The Dreaming

It was originally used by Francis Gillen, quickly adopted by his colleague Walter Baldwin Spencer, and thereafter popularised by A. P. Elkin, who later revised his views.

The Dreaming is used to represent Aboriginal concepts of "Everywhen", during which the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities.

[3][4][5] By the 1990s, Dreaming had acquired its own currency in popular culture, based on idealised or fictionalised conceptions of Australian mythology.

Along with Walter Baldwin Spencer, Gillen published a major work, Native Tribes of Central Australia, in 1899.

[6] In that work, they spoke of the Alcheringa as "the name applied to the far distant past with which the earliest traditions of the tribe deal".

[8] Early doubts about the precision of Spencer and Gillen's English gloss were expressed by the German Lutheran pastor and missionary Carl Strehlow in his 1908 book Die Aranda (The Arrernte).

Strehlow theorised that the noun is the somewhat rare word altjirrinja, which Spencer and Gillen gave a corrupted transcription and a false etymology.

In Strehlow's account, Altjira lives in the sky (which is a body of land through which runs the Milky Way, a river).

He attributes the clash partly to Spencer's cultural evolutionist beliefs that Aboriginal people were at a pre-religion "stage" of development (and thus could not believe in a supreme being), while Strehlow as a Christian missionary found presence of belief in the divine a useful entry point for proselytising.

There was some semantic relationship between "Altjira" and "a dream", but to imagine that the latter captures the essence of "Altjira" is an illusion.The complex of religious beliefs encapsulated by the Dreamings are also called: In English, anthropologists have variously translated words normally understood to mean Dreaming or Dreamtime in a variety of other ways, including "Everywhen", "world-dawn", "ancestral past", "ancestral present", "ancestral now" (satirically), "unfixed in time", "abiding events" or "abiding law".

This is because in the Dreaming an individual's entire ancestry exists as one, culminating in the idea that all worldly knowledge is accumulated through one's ancestors.

[citation needed] Some of the ancestor or spirit beings inhabiting the Dreamtime become one with parts of the landscape, such as rocks or trees.

Upon birth, the child is considered to be a special custodian of that part of their country and is taught the stories and songlines of that place.

Stencil art at Carnarvon Gorge , which may be memorials, signs from, or appeals to totemic ancestors or records of Dreaming stories [ 1 ]
The Milky Way over Uluru . The Dreaming, according to Carl Strehlow , sees the Milky Way as a river connected to the dwelling of a Creator Deity.
Ku-ring-gai Chase-petroglyph, via Waratah Track, depicting Baiame , the Creator God and Sky Father in the dreaming of several Aboriginal language groups
Waugals (yellow triangles with a black snake in the centre) are the official Bibbulmun Track trailmarkers between Kalamunda and Albany in Western Australia. The Noongar believe that the Waugal, or Wagyl, created the Swan River and is represented by the Darling scarp.