Discuss how “Dreamtime” and the ‘Dreaming’ become the spiritual basis of Aboriginal culture Dreaming” is the basic philosophical premise of Aboriginal nature-centric spirituality and “Dreamtime” is that eternal creative phase when the land and its laws were generated by the “ancestral beings” for the Aborigines. part of “Dreaming” is the most important and intrinsic element of Aboriginality.

Discuss how “Dreamtime” and the ‘Dreaming’ become the spiritual basis of Aboriginal culture

It encompasses a spatio-temporal infinitude, and is a matter of “everywhere and everywhen” (Stanner). It is a vision and philosophical design that connects past to the present, one aspect of nature to another:

A central meaning of ‘The Dreaming’ is that of a sacred, heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are; but neither ‘time’ nor ‘history’ as we understand them is involved in this meaning... Although ‘The Dreaming’ conjures the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the infinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present. One cannot ‘fix’ ‘The Dreaming’ in time: it was, and is, everywhen... Clearly, The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal man…. It is a cosmogony, an account of the begetting of the universe, a study about creation. It is also a cosmology, an account or theory of how what was created became an ordered system. To be more precise, how the universe became a moral system. (Stanner 23)

It is this connectedness that engenders in the Aborigines a community value and sense of belongingness, a pride about its mythical origin and history. Vicki Grieves rightly mentions: “It is a state of being that includes knowledge, calmness, acceptance and tolerance, balance and focus, inner strength, cleansing and inner peace, feeling whole, an understanding of cultural roots and ‘deep wellbeing’.” The term “Dreaming” was coined by F. Gillen in 1896 and taken up by W.B. Spencer. The word was a translation of the Arrernte phrase altjirangangambakalaon and the inference was that altjirarama stood for “to dream” and had been used to refer to the creative epoch of the Aboriginal world in the religious myths and legends of the Northern Arunta people. Later this “creative epoch” or “Dreamtime” was applied to pan-Aboriginal spiritual belief. This is not to rule out that there are intricate myths ascribed to each Aboriginal community but a degree of sameness in the spiritual insight is to be traced in all.

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