The Dreaming

The Dreaming, also sometimes referred to as The Dreamtime, is a concept that is both unique to Australia and essential, crucial and pivotal to traditional Aboriginal culture. There are lots of different way whitefellas have tried to explain it or understand it, and they all skirt around the outside of it and touch on various aspects of it, while, most likely, never truly come to grips with its essence.

   The imperfect understanding of it that I have arrived at, as a whitefella from the Northern Territory, is that it appears to be a human being’s state of being in and with the world. On one level there is a series, a cycle, a complex whole of songs and stories that relate how the world came into existence, at a point in time that is not fixed or identified, through the actions, undertakings and decisions of a group of beings that are both considered exterior to human beings as well as ancestral and interior to them. A very straightforward example is that of the Rainbow Serpent rising up from the ground, traveling through the sky on a journey of original beginning, and bringing into being various features of the land, of the country around humanity by touching or otherwise interacting with the physical world, somehow causing the land to exist while both being external to it and part of it. In that way the Rainbow Serpent landed on an unfixed point in space, where it laid eggs, and those eggs then became a rocky outcrop, in this case known as The Devil’s Marbles, north of Tennant Creek. By its actions the Rainbow Serpent caused this outcrop to become that outcrop, and henceforth to be fixed in space and time, whereas previously it wasn’t. It is unclear what was there beforehand, but through the actions of the Rainbow Serpent, this rocky outcrop has become a fixed point in physical reality. At the same time, very importantly, it assumes an identity in the metaphysical world of humans and the land, and is assigned a place in an ordered universe, with a history, an origin, a relationship to everything else (through the Rainbow Serpent), and a justification and reason for existing. Put very simplistically, the Dreaming relates where everything in the world came from, all the animals, rivers, trees, mountains and people, and, crucially, why. It lends explanation and purpose to existence, and provides humanity with a place in the wide order of things, alongside of everything else that moves and doesn’t move.

   On a second level the stories and songs that make up the Dreaming have a very down-to-earth and immediately practical function. To know the stories a traditional Aboriginal Human needs to become initiated, they need to do what is called ‘make lore’ and ‘make law’. In a very broadly generalising way this usually involves some sort of ceremony, during which a person coming of age is introduced to and exposed to the particular set of stories and songs relevant to them, their family, their gender and theoretical relationship to the world. Special places are associated with these ceremonies, and ceremonial objects of varying nature may be involved. There are different stories that apply to men and women, as there are different rules for behaviour as a human being in society that apply to men and women and regulate their interactions. Once a person has ‘made lore’ and ‘made law’ they have full access to the stories that inform their lives. And these stories, in a factual matter, provide crucial information about the country around them, in terms of survival: where to find food and water, which places to avoid, which places are hospitable. As a fully initiated person on traditional country it is possible to follow the tracks of what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Dreaming Ancestors’, such as the Rainbow Serpent, and travel in their footsteps, while all along finding enough resources and sustenance to stay alive and live well on the country. Such information in encoded in the story of the journey of the Dreaming Ancestor: The Rainbow Serpent rested on that hill over there, and by pissing created a billabong of fresh water, where the wallabies gather in the season when the country starts to burn. A person who knows these stories can follow them like a map of the country contained in their mind, and can go anywhere they want, within the confines of what is permissible: there will be some places that will be off-limits, for reasons explained in the Dreaming stories. There are instances where ‘no go’ places have been identified, by scientific whitefellas, as areas where naturally occurring concentrations of uranium lay close to the surface and where radiation was having a detrimental effect on the general health of the environment, its plants and animals.

   But there is one crucial third level to the concept of the Dreaming, and this is the thing that is unique to Aboriginal culture, and is the notion that continues to escape outside people who try to gain an understanding of it.

