The Lamb Enters the Dreaming

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.

The extraordinary story of Pepper’s conversion to Christianity in 1860, 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.