Today we digress from the Bungle Bungle Range to talk about a fascinating aspect of Indigenous Australian culture, The Dreaming.

Just a quick note before we start that for those destination historians of Aboriginal descent, that names of deceased persons may be mentioned in this episode.

Understanding the Dreaming

The term ‘The Dreamtime’, or ‘The Dreaming’, is used as an all encompassing term to describe Aboriginal spiritual beliefs. But The Dreaming can be a really difficult thing wrap your head around if you’re non-Indigenous, like me.

As a non-Indigenous Australian I have a very basic and simple understanding of Aboriginal spirituality and customs, but I’m going to try my best here to explain what The Dreamtime is, through my understanding of the research I’ve been able to do, and the connection Indigenous Australians have to the spiritual part of this great land we call Australia.

From what I can gather, ‘The Dreamtime’ is a blanket term that has been used by non-Indigenous Australians that describes the stories, beliefs and spirituality of the many many many Aboriginal groups that can be found in Australia. And trust me, there are a lot of them. Check out the map showing all the different language groups across the country.

Basically The Dreamtime is the foundation of everything, absolutely everything for Indigenous Australians. It’s the stories about how everything came to be, how the universe was created, how humans were created, animals, plants, rivers, streams, hills, rocks… everything. But not only that, it also dictates everything that goes along with living and the rules people need to live by. So the Code of Law is included in the Dreamtime, as well as customs, rituals and ceremonies. And then the Dreamtime also includes how people are connected to their country, their relationships with those around them, as well as their connection to the spirits that made the world and keep it running.

The Dreamtime is how Indigenous Australians understand their world, and the stories they tell pass that understanding and respect for country down through the generations.

The core of the Dreamtime stories is that at the very beginning of time, ancestors rose up out of the darkness to create everything. And each tribe, clan or group had their own stories of creation, their own rules of law, their own ancestral spirit, and their own name for their stories and beliefs. Some believed the ancestors to be animal spirits, others, particularly those in the Northern Territory, tell of ancestors as huge snakes. Each cultural group had their own name for what we call ‘The Dreaming’, and it would have been a different word for each language.

Indigenous Australians see what we call ‘The Dreaming’ as a kind of beginning that never ended. They see the Dreamtime as a period that includes the past, present and future. It has no fixed point in time, it is all around us.

Here’s Jeannie Herbet Nungarrayi of the Warlpiri people of the Tanami Desert up in the Northern Territory to give us a bit of an understanding about The Dreamtime.

To get an insight into us it is necessary to understand something about our major religious belief, the Jukurrpa.

This is the Warlpiri people’s word for what we know as ‘The Dreaming’. Back to Jeannie.

The Jukurrpa is an all embracing concept that provides rules for living, a moral code, as well as rules for interacting with the natural environment. The philosophy behind it is holistic – the Jukurrpa provides for a total, integrated way of life. It is important to understand that, for Warlpiri and other Aboriginal people living in remote Aboriginal settlements. The Dreaming isn’t something that has been consigned to the past but is a lived daily reality. We, the Warlpiri people believe in the Jukurrpa to this day.

Hopefully that gives you an idea as to the all-encompassing connection The Dreaming provide Indigenous Australians to the land, the country and their way of life. It’s just unfortunate that the English term, ‘The Dreamtime’ or ‘The Dreaming’, is such a poor translation that it doesn’t really capture anything of what Jeannie knows The Dreaming to mean for her.

Issues with understanding the Dreaming

The idea behind the Dreaming is so different to what we know as religion or spirituality in the modern world, and if you’re not within the Indigenous culture of Australia, it can be incredibly difficult to get your head around it and understand it without comparing it to a religion that we are familiar with, such as Christianity or Catholicism.

It’s just a fact that there isn’t a word in English that can capture what ‘The Dreaming’ means for Indigenous Australians. The English language really does fall short in the translation of many languages and cultures, and so too it does for Indigenous Australia. Although, I feel it’s important to recognise that ‘The Dreaming’ or ‘The Dreamtime’ has never really been a direct translation of any Aboriginal word, and I really don’t think there’s any equivalent word in any language that could encapsulate the complex spiritual concepts held by Indigenous Australians.

It seems that over the decades, white Australians have come to use the term to mean the Creation stories from Aboriginal culture, rather than the belief system as a whole. This is what I was taught at any rate when I was in primary school in the late 90s. And it is still used as a term to describe some of the Aboriginal art that we can see in museums and art galleries.

But it’s also a term that as non-Indigenous Australians we need to respect and recognise that it has a much stronger significance to others.

