Page 9 - Indiginous Australians

Mary Alp
Aboriginal driven with plans for healing to restore identity & pride through programs of cultural knowledge & awareness. They are proving more successful.
The Dreaming – Indigenous Australian spirituality/religion – the basis of Indigenous Australian culture.
To try & understand the dislocation & the trauma caused by colonization/settlement we need to have some idea of what underpinned everything Aboriginal. We can call it cosmology, ideology, ontology, spirituality or religion but whatever label we give it seems insufficient. The Indigenous People’s belief system – The Dreaming – was/is the lived fabric that gave meaning to every aspect of life. It is their creation story that tells of a heroic time when man &
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of this happening, they all tell of ancestral spirits who moved across the land,
created landmarks, gave life to animals & finally produced children, then either
left or became landmarks. Their wanderings were over a vast area & these
‘Dreaming’ tracks, together with the given land & nature, were sacred &
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personalized.
Man, nature & land were a unity.
Although the Dreaming’s origins were in the past, the concept is timeless, for the past is in the present & also in the future, It is the ‘unchallenged sacred authority’ which ‘is the charter of what happened is happening & will happen’. In this cyclical world, the emphasis is on the doctrine of the pre-existence of spirits – for while they see death as inevitable, it is not final, because in this world, just as the spirit entered the woman at the conception site, so too it must leave the body at
25 death & return into the cycle to await re-birth - or go back to The Dreaming .This
belief in spirits includes both evil & good spirits. This is exemplified by the sorcerer & medicine man & the Indigenous Australians fear of the unknow &
22 Healing Foundation 2013 (definition); aifs.gov.au ‘Growing Our Children Up Strong and Deadly: Healing for children & young people’.(aifs-Australian Institute of Family Studies). ‘Intergenerational Trauma’ , Australians Together, pp 1-6.
23 W.E.H. Stanner, 1979, White Man got no Dreaming, p.23 - 24.
24 R.M. & C.H. Berndt, 1985, The World of the First Australians pp 239 – 243. 25 Ibid., pp239-240, p. 488.
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nature came to be as they are .
While there are varied regional interpretations