⁂ Concepts · Sacred · No. 200
The Dreaming

One framework required to be stated in the terms of another, with the translation falling on its holders.

The Dreaming

The Aboriginal Australian framework of ancestral creation, law and country - named in English by a word that misleads in almost every respect.

Theme
Cosmos, the sacred and ultimate reality
Tradition
Aboriginal Australian

In plain terms

Almost everything the English name suggests is wrong.

It has nothing to do with sleeping or with dreams; the translation came from an Arrernte word that Spencer and Gillen rendered that way in the 1890s. It is not a time long ago, which is what Dreamtime implies - the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner reached for the word everywhen precisely because it is not past. And it is not mythology in the sense of stories that explain things, though it includes narrative.

What it does is hold together several things English separates: how the country came to be shaped as it is, the law governing conduct, the relationships between people and places and species, and the obligations that follow. Creation, law and geography are one framework rather than three.

And it is not one thing. Hundreds of nations have their own terms and their own content.

As a philosopher would put it

The English term derives from Spencer and Gillen's translation of Arrernte Altyerre, and the etymology has been disputed since; scholars including John Morton have argued the connection to dreams is tenuous and possibly mistaken.

Stanner's 1953 essay is the standard corrective. He argues that the Dreaming is not a time but a condition - his coinage everywhen - and that it fuses what European thought divides into cosmology, law, morality and land tenure. Ancestral beings travelled, shaped the country, and remain present in it, so a feature of landscape is evidence and not illustration.

The practical consequence is legal. Native title after Mabo requires demonstration of continuing connection under traditional law and custom, which puts Dreaming-based systems of law and responsibility into Australian courts - where they must be translated into the vocabulary of title and interest.

Much content is restricted by age, gender or initiation, so any public account is necessarily partial, and this one is.

Where you meet it

The Native Title Act 1993 requires claimants to establish rights possessed under traditional laws acknowledged and customs observed, with connection maintained substantially uninterrupted since sovereignty.

In practice that has meant presenting Dreaming-based law in a Federal Court. Claimants have given evidence about ancestral tracks, responsibilities for particular sites, and the systems of relationship that assign those responsibilities. Some evidence is restricted and has been given in closed session or to a judge of a particular gender, and courts have made orders accommodating this.

The Yorta Yorta decision in 2002 held that connection had been washed away by the tide of history, and the reasoning turned on continuity of observance - a standard that measures a living tradition against its state at a moment fixed by the coloniser.

What the process demonstrates is a legal system requiring one framework to be stated in the terms of another, with the burden of translation falling entirely on the people whose framework it is.

What is actually disputed

Whether the English term should be used at all.

Many Aboriginal people and scholars use it, as the available common word across nations and in dealings with institutions. Others avoid it, preferring the specific term of the nation concerned - Tjukurpa, Jukurrpa, Ngarrankarni - on the ground that the English word imports a temporal framing and an association with sleep that misdescribe it, and that a single term suggests a single system where there are hundreds.

The deeper issue is the one the native title process makes concrete. If the framework is only recognised when rendered in the categories of Australian property law, then recognition and distortion arrive together, and the Yorta Yorta standard shows what that costs.

And a caution belongs here rather than in a footnote. Much of the content is restricted, the traditions are living and are held by their own peoples, and an encyclopaedia entry is a summary written from outside.

Commonly confused with

  • a creation myth It includes narrative and is also law, geography and a system of obligation, and treating it as a story separates what it holds together.
  • the Dreamtime The suffix implies a past era. Stanner's whole correction is that it is not a time.
  • one belief system Hundreds of nations have distinct terms and content, and treating them as one is the error most public accounts make.

Defined against

  • Time The framework is precisely not a period, and Stanner coined everywhen because no available English temporal category fitted

Philosophers

  • Achille Mbembe The colonial production of knowledge about colonised peoples

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Country · Tapu · The sacred c. 400 · Time c. 397 · Relationality c. 150

The Dreaming is Spencer and Gillen's 1890s rendering of Arrernte Altyerre, and it has nothing to do with sleep or dreams; hundreds of nations have their own terms - Tjukurpa, Jukurrpa, Ngarrankarni and many others - which are not interchangeable.