torn three ways between (1) their traditional lore as Wotjobaluk Aboriginal people; (2) their encounter with the European settlers such as Horatio Ellerman, with their guns, their herds of sheep and cattle and their imposing horses and (3) the European clothing and language, as well as the Christian "good news" about the "Sacrificial Lamb of God", which was brought by the Moravian missionaries to the Aborigines at the Ebenezer Mission at Antwerp in Victoria's Wimmera Region (p.23). Nevertheless, Nathanael Pepper converted to Christianity in 1860 and this conversion reveals much about the deeper symbolic and moral forces at work in this inevitable collision of indigenous Aboriginal and of western, European society, culture, customs and beliefs. The author reconsiders this collision of cultures and how the various parties seek to accommodate to each other's customs and attitudes. In relation to the introduced sheep for example, the pastoralists slaughtered their sheep for local sale and for economic profit, while the missionaries presented their emblem of a slaughtered sheep as representing their Jesus Christ as the cosmic, sacrificial Lamb of God. No wonder the Europeans appeared to be people of the sheep. In the meantime, the local Aborigines continued to conduct their corroborees (p.15), to perform "shedding of blood" rituals (p.16) and to respect their totemic animals and birds (p.176). This arrival into the Wimmera of the European squatters and shepherds with their sheep and cattle has led the author to suggest that these European sheep were interpreted by Aborigines as "the settlers' group totem". Hence cattle, sheep and horses entered not only the countryside but also entered the Aborigines' Dreaming (p.176-178). The slaughter of sheep by some Aborigines may thus have been a ritualistic act rather than a killing for food. The squatter's revenge is not overlooked in the description of the murder of William Wimmera's mother by local squatter Horatio Ellerman (p.117-119). The author's visit to Herrnhut, which means "the Lord's Watch", in Saxony and to the Unitats-Archiv brought back to life the Ebenezer Mission, through its stored reports and photos. These included the hut constructed by Nathanael Pepper and a photo of him (p.9-10). We are informed that in 1858, Charles La Trobe gave the missionaries Spieseke and Hagenauer a copy of the small book about William Wimmera, whose mother had been shot and who had been taken to London to train as a missionary, only to die from a lung disease in the cold weather soon after arriving. This was read to Pepper and others by Hagenauer (p.118-120). When Pepper confirmed his conversion, Reverend Goethe at the Melbourne Auxiliary of the London Missionary Society in February 1860 presented this "momentous events in the Wimmera" (p.14). Sheep once again emerge when the Moravians introduce their insignia, which was the Lamb of God, a sheep holding a cross (p.178). Although Nathanael Pepper is the focus of this book, the author also explores wider background issues such as the Dreaming and some contemporary European scientific and philosophical issues relating to racial debates and challenging the beliefs of evangelical Christianity. We also congratulate Robert on recently being awarded the history prize in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. |