(which may be the earliest Aboriginal representation of western animals) is embossed and it’s impossible to resist running one’s fingers over it.But the inside’s even better. The focal point of the book is the conversion of a Wotjabaluk man from what’s now western Victoria at a German Moravian mission in 1860. Nathanael Pepper’s conversion was much celebrated at the time, and has traditionally been seen as the founding moment of the indigenous church. Kenny shows there’s more going on than people have noticed, starting with the baptismal name Nathanael which all the (few) historical sources insist Pepper chose for himself – it wasn’t among the names suggested to him. There’s only one Nathanael in the Bible, and he’s known for only one thing, asking “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46) Kenny makes a suggestive case that Pepper’s aligning himself with “Nathanael’s question” shows his conversion to be a challenge to the culture of the western invaders rather than an acquiescence to it – like Nazareth, Europe hardly seemed like the sort of place from which salvation might come. It is Christianity he accepts, not the culture which brought it to Australia.
Kenny's unafraid to take on academic commonplaces, like that missionaries are the agents of colonialism: during this period, some of the Christian missions were on the side of the angels, working to protect Aboriginal people and their lands. (In Australia the missionaries usually came after the ranchers had come into a territory with their flocks.) Kenny reports his surprise on learning that, in this period, the ideals of equality and anti-racism were being promoted by religious figures persuaded that all human beings were of “One Blood,” not by secular thinkers. And so, one by one, Kenny brings various stereotypes and accepted views down a notch – it’s an exciting read. The work is a fine example of a new kind of global microhistory – attention to how some apparently local event was affected by larger movements, and also in its way made its mark: Pepper’s conversion was reported in various publications in Europe as proof positive that the Australian Aborigines were among God’s chosen, too.
The harder part of the story to tell concerns the culture and religion of the Wotjabaluk. His title records Kenny’s brilliant idea that, to a people for whom animals were of great religious as well as social (and nutritional) importance, European animals will have been a bigger shock than ‘white’ human beings: there are no animals as big as horses or cows in Australia, and none domesticated. Why should not the Wotjabaluk have concluded that one of these animals was this people’s totem?
But if we decide that the physical scale of the cattle, horses, and carts challenged Aboriginal cosmology, the same can’t be said of sheep, who were no larger than wallabies or wombats. Their numbers alone may have done so, but there was a more important reason for the local peoples to see the sheep as symbolic to the settlers—to see the sheep as the settlers’ group “totem.” It was. (176)
I was so enthralled by Kenny’s book that I wrote to him – loved your book, intersects with so many things I’m interested in, pity we can’t meet since I am leaving in a week – and he found time to get together. We met for coffee yesterday at Cicalata, just beyond Readings, and got on like a house on fire! He’s got the closest thing to a religious studies sensibility I’ve found here. Had his book appeared six months sooner I suspect we’d be best mates by now, and I’d know a lot more academicky people here, but look on the bright side: it didn’t come out six months from now. And I have yet another reason to come back to Melbourne!