   This world that is brought into being by the travels of the Dreaming Ancestral Creatures like the Rainbow Serpent was not born in the time of long ago, lost in the hazy mists of time. While it did indeed happen long ago, it also continues to happen today in the present, all day every day. That is, every minute of every day the Rainbow Serpent is creating the world and everything that’s in it, in a long, continuous and self-repeating cycle of coming-into-existence. So the world was, at one and the same time, created a long, long time ago, and right here right now, as an ongoing thing. This world continues to come into being continuously, the whole time, without beginning and without end. But, and this is the single, most important, most essential, most crucial and most unique, baffling and mind-boggling aspect of this worldview, ONLY if the people continue to tell the stories, sing the songs and perform the ceremonies, if they continue to ‘make lore’and ‘make law’. By performing the ceremonies, telling the stories and singing the songs they, in an absolute and literal sense, ‘sing the world into existence’. It is the essential and sacred duty of the humans to do so, and is the single most important thing to do for a traditional human. because, and this is the hard and fast bottom line, if they don’t the world ceases to exist. The country needs to be sung alive by the people, and the people need to carry it in their songs and stories, in their minds and in their hands, to keep it alive. Without that the country will die.

   This is the single most glaring and irreconcilable difference between a traditional Aboriginal worldview and a western worldview, where the physical world, the environment, is looked at as a resource to exploit, use and abuse as people see fit, for the sole purpose of providing them with sustenance, and, preferably, as much decadent and useless wealth as possible. Whether or not that world and that environment are destroyed in a wholesale fashion as a result of that is widely considered irrelevant in mainstream society, obvious exceptions notwithstanding.

   In the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys the heartbeat of the Aboriginal worldview pulses strongly and vitally through the land. The further you go down south and east and west the weaker that pulse becomes, until it is buried so deeply under a load of concrete and glass thick and heavy enough to shift the planet out of orbit that it is dead and gone, and all that’s left is a moonscape wasteland of dead country. The city railway yards of Melbourne, the endlessly outstretching suburbs of Sydney, the water-sucking cotton farms of Queensland, the salt-covered wheatbelt of Western Australia, the barren and overgrazed rock hard soil outside of the Goyder Line in South Australia. All flogged like a dead horse by whitefellas trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.

   One of the most prominent and readily visible Dreaming Creatures in the Northern Territory is Namarrgon. He lives in the sky, and has lightening rods around his body and axes on his shoulders and knees. At the start of the Build Up season, leading up to the Wet season, he makes lightening and falls to the ground, splitting trees with the axes on his body. He can be seen around everywhere, not just in the sky when the thunder roars and the lightening strikes crackle, arcing left right and centre through the purple clouds at night, but on rock faces everywhere out bush, in caves and overhangs where the old people painted him on the walls, in hues of red and yellow ochre. I have met him high up on the escarpment, rockclimbing in remote area, and, hunting in the billabongs of the lowlands, I have seen him down on the floodplain, there on the old walls in front of me, in colours that could be thousands of years old.

   Namarrgon bears a certain resemblance with Taranis, the old Celtic god associated with thunder, lightening and storms. To this day the word ‘taran’ means ‘thunder’in modern Welsh. Small statuettes of Taranis have been found in archeological excavations, dating from Roman and pre-Roman times. We know it’s him because he’s got his name carved on it. These images show a bloke with a scruffy beard and a puzzled look on his face, holding a wheel in his hand. Thanks to intensive academic cross-disciplinarian investigation encompassing the fields of anthropology, comparative religion and linguistics it has been possible to ascertain that Taranis was, indeed, widely venerated in the ancient Celtic world as The God Of Flat Tyres, with, on the weekends and public holidays, a lucrative sideline as God Of Roadside Assistance. It pays to diversify. No point in limiting yourself to just one niche.

   I looked up at the night sky above me. There, high and mighty among the stars, was Namarrgon, throwing his bushels of lightening around, illuminating the silhouettes of the mountains across the bay. I paused, knee-deep in the warm seawater. Being in the water when lightning strikes could well be classified as being decidedly detrimental to your health. We looked around a bit. Namarrgon didn’t appear to show any inclination to hit the water anytime soon. I looked at the Snake Catcher and shrugged. He looked back and shrugged.

   ‘Let’s just go’, we said.

