NSW HSC Studies of Religion

Aboriginal spirituality is not a single religion with one founder, one text and one creed. It is a set of related worldviews held by many separate peoples, each with its own language, Country and stories, and what they share is an understanding often called the Dreaming. The English word is an approximation. Different peoples have their own terms for it, such as Tjukurrpa in the Western Desert, and none of them mean "a dream" in the ordinary sense.

What the Dreaming means

The Dreaming is the Aboriginal understanding of how the world came to be as it is, how it continues to be, and how people must live in it. It describes a time when Ancestral Beings, sometimes in human form, sometimes as animals, plants or forces of nature, travelled across a land that had no features and shaped it by their actions. Where they walked, rested, fought, gave birth or died they left rivers, hills, rock formations, waterholes and the species that live there. They also set down the Law: the rules for ceremony, kinship, marriage, the use of resources and the care of Country.

The older popular term "Dreamtime" suggests a distant past that has finished, and that is the main reason many Aboriginal people and scholars prefer "the Dreaming". The ancestral events are held to be still present in the land, in the people and in ceremony, and a ceremony does not just recall them but takes part in them. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, writing in the 1950s and 1960s, described the Dreaming in terms of something that was "everywhen" rather than long ago, which is a way of saying that it has no past tense.

Origins of the universe

Stories of origin differ from one region to the next, so a student should be able to name a few and say where they belong rather than speak as if all Aboriginal peoples tell the same one.

• The Rainbow Serpent is known in many parts of the continent under many names, including Wagyl among the Noongar of south-western Western Australia. It is typically linked to water, to the carving of rivers and gorges, to fertility and to the power to give or withhold life.
• Baiame is the creator figure of many peoples in south-eastern Australia, including the Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri. He is the maker of the land and its Law, and he is associated with the sky.
• The Wandjina of the Kimberley are ancestral cloud and rain beings, painted in rock shelters by the Ngarinyin, Worrorra and Wunambal peoples and repainted so that the rains keep coming.
• The Seven Sisters story follows a group of women pursued across much of central Australia by a man; it is a story of a journey, and the same journey is tied to the star cluster known in English as the Pleiades.

In these accounts the world is not made from nothing by a God who then stands apart from it. The land, the ancestors and the living are one continuing creation, and the Ancestral Beings remain in the country they made.

Sacred sites

A sacred site is a place that carries the presence or the actions of an Ancestral Being. It may be a rock, a waterhole, a tree, a cave, a stretch of river or a whole hill. Uluru is a well-known example: for the Anangu, the traditional owners, its surface and caves record the actions of ancestors such as the Mala (rufous hare-wallaby) people and the python woman Kuniya, and different parts of the rock are tied to different stories and different groups.

Not every site is open to every person. Some places are restricted to men or to women, some to initiated people, and some may not be visited at all, because going there wrongly can harm the person and the Country. Sites are linked together by the paths the ancestors took, often called Dreaming tracks or songlines, and the track is held in a sequence of song that names the places in order, so that a person who knows the song can find their way across great distances.

The importance of sites explains why their destruction is treated as a spiritual wound and not simply as a loss of heritage. In May 2020, Rio Tinto destroyed rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia that held evidence of human occupation reaching back some 46,000 years, to expand an iron ore mine, and the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples were left with a loss that no payment could repair. The incident led to a parliamentary inquiry and to the company's leaders leaving their positions.

Stories of the Dreaming

The Dreaming is carried in story, song, dance, painting and ceremony, not in a written text. Knowledge is passed from older people to younger ones, usually in stages, and a person's right to know and to tell a story depends on their age, gender, kinship and initiation. A story may exist at several levels: a version for children, a public version told to outsiders, and deeper versions held by those with responsibility for them. Telling a story belongs to the person or group who holds it, so a story from one Country is not freely told by people from another.

These stories do several jobs at once. They explain the origin of a feature of the land, they teach the moral and practical Law (what may be eaten, who may marry whom, how to treat a stranger, how to behave at a waterhole), and they establish who holds responsibility for which place. A story about a greedy ancestor who is turned into a rock is also a lesson about sharing.

Symbolism and art

Art is a way of recording and enacting the Dreaming. The main forms include:

• rock art, some of it thousands of years old, found in places such as Kakadu and the Kimberley, which records ancestors, animals and the people's relationship to them;
• bark painting in Arnhem Land, often in fine cross-hatching, which shows ancestral beings and clan designs;
• body painting for ceremony, in which the designs of the Ancestral Beings are put on the performers so that they become the ancestors for the length of the ritual;
• ground and sand designs, and carved and painted objects used in ceremony;
• acrylic dot painting from the Western Desert, which began at Papunya in 1971 and is now sold and exhibited around the world.

Symbols are used consistently within a region: concentric circles commonly stand for a waterhole, a camp or a site, a U-shape for a seated person, and lines for paths and tracks. A single painting may be read at several levels, and in the desert style the covering of dots helps to hide the most sacred meanings from those who should not read them. Because the designs belong to particular families and Countries, the right to paint a story is a form of inherited authority, and copying a design without permission is a breach of that authority as well as of ownership.

Diversity of the Dreaming

Before 1788 there were more than 250 distinct languages across the continent, with many dialects, and the Dreaming varies as much as the Countries do. A people of the coast and sea will have stories about the sea and its animals, and a desert people will hold stories about water, travel and the scarcity of food. Totems, ceremonial calendars, the roles of men and women, and the forms of initiation are not the same everywhere. Torres Strait Islander peoples have their own distinct cultures and spiritual traditions, which are related to but not the same as those of Aboriginal peoples on the mainland.

What is common is the shape: a creation by Ancestral Beings, a Law that follows from it, a deep connection to a particular place, and the belief that people carry a continuing responsibility to look after that place and each other.

The Dreaming, the land and identity

For Aboriginal peoples the land is not a resource that a person owns. Country is a living entity, with a spirit, that holds people, and people hold responsibility for it. A person belongs to Country, and this is expressed in the way many people introduce themselves, by naming their language group, Country and kin before they say anything else.

Identity comes from this connection in several ways. A person may be linked to the ancestor of a place through their conception, birth or totem, so that they are partly made of that ancestor's spirit. They inherit duties to look after sites, to hold ceremony and to speak for Country. The animals, plants and features of the land are relatives and not simply property. For this reason the loss of land is also a loss of the means to carry out the Dreaming: when people are cut off from the places that hold the stories, the stories cannot be fully lived, and part of what makes a person who they are is damaged. The history of dispossession and the claims for land rights that followed are therefore matters of spirituality as much as of law and economy.