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 Serpe...