The Lamb Enters the Dreaming

I have taken a long time over reading Robert Kenny's award-winning The Lamb Enters the Dreaming, partly because the complexity of the subject matter required careful concentration, and partly because I wanted to savour it and let it sink in.

Kenny examines the story of Nathanael Pepper, one of the first Aboriginal converts to Christianity in the Western District of Victoria; but as well as thinking about the point of view of the missionaries and their joy at recruiting a local Australian (who seemed largely impervious to the message of Jesus), Kenny also looks at what might have been gained for Pepper himself, and how he might have found sense and meaning in integrating the Christian story with his own traditional culture and also the catastrophic impact of invasion.

One really interesting point that Kenny makes is that it was probably the animals that the invaders brought with them, rather than the humans, that were the most shocking intrusion into the Aboriginal cosmology. First Nations people were used to large two-legged beasts -- emus, kangaroos -- and suddenly these big, alien four-legged animals appeared from nowhere: cows, sheep, and most alarmingly, horses. How were they to make sense of these shocking new life-forms? Men on horseback must have seemed like some bizarre hybrid species. As Kenny says, it must have seemed as if the Martians had landed. And were the white humans there to serve the animals, or the other way round?

The Lamb Enters the Dreaming is deeply thought-provoking and fascinating stuff. Not light reading, but very rewarding.