Here’s Maggie Fletcher’s take on the term ‘The Dreamtime’, which she wrote about in her Master’s thesis:

…an entire epistemology has been reduced to a single English word.

Rather than a single word to describe everything, each language group had a myriad of words for their spirituality and beliefs.

Here’s Mudrooroo, an Aboriginal writer, explaining another aspect of The Dreaming:

The Dreaming or The Dreamtime indicates a psychic state in which or during which contact is made with the ancestral spirits, or the Law, or that special period of the beginning.

Having the word ‘time’ in ‘the Dreamtime’ can confuse a fair few. It doesn’t denote a particular time in the past, there’s actually nothing to do with time at all. Here’s Mudrooroo again to clear it up for us:

The ‘Dreamtime’ is there with them, it is not a long way away. The Dreamtime is the environment that the Aboriginal lived in, and it still exists today, all around us.

And some have strong opinions about the word ‘Dreamtime’ and its English connotations of time. Let’s hear what Karl Telfer, a senior culture-bearer of the Kaurna people of Adelaide reckons:

We are the oldest and the strongest people, we’re here all of the time, we’re constant through the Dreaming which is happening now, there’s no such thing as the Dreamtime.

So perhaps ditching the word ‘Dreamtime’ and using ‘Dreaming’ would be better instead. It certainly gives us a better idea of a ‘timeless concept’, something more akin to what one experiences when in a dream. Well, it’s better than ‘Dreamtime’, but ‘Dreaming’ has its own English connotations and they aren’t that much better at describing what The Dreaming is to Indigenous Australians, because it certainly is not a product of our dreams.

It appears as if the term ‘The Dreamtime’ was first used as a word to describe Aboriginal Creation mythology in the 1890s, by a white bloke who had been living in Alice Springs and had a pretty good understanding of local Indigenous languages. And it wasn’t too long after that The Dreamtime was popularised by anthropologist, Baldwin Spencer. From here the word seems to have been used as a more general term to describe all Aboriginal religious beliefs and has continued to be used into the 21st century.

The Dreaming may be pretty difficult for non-Indigenous people to understand, but it seems to be at the very essence of who Indigenous Australians are and their reason for being.

The Dreaming is the past, present and future, as opposed to being ‘timeless’, it is everywhere at all times. Australian anthropologist W.E.H Stanner had the right idea in a 1956 essay when he came up with the term ‘everywhen’.

One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen … [The Dreaming] has … an unchallengeable sacred authority … We [non-Indigenous Australians] shall not understand The Dreaming fully except as a complex of meanings.

Stanner really hits the nail on the head there. The only way non-Indigenous Australians can understand The Dreaming, is as a collection of understandings of the world, how it works, how it came to be, and how it continues to be.

Here’s Indigenous Australian Midnight Davies telling us how all-encompassing The Dreaming can be:

… The Dreaming is a complete guide to life and living – it is an encyclopaedia of the world. It is not just stories – it is art, songs, dance; it is written into the land itself. Through the Dreaming we are taught knowledge of plants and animals … the movement of the stars foretells the changing of the weather, the birth of animals, the time for ceremony and gatherings. The Dreaming completely surrounds us, we are shown proof of it everyday … It is the living world itself. The Dreaming belongs to every Aboriginal person – it isn’t the sacred property of a few priests/rabbis/imams, it is the property of everyone … every bit of knowledge is destined to be known to an individual sometime within their lifetime. The Dreaming was not designed to be just practised one day a week, or to only be turned to only in times of need – it is designed to be lived in every moment … It serves as a guide to day-to-day life, a guide to the spiritual side of life.

Dreamtime stories

The Dreamtime stories explain how everything came to be and was created. The stories tell us

Why a rock is in a certain place or a particular shape, why the echidna has spikes, why the moon returns full every month, how kangaroos got their tails.

If you can think of it, it has a story. Indigenous Australians learn about the creation stories through folklores that tell of the actions of the creators. It is through these stories, that one will learn how the land, hills, rivers, plants, mountains, animals, humans and the sky were formed and created through the actions of supernatural spirits.

Because there are so incredibly many Dreamtime stories, and there’s no way I can do any of them justice, I’m not even going to try to retell any here, but there are plenty of resources online, if you wish to hear some for yourself. Check out these links (1, 2, 3) if you’re interested in some Indigenous Australian creation stories.

And the stories aren’t just told through word of mouth either, they’re also told through dance ceremonies and Aboriginal art. When we see and talk about Aboriginal art, it’s actually become quite a connection point between Indigenous culture and western culture within Australia, we can often see references to Dreamtime stories or beliefs. This once again just demonstrates that the Dreaming to Indigenous Australians really is in every part of their existence.

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