Dimensions
155 x 234 x 29mm
In 1860, a Wotjubaluk Aboriginal youth converted to Christianity and took the name Nathanael Pepper. But even as Christian missionaries were making their first impact upon Aboriginal culture, early pastoralists were driving thousands of sheep and cattle into the Wimmera region -- an onslaught that devastated the traditional world of Pepper's people. The sudden presence of animals as alien as if from Mars ruptured the indigenous cosmology in which the totemic power of animals was paramount.
By following the short and tragic lives of Pepper and those close to him, 'The Lamb Enters the Dreaming' tells the story of Aboriginal attempts to accommodate within the Dreaming the 'people of the sheep', with their great flocks and their ancient totem of animal sacrifice, the Lamb of God. It shows that Aboriginal response was often the most symbolically powerful element of European culture -- Christianity.
Beautifully written and highly original, 'The Lamb Enters the Dreaming' is a major reappraisal of the collision of the symbolic and moral universe of the Aborigine and the European and how it influenced Aboriginal and European relations in the first decades of contact in southern Australia.
