Aboriginal Australian belief

What it is

The religious traditions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples — the oldest continuing cultures on earth, with occupation of the continent established at more than sixty-five thousand years.

There is no such thing as Aboriginal religion in the singular. At the time of invasion there were some two hundred and fifty distinct languages and many more dialects, across hundreds of nations with their own laws, ceremonies, kinship systems, songs and country. A statement true of Arrernte people may be false of Yolŋu, Noongar, Palawa or Torres Strait Islander peoples.

And a large proportion of this knowledge is restricted. It is held by particular people — restricted by gender, by initiation grade, by age, and above all by country, since knowledge belongs to the people responsible for the place it concerns. Restricted material has been published without consent, repeatedly, and communities have gone to court over it.

That constraint shapes this article completely. What follows describes shape, terminology and public record. It contains no ceremony, no restricted material, no sacred narratives, and it should be read as a signpost toward Aboriginal-authored sources rather than as an account.

Where it came from

Continuous occupation and continuous law, from a date that keeps being pushed back by archaeology — Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land has been dated to around 65,000 years, and the songs, sites and law are understood by the peoples concerned as having been there from the beginning.

The word "Dreaming" needs care. It entered English through the anthropologists Spencer and Gillen, rendering the Arrernte term altyerre. It has been generalised to a great many unrelated languages, and it is a poor translation.

It suggests something imagined, and it suggests something past. Neither is right. The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner coined "everywhen" for what it actually indicates: not a time that ended but a reality that is present, in which ancestral beings shaped the country and remain in it. It is also law — the source of obligation, kinship, marriage rules, custodianship and correct behaviour — rather than a mythology in the Western sense.

Many people prefer terms from their own languages: altyerre, jukurrpa, tjukurpa, ngarrankarni and many others. Some prefer "the Law". This site uses Dreaming where a general term is needed and flags that it is a foreign word doing rough work.

Songlines, or dreaming tracks, are routes across country associated with ancestral journeys, encoded in sequences of song, connecting sites across enormous distances and across the territories of many groups. Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (1987) made the term widely known and is regarded by anthropologists and by Aboriginal commentators as unreliable — a travel book, substantially imagined, that many readers have taken as ethnography.

How it is practised

Not described here.

What can be said publicly: that ceremony, song, dance, design and the care of country are inseparable; that responsibility for particular sites and stories sits with particular people; and that the obligations run in both directions between people and country.

One convention many Australians encounter weekly without knowing its basis: warnings that a broadcast or publication may contain names, voices or images of people who have died. In many communities the name of a deceased person is not spoken for a period, and images are similarly restricted. This is discussed further under name magic.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the record of suppression and dispossession is a matter of public history. Frontier violence and massacres, now systematically mapped by researchers at the University of Newcastle; the removal of children across generations, documented in the Bringing Them Home report (1997); missions and reserves where language and ceremony were prohibited; and the doctrine of terra nullius, which held that the continent had belonged to no one, and which the High Court overturned in Mabo in 1992.

W.E.H. Stanner named the omission of all this from Australian self-understanding the Great Australian Silence in his 1968 Boyer Lectures. It has been partially broken since.

We can say sacred sites are a live legal and political question, not a historical one — the closure of the Uluru climb in 2019 at the request of Aṉangu traditional owners, and the lawful destruction of the Juukan Gorge rock shelters in 2020, are treated under sacred sites.

We can say appropriation is a continuing problem with specifically Australian forms: mass-produced "Aboriginal-style" art made by non-Indigenous people, which the Productivity Commission has examined; didgeridoo sales that ignore the instrument's gendered and regional restrictions; and "Dreamtime stories" published without provenance or permission.

We cannot describe the traditions, and this is not modesty. The material is restricted by people who have the right to restrict it, has been taken before without consent, and is not ours.

What this site can usefully do is point at the sources. AIATSIS — the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies — is the national institution, holds the archive, and publishes a code of ethics governing research with communities. Aboriginal authors including Marcia Langton and Tyson Yunkaporta write for general readers. Land councils and community organisations publish material they have approved for public release. Those are the doors.

Further reading

• AIATSIS, and its Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research.
• Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk (2019) — an Aboriginal academic writing for a general audience.
• Bringing Them Home (1997), the National Inquiry report, freely available.
• W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays — non-Indigenous, mid-century, and the source of "everywhen" and of the Great Australian Silence.