The Lamb enters the Dreaming
Cover of The Lamb Enters the Dreaming Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World.
Nathanael Pepper, a studio portrait titled ‘Australian Christian’, reprinted in the book, from the Moravian Archives in Herrnhut, Germany.
Dr Kenny, left, receives his award from PM Prize Advisory Committee member, La Trobe Emeritus Scholar, Dr John Hirst.
The prizes keep rolling in for Robert Kenny who explores what happens when the cosmologies and symbolic worlds of Europe and Aboriginal Australia meet for the first time in northern Victoria.
The La Trobe University scholar in July was awarded the 2008 Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History for his book that deals with the conversion to Christianity of the first tribal Aborigine in Victoria. (Dr Kenny was co-winner with Professor Tom Griffiths from the ANU.)
His book, titled The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World, was described by the judges as ‘truly original, surprising and profound’.
Dr Kenny – who lost his house and all his possessions in Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires – received a prize of $50,000 and a gold medallion at a ceremony in Canberra. He competed with sixty-two other nominations for the award which demonstrates ‘the exceptional strength of Australian historical research and the extent to which Australian history continues to inspire many of our talented writers, researchers and producers.’
Dr Kenny says Nathanael Pepper was a member of the Wotjobaluk tribe which inhabited the Wimmera when Moravian missionaries arrived from Germany. It took him seven years to reconstruct the tale and his version of the young Aboriginal’s conversion.
He pieced together the story from quoted conversations in diaries, letters by Pepper and documents in the headquarters of the church in Germany. ‘It was a very odd thing,’ he says, ‘to be in a baroque German village covered in snow while reading about the Wimmera.’
He says the book ‘represents a meeting of European and Aboriginal cosmologies and symbolic worlds. Part of my argument is that the Moravians were evangelical Christians and they believed just as much in an enchanted spirit-filled world as the Wotjobaluk people.’
Dr Kenny suggests that when Pepper and his people saw the Europeans arrive with their sheep, they perceived the animals as part of the spirit world.
‘They regarded the sheep in a totemic way, as a European totem. And they were right. The Moravians’ emblem was the Lamb of God, and passages in the Bible relating to the Good Shepherd impressed Pepper.’
The judges described the work as a ‘scholarly yet accessible book, elegantly written and powerfully argued. Meticulous in his use of sources, he also goes beyond that and shows how historical imagination is not the enemy of accuracy.’
Dr Kenny says the reception of the book, culminating with the Prime Minister’s Prize, vindicates his approach as an important means by which ‘to touch again our troubling past’.
‘When an historian takes chances to understand the past and how that past still lives within us, there is always the fear of being unheard, or even lampooned.’
Last year the book won in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and gained the Hancock Prize from the Australian Historical Association. As a manuscript it was awarded the Peter Blazey Fellowship from the University of Melbourne.
Dr Kenny holds a PhD from La Trobe University and is an ARC Research Fellow in the School of European Historical Studies. The book is published by Scribe Publications.