Dreamtime

Dreamtime is the foundation of Aboriginal religion and culture. It dates back some 65,000 years. It is the story of events that have happened, how the universe came into being, how human beings were created and how their Creator intended the humans to function within the world as they knew it. The Dreamtime is a commonly used term for describing important features of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and existence.

Aboriginals believe that the Dreamtime was way back, at the very beginning. The land and the people were created by the spirits. They made the rivers, streams, water holes, the land, hills, rocks, plants and animals. It is believed that the spirits gave people their hunting tools and each tribe its land, their totems and their Dreaming. Aboriginal people understand the Dreamtime as a beginning that never ends. They hold the belief that the Dreamtime is a period or a continuum of past, present and future.

The Aboriginals believe that the entire world was made by their Ancestors way back in the very beginning of time, the Dreamtime. The Ancestors made everything. The Aboriginals learned about their beginnings through their Dreamtime creation folklores that tell of the momentous actions of the creators. The myths are the foundation of Aboriginal society and provide certainty about existence.

The Ancestors made particular sites to show the Aboriginal people which places were to be sacred. The Aboriginals perform ritual ceremonies and customary songs near the sacred sites to please the ancestral spirits and to keep themselves alive. Distinct tribes had different philosophies and beliefs about the ancestors who made the world. Some believed that the ancestors were animal-spirits. The Australian aboriginals believe that the land they occupy was once not in existence like it is today. It was free from any form or life, vacuous – empty. They unquestionably believe that this is the way things once were because the ancestors had said so and they will never doubt their word. It was, during what has become known as the Dreamtime, that the land, mountains, hills, rivers, plants, lifeforms both animal and human and the sky above were formed by the actions of mysterious and supernatural spirits.

During the Dreamtime the creators made men, women and animals, declared the laws of the land and how people were to behave to one another, the customs of food supply and distribution, the rituals of initiation, the laws of marriage and the death ceremonies which must be performed so that the spirit of the dead travels peacefully to his or her spirit-place. Others in parts of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory believed the Ancestors were huge snakes. In other places the spirits who created the world were believed to be the Wandjina. Some dreamings tell of the mythical creators disappearing. They believe that the creators disappeared from the sight of mere mortals, but continue to live in secret places. Some live in the tribe’s territory in rock crevices, trees and water holes. Others went up into the sky above as heavenly bodies. Others changed into (or perhaps became) natural forces such as wind, rain, thunder and lightning.

That is why it is believed that many of the creators continue to live on the land or in the sky above watching over them. These supernatural enigmatic creators were often referred to as men and women who had the ability to change shape into animals and other creatures such as the Rainbow Serpent. There are also stories of heroes and heroines and Father and Mother figures.

The Dreamtime may be difficult to understand fully but it is part of who the Aboriginal people are, the very essence and reason for being here. It is all encompassing and will forever be at the centre of their existence as a people. Dreamtime or Dreaming for the aboriginal people represents the time when the Ancestral Spirits progressed over the land and created life and important physical geographic formations and sites. Aboriginal philosophy is known as the Dreaming and is based on the interrelation of all people and all things. The past of the Spirit Ancestors which live on in the legends are handed down through stories, art, ceremony and songs. The Dreaming explains the origin of the universe and workings of nature and humanity. It shapes and structures life through the regulation and understanding of family life, the relations between the sexes and obligations to people, land and spirits.

Aboriginal people disclose their Dreaming stories to pass on imperative knowledge, cultural values, traditions and law to future generations. Their Dreamings are passed on through various customs such as ceremonial body painting, storytelling song and dance. The Australian indigenous people have over thousands of years maintained a link with the Dreamtime and dreaming stories of the past to the present. Due to their customs and beliefs, they have sustained a rich cultural heritage. It conveys better the timeless concept of moving from ‘dream’ to reality which in itself is an act of creation and the basis of many aboriginal creation myths. Aboriginal spirituality does not think about the ‘Dreaming’ as a time past, in fact not as a time at all. Time refers to past, present and future but the ‘Dreaming’ is none of these. Because the ancestors did not disappear at the end of the Dreaming, but remained and still remain in these sacred sites, the Dreaming is never-ending, linking the past to the present, the people and the land. Dreamings allow aboriginal people to understand their place in traditional society and nature and connects their spiritual world of the past with the present and the future. None of the hundreds of aboriginal languages have a word for time. When we try to explain in English their philosophy, we had better not use the term ‘Dreamtime’ but use the word ‘Dreaming’ instead. It conveys better the timeless concept of moving from ‘dream’ to reality which in itself is an act of creation. The ‘Dreaming’ “is there with them, it is not a long way off. The Dreaming is the environment that the Aboriginals live in. It is important to note that the Dreaming always comprises the significance of place.

