On the Unsafe Side of the White Divide: New Perspectives on the Dreaming of Australian Aborigines (original) (raw)
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There exists in the vast divide of the Australian territories a uniquely connected population of Aboriginal peoples. Their history spans at least 50,000 years and their over 700 tribes are separated by both distance and language; the expanse in breadth of time and space seems almost insurmountable, the continuity of culture impossible. But the creation of a system wherein the repetition of stories and rituals encoded with the blueprints for survival in the harsh landscape has kept this accumulated knowledge safe in the hands of its cultural custodians. This essay will explore the Dreamtime mythology and performance as a structural expression of the techno-environmental adaptations made by its first inhabitants. It also asserts that traditional performative aspects of Aboriginal culture both ancient and modern have created its main platform for power negotiations between each other and with the outside world. First, I must add that the inspiration for this project was my own experience in Australia. In the latter half of 2002 I spend 6 thrilling months traveling throughout Eastern, Central, and Southern Australia when I wasn't in school at the University of Wollongong studying Aboriginal anthropology and Australian theatre. I admit that at the time my decision to study there was based more on the availability of a program through my school in America and the excitement conjured by the highly romanticized version of "the land down under" extolled by Paul Dundee and the "Crocodile Hunter" than any particular interest in the Aboriginal culture. In reality, Australia is much like America. Learning about Aboriginal history reminded me of where I grew up in upstate New York, where I had been acutely aware of the atrocities inflicted upon our native population before they had been shuffled into the reservations which existed on the periphery of our 2 Jennifer McNiven more rural towns and along the Canadian border. My college dormitories were assigned names such as Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, and Cayuga as empty reminders of a history far removed from our sensibilities. The difference in Australia is the relatively late coming of the Europeans. Founded in 1788, the clash of cultures there began almost three hundred years after our own, and the settlement of the central and western parts of the continent was restricted due to the arid inhospitable environment. The adaptation from central and northern Europe to the Outback was too much for most of the settlers to bear, so they remained on the Eastern coast and vast swathes of the country remained in the hands of its original inhabitants, who had had 50,000 years to adapt to its demands. At this point in time much of the Aboriginal population is in a precarious position. They exist half-heartedly in the modern world in which they were placed several generations ago, while trying to regain a connection to the world of their ancestors and those who remain in the wild unsettled Australian territories. Part of this effort involves the continuation of learned stories, songs, dances, customs, and rituals which encompass their cultural knowledge and spirituality: the Dreamtime. The Dreamtime, which is where the totemic ancestors who created the world exist, has always been connected to the land and the people through ritual. Practically every aspect of Aboriginal life is represented in the stories, which explain through tales of past spirits and people how the land and traditions of their culture were created. Certain elements of these themes are symbolized in art, dance, song, and ritual performed in ceremonies at special occasions in the Aboriginal person's life. Not every Aboriginal person is entrusted with the entire corpus of Dreamtime knowledge; traditional storytellers (usually elders) become custodians of this information and are tasked with revealing certain parts of it to people at different 3 Jennifer McNiven stages in their life. Men and women receive different sacred knowledge based on their role in society; children are privy to fewer stories as a child than they know as an adult; different regions hold the stories specific to their own land and totemic spirits. It is a complex system with many rules and standards to comprehend, and in order to exist in the Aboriginal world you must spend your entire life learning them (McKay 2001: Introduction).
A Journey into the Dreaming: exploring Aboriginal Metaphysics
This little book endeavours to explore the metaphysical nature of the Dreaming, and what it means to the Aborigines of Australia. It comes out of a journey I did with Two Bob Tjungarri backing the 90s. I visited his sacred site of Winbaraku, and together we travelled north in the footsteps of Jarapiri, the Great Snake. On the journey Two Bob revealed his Dreaming stories, and the songs associated with various sites. The book attempts to make the Dreaming Journey into an act of meditation on the part of those who make it.
