WORKING WITH EVIDENCE

Stories of the Australian Dreamtime

The Aboriginal, or native, peoples of Australia have lived on their island/continent for tens of thousands of years, and until the arrival of Europeans in the late eighteenth century, they practiced a gathering and hunting way of life. These peoples have persisted into the twenty-first century as a small minority in modern Australia, and a dwindling few of them still practice their ancient culture. Over an enormously long period of time, these peoples developed an elaborate body of myths, legends, and stories that gave expression to an Aboriginal cosmology, or understanding of the world. Known collectively as the Dreamtime, these stories served to anchor the landscape and its human and animal inhabitants to distant events and mythical ancestors.

In this cosmology, long before humans appeared, ancestral beings emerged from the earth and traversed the land. Their places of emergence became waterholes or caves; their journeys gave rise to rivers and gorges; trees grew where their digging sticks were stuck in the ground; plants arose from their footsteps. In Aboriginal thinking, the numerous rock paintings that dot the landscape were not the product of human hands but the continuing presence, image, or shadow of these ancestral beings.

A contemporary Aboriginal artist, Semon Deeb, explains:

Around the beginning the Ancestral Beings rose from the folds of the earth and stretching up to the scorching sun they called, “I am!” As each Ancestor sang out their name, “I am Snake,” “I am Honey Ant,” they created the most sacred of their songs. Slowly they began to move across the barren land naming all things and thus bringing them into being. Their words forming verses as the Ancestors walked about, they sang mountains, rivers and deserts into existence. Wherever they went, their songs remained, creating a web of Songlines over the Country. As they travelled the Ancestors hunted, ate, made love, sang and danced leaving a trail of Dreaming along the songlines. Finally at the end of their journey the Ancestral Beings sang “back into” the earth where they can be seen as land formations, sleeping.20

Transmitted orally and changing over time, numerous Dreamtime stories have been collected and set down in writing over the past two centuries. The tales presented here illustrate these Aboriginal efforts to give meaning and shape to their experience.