Songlines trace the journeys of ancestral spirits as they created the land, animals and lore. Integral to Aboriginal spirituality, songlines are deeply tied to the Australian landscape and provide important knowledge, cultural values and wisdom to Indigenous people. 'They can be about creation stories, and they can be contemporary stories as well,' says Adams. 'It's quite complex, but those land markers are very, very important, hence the importance of land claims and acknowledgement of traditional owners.' Using songlines, indigenous Australians have acquired an encyclopedic memory of the thousands of species of plants and animals across Australia. 'They wouldn't have survived if they didn't have all this practical knowledge and handed down generation after generation,' says Monash University researcher Lynne Kelly.

Kelly has collaborated with Aboriginals to gain an insight into their oral tradition and memory, and its deep connections to the landscape. 'Songlines are known as navigational tracks, in that the elders or the trained Indigenous people will sing the landscape and therefore be able to move from location to location through it, and teach each other,' says Kelly. 'At every location, each sacred site within that sung track, they perform rituals. Those rituals are repeated songs, and those songs encode the information.' According to Kelly, research has shown that up to 70 per cent of Indigenous songs is knowledge about animals, plants and seasonality—'the sort of information you need to survive and know that environment backwards'. 'They are singing the information in songs that tell stories because song, story, mythology, is so much more memorable than a list of facts. 'By describing a plant and giving it characteristics and behaviour, you're actually making the information much more memorable.'

In 2014, the Nobel Prize for Medicine established how closely memory and spatial awareness are intertwined in the hippocampus. The finding confirmed the pairing of place and memory seen in many of the world's indigenous cultures. 'Songlines link positions in landscape. Each location in the landscape acts as a memory aid to a particular part of the information system, so the knowledge is literally grounded in the landscape,' says Kelly. The technique is reinforced by the use of portable devices, such as message sticks. 'Using these devices, and the landscape, song and dance and story and mythology— that combination is an extraordinarily powerful memory technique that reinforces itself,' Kelly says. Kelly says evidence has emerged of a cultural knowledge of landscape changes dating back 7,000 years. 'The mechanisms are so robust that things like formation of islands around the coast of Australia and sea level rises are accurately recorded in [the] oral tradition,' she says.

Australia is home to an extensive network of traditional songlines, some of which traverse hundreds of kilometres through lands of many different Indigenous peoples. Songlines offer rich explanations of land formations, plant remedies and animal behaviour. Before Indigenous hunters head out, they will perform rituals and repeated acts to improve the success of their hunt. 'If they are hunting kangaroos, for example, dancers will demonstrate the way the ears move if they have detected movement. That sort of information is hugely helpful to get close enough in order to hunt a kangaroo.' Though deeply tied to the landscape, Kelly has discovered how memory codes like songlines can be used in everyday life. Like many oral cultures, Kelly used the environment around her to create her own songline, through it, she's been able to memorise all 242 countries by population order. 'I've got Brazil linked to a window in my study. I always know Brazil is number five,' says Kelly. 'I was blessed with a terrible memory, and now I can memorise all this stuff, but it's so much fun and so vivid… I'll just create stories.'

Given the significance of the Australian landscape to Indigenous people's cultural heritage, Karen Adams says it is important the land is cared for and respected. 'A lot of the ceremonies and rituals and continuing stories reinforce belonging and social connection and strength of identity and who you are, your confidence and how you travel in the world, and that has an enormous impact on mental health,' she says. Lynne Kelly agrees, and says the 'invigorated' Australian landscape is an encyclopedia 'embedded' with Aboriginal history, culture and knowledge. 'I had no concept of the depth of knowledge, the absolutely critical nature of the songs and stories, and in particular the landscape, and the bonds between people.' 'The thought now of what the colonisers did to Indigenous people is just horrendous.'

Adams says Australia's long Indigenous history is something all Australians should 'take a great deal of pride in'. 'Because of Aboriginal culture, we have these continuing stories to our country that other countries actually don't have. And I think that that's something to be really proud of.'