The Nightmare for Aboriginal People and its Relation to Dreamtime
International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2014
Using his experience of applying "large group" psychology to analyzing and intervening in violent political conflicts in many parts of the world, the author describes his observations from a brief engagement with some Australian Aboriginal people and those who are trying to help them. He concludes that the way in which Aboriginal culture views existence, in particular its concepts of time, space and the symbolic, is a major contributor to their difficulties in challenging and coming to terms with the majority culture. He proposes that simply continuing to provide material resources to improve Aboriginal well-being will not be effective, and that a conservation approach to Aboriginal culture may doom Aboriginal people to continuing misery and untimely deaths. A process of psychosocial engagement is proposed that requires a preparedness to change perspectives on both sides to address the long-term problems of historically disturbed relationships between indigenous and colonizing peoples.
The Dreaming, Human Agency and Inscriptive Practice
The myth/history and orality/literacy oppositions are interrelated ones, through which Aboriginal culture has been stereotyped as the simple inverse of European. The Dreaming has been seen as antithetical to historical consciousness, as it assimilates contingent events to a pre-existing order which is objectified in natural features of the landscape. I argue that The Dreaming is one instance of a more general mode of orientation through which a good deal of what we call history-the purposeful acts of living persons and their known forebears-is also memorialised in the landscape. What is specific to Aporiginal sociality is not orality or a mythic mentality, but a particular economy of inscriptive and interpretive practices through which 'country' becomes 'story'.
Allegory and the Work of Aboriginal Dreaming/Law/Lore
Allegory Studies, 2021
The chapter inquires whether allegory—redefined in my previous work in phenomenological terms, as a structure which supports the appearance of two things in the same space at the same time—provides a method and a mode for reading the Dreaming of the Aboriginal Peoples of Australia without appropriating it into Western modes of knowledge. The project strives to respect the difference of Aboriginal ontology as expressed in the publicly shared aspects of the Dreaming, and in the literary presentations of it in works like Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart and That Deadman Dance. Rather than treating the Aboriginal way of being as “other,” this paper approaches it as simply different, and will use the Western theories of difference not only to consider the workings of the Dreaming through a Western theoretical model but simultaneously to question the premises of that Western model and remain, as much as possible, in the space of difference that forms the threshold between Euro-American and Aboriginal ways of experiencing the world.
Accessing the eternal: Dreaming the dreaming and ceremonial performance
Zygon®, 2004
Australian Aboriginal cosmology is centered on The Dreaming, which has an eternal nature. It has been referred to as "everywhen" to articulate its timelessness. Starting with the assumption that "waking" reality is only one type of experienced reality, we investigate the concept of timelessness as it pertains to the Aboriginal worldview. We begin by questioning whether in fact "Dreaming" is an appropriate translation of a complex Aboriginal concept, then discuss whether there is any relationship between dreaming and The Dreaming. We then discuss Aboriginal ceremonial performance, during which actors are said to become Dreaming Ancestors, using as a frame of reference the "flow" experience explicated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi together with Alfred Schutz's "mutual tuning-in relationship."
Harmonising the Land and Sky in Aboriginal Dreamings
The Harmony Debates, 2020
This chapter explores the ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples see the realms of Earth, sea and sky as aspects of a unified ‘cosmoscape’ – in which the skyworld is every bit as real as Earth, complete with rivers and forests inhabited by fish, birds, animals and ancestral beings. Certain important stars and asterisms were seen as the skyworld counterpart of terrestrial animals and their annual appearance and movement through the night sky informed people of the seasonal migrations, lifecycles, abundance and food resource availability of the animals they represented. The examples I deal with here are only a handful of the many Dreamings which harmonise the celestial cycles of the animal constellations in the sky with the lifecycles of their terrestrial counterparts and serve to demonstrate the keen-eyed observations of the natural world by the Indigenous First Australians.
Australian Aboriginal Dreaming Stories: A Chronological Bibliography of Published Works 1789-1991
1994
Abstract The bibliography lists published works relating to Aboriginal stories which have been labelled by non-Aboriginal Australians with a variety of terms: myths or mythology, legends, fairy tales, superstitions, fables, traditions, stories, dreamtime stories, narratives or even ghost stories. Preference is now given to the use of the term 'dreaming stories'. For a discussion of the various definitions and classifications of such material by Australian anthropologists and ethnologists refer Hiatt (1975).