Aboriginal Cosmology and Spiritual Renewal

 

My soul is a strange country. – Randolph Stow 

Randolph Stow, To the Islands (1958; Melbourne: Penguin, 1978), p. 208. 

I’ve written two books on Aboriginal spirituality and its impact on European Australians:

Edge of the Sacred, revised international edition (Zurich: Daimon Verlag, 2006).

Re-Enchantment: The New Australian Spirituality (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000).

One always has to speak in the plural about Aboriginal cultures, as there is not one, but many.

There were 250 separate languages spoken in Aboriginal Australia, plus dialects. Of these 110 are critically endangered.

The indigenous people of Australia have been described by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as ‘the oldest continuing cultures in human history’.

Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister of Australia, ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’, 2008. http://www.aph.gov.au/house/Rudd_Speech.pdf

The traditional custodians of the central deserts are the Arrernte people, but today there is a mix of indigenous groups, including the Pitjantjatjara, Pintubi and Warlpiri.

Alice Springs is known as ‘Mparntwe’ to its traditional inhabitants, and the MacDonnell ranges that surround it are called the Athereyurre hills.

Everything in this place has at least two names, one given by Europeans, who imposed the names of kings, princes, explorers, anthropologists and pioneers on everything they saw, and another given by the indigenous, who named places and landscapes according to the ancestral spirits of their religions.

The site of the town is part of the Caterpillar (Yeperenye) Dreaming, and it is believed that the ranges, which have a wave-like formation, are the streams of caterpillars coming into Mparntwe to dance and perform the ceremonies that created the landscape of Alice Springs. The western side of Alice where I lived is part of the Wild Dog Dreaming, and Heavitree Gap (Ntaripe) was a place where men’s sacred objects were stored.

The holy lands of Israel and Palestine were desert places, and I began to feel that the injunction: ‘Take off your shoes, for the place on which you stand is holy ground’ (Exodus 3:5), could relate to our land, too.

Aboriginal people refer to their religion as the Dreaming: translated from alcheringa in Arrernte; or tjukurrpa in Pitjantjatjara, Pintubi and Warlpiri. Aboriginal people do not like their terms translated as ‘dreamtime’, as that suggests the time of the sacred was back in the distant past. For them, Dreaming is better, as the sacred is in the past, present and future; ‘everywhen’, as translated by Bill Stanner. The Dreaming refers to the presence and interaction of ancestral forces in creation.

One day in 1971, during my gap year, an old man named Owen stopped in the citrus orchard where I was labouring and said:

You whitefellas are a curious people to us. It seems to us blackfellas that you are not initiated.

Owen went on:

You whitefellas put a lot of effort into gaining material things, to make yourselves happy. But you don’t seem to us blackfellas to be happy; you are always striving for more. You grasp at things like children but it doesn’t make you happy. For Aboriginal people, the important things are not bought or sold.

I said we did have ceremonies of baptism and confirmation, which were designed to help us enter maturity. Owen looked unconvinced. He shook his head and said:

Those ceremonies must not work anymore; otherwise you people would act different.

In his essay, ‘The Dreaming’, Sydney anthropologist Bill Stanner writes of meeting an Aboriginal elder while on a field trip in central Australia. The unnamed elder said:

White man got no dreaming,

Him go ‘nother way.

White man, him go different.

Him got road belong himself.  

Aboriginal elder, quoted by W. E. H. Stanner, ‘The Dreaming’ (1953), in Robert Manne, ed., The Dreaming and Other Essays (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), p. 57.