The Dream and the Dreaming

An unlikely alliance between the German missionaries and the Aboriginal People of central Australia

For over thirty thousand years, the Desert People of Central Australia had walked their lands, their life governed by ancient and immutable laws laid down by the totemic ancestors and their Dreamings. In 1877 the German Lutherans arrived. Their dream of a 'mission field' in the very heart of the Australian continent put them at the epicentre of a massive clash of cultures. As the pastoral frontier, engulfed the Arrarnta homelands and threatened their existence, the Mission lease of 1,000 square miles was to become not so much a beachhead of Christianity but a place of sanctuary.