   We’d find out soon enough if we were going to get fried by Namarrgon. Only one way to find out. So we laid on our boards and struck out into the balmy night, floating out onto the salt water by the usual light of the stars, the moon, and, today, the lightening. The water was welcoming and warm, perfect temperature, heated by the long summer days, and I sighed and smiled in contentment. It just didn’t get better than that. We struck out into the waves, hands pulling through the black translucent water, reflecting the moonlight, and marvelled at the sparks of bioluminescence whirling through the water at our touch, tiny particles of plankton living in the top layer of subtropical water flashing and shining green and purple and blue and gold.

   We paddled around the corner to our favourite spot, pulled up and started catching waves, one after the other. Time passed and others joined us, one by one. Here was our mate Chief Switchfoot, famous for being ambipodous. Everyone’s heard about being ambidextrous: being equally at ease using both hands for tasks. Ambipodous is the same for feet. He rides his board both ways, natural and goofy-footed, and will often switch from one to the other in mid-ride. Also joining us was The Shredder, renowned for ripping the shit out of any wave more than ten centimetres high.

   The night black had faded into dawn as he pulled up, the last shreds of twilight vanishing with the golden-coloured clouds of the rising sun. We shook our heads at such tardiness. Whatever was he thinking. Turning up in daylight, what an unheard-of and outlandish notion. We looked at him. He seemed a bit pre-occupied. He paddled over and sat up on his board.

   ‘I had this dream last night’, he said, a stricken expression on his face. We turned and looked at him, curious.

   ‘It was shithouse, it was a terrible dream’, he continued.

   We raised eyebrows quizzically.

   ‘I dreamed I was out here, on the water, surfing, sort of around this time of day ...’

   We nodded. That sort of thing was bound to turn up in a dream sooner or later. After all, this is where we spend every waking moment. Stands to reason it’s going to make an appearance.

   Behind The Shredder two people turned up and sat up on their boards. We glanced at them. They appeared to be Unknown Soldiers, i.e. from out of town. Being as it was summertime this was, unfortunately, no surprise. We get flooded to breaking point with tourists.

   ‘... and there was a shark ...’, The Shredder went on.

   Behind him the two new arrivals stiffened and sat bolt upright on their boards. I could see their ears twitch and prick up.

   ‘... and the shark attacked someone, and ripped them to pieces ...’

   The two figures behind him had now assumed the breathless rigidity only found in those secretively eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, and in those who have been dead for three days.

   ‘... and I couldn’t see who it was’, The Shredder continued, and gestured expansively around him, indicating all of us, the gathered audience, ‘... but it was one of us. It was terrible.’

   From behind him came a sound as if someone had flushed a toilet, a sort of sucking noise followed by an expanding “pop”, such as you might get if the fabric of time and space had momentarily contracted and readjusted to allow for the disappearance of two human beings at the speed of light. We looked around. The two Unknown Soldiers, blow-ins from out of town, were paddling for the far shore as if their life depended on it, leaving a trail of broken surfboards and drowning children in their wake.

   Clearly they had followed the story on the sly and had chosen to run for their lives.

   We looked at The Shredder. The Shredder looked back at us.

   We looked at the crowd of holiday-making blow-in surfers bobbing aimlessly on the water behind and around us, crowding our break, making it impossible for us to get a wave and causing regular outbreaks of aggression and surf rage, not always involving The Snake Catcher.

   The Shredder looked at us. A slow evil grin started spreading over his face.

   He turned around, paddled over to three Unknown Soldiers sitting in the line-up, and pulled up next to them.

   ‘Goodday fellas, how yous going?’ he said, beaming manically at them.

   ‘Yeah, good, yourself?’, they replied, a bit taken aback and nonplussed.

   ‘Not bad, not bad’, answered The Shredder, sidling up closer to them. ‘Hey listen, I gotta tell yous something, I had this dream last night ...’

   We watched as their faces turned green and they spun around and vanished at a speed Namarrgon himself would have been proud of. The Shredder continued on to the next group of people in the line-up, grinning madly.

   And so he went around, clearing out the water with the story of his dream, and, like the Old People Of The Land used to do before us, he sang into existence the world as it should be, and all things would be well, and all manner of things would be well.

   Maybe the Dreaming is still alive around here after all.