The dreaming is like a spiritual guidance that guides their people through their 'Walkabout' journeys, giving back to the grounds they walk on and respecting the land. They would give back to the earth by cutting a vein in their arm and let the blood drip and soak into the soil. To me this gesture is filled with a strong emotional tie to the land and this is one of the ways they would give back to it. The aboriginals would also dream up different animal totems for their people and once that person would die they would be reincarnated back into their animal totem. My friend lost her father recently and she has said that he is now the kookaburra that visits her every morning on her veranda. The morning after his funeral was when the kookaburra made his first appearance and he just sits there and watches her for a couple of hours and then flies off.
My favourite aboriginal story is 'The Rainbow Serpent', and can remember reading it from a very young age. It is a beautiful story and has remained with me for a long time.
www.didjshop.com/stories/rainbow.html
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| The Rainbow Serpent. |
Stanner, W.E.H. (1979). The dreaming (1953), in White man got no dreaming: Essays 1938-1973
(pp. 23-30). Canberra, Australia: Australian National University Press.
Image retrieved from: www.didjshop.com/stories/rainbow.html
I enjoyed reading your description of the Dreaming; I too thought the Dreaming was purely about the stories made up to explain how all things came into existence. By reading your blog and researching other materials, I now know that it is so much more. It gives insight to the creation of sacred place, animal totems, customs and laws. When the Ancestor Spirit created the world it turned into trees, waterholes, stars and other objects and then it was those places that became sacred. Unfortunately I was never taught about the Aboriginal culture when I was at school in Melbourne in the 70’s. It is good to see that the Aboriginal stories are taught in schools today, it helps to bring us together in appreciation of one of the oldest cultures on earth that we know of today.
ReplyDeleteThe Aborigines culture is definitely one of the oldest in the world. In my culture, dreaming was also a crucial part of decision making until christianity arrived and everything went downhill from there. If a chief of a tribe dream about something that need doing, whether a place or a person, they must follow that dream. It would take them to a new place, and that place must be named after whatever was in the chief's dream. It become a symbol and a taboo place where people can visit for guidance and so forth. It is interesting to observe though that a lot of this customs has simply forgotten due to the arrival of christianity.
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