A major reappraisal of the nature of Aboriginal and European relations in the first decades of contact in southern Australia, this book explores the conversion of Nathanael Pepper, a Wotjubaluk Aboriginal youth, to Christianity in 1860. Through the ritual slaughter of settlers' stock, the choice of Pepper's baptismal name, the settlers' punitive and murderous raids, and the Moravian Church's celebration of Pepper's conversion, the story of Nathanael Pepper is the collision of the symbolic and moral universes of the Aborigine and the European. | 
