Victoria King

Prof. Lovern

A.W.R. – Final Paper

9 December 2010

Aborigines in Australia: An Overview

I began researching for this paper thinking that I could find some general consensus about

the culture of the Aboriginal community in Australia, but no general consensus is to be found

across the broad spectrum of literature on the subject from which to choose. It seems to be the

case that conceptions of the Aboriginal culture vary depending on the source writing on the

subject, and depending on the time frame that studies were written on them. It seems also to be

the case that conceptions of individuals concerning Dreamtime may differ even within the realm

of a specific group. Conceptions of women also differ depending on the source writing about

them. In this paper, I intend to focus on a general overview of what I have read concerning the

culture, lifestyle, and history of Australian Aborigines and the Dreamtime. I may compare it to

some myths from European tradition in order to try to show that the ideas presented are not so

strange or not necessarily so foreign.

According to Western theory, the Aborigines have lived in Australia for over 40,000

years or longer. Russel Ward holds that they migrated from Asia 40-50,000 years ago, though he

does not mention their means of migrating (Ward, 2). According to Aboriginal ontology,

Dreamtime, The Dreaming, or Altjeringa is a sacred time in which the totemic Ancestor spirits of

the Aborigines sprang up from a gray, flat nothingness and created the Earth (Ellie). The spirits

came up and, in their search for food, formed the physical geographical features of the land.

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There are many stories told that convey how different geographical features came about. Also

within the stories are messages concerning the causes of certain specific characteristics local

animals and men exhibit.

Stories concerning creation differ a bit, although there are a few with the same idea that

the Sun Mother was woken up to create the world. In “Earth Dying – Earth Reborn”, when the

Sun Mother woke up and breathed, the atmosphere changed; when she got up to take a journey,

vegetable life sprung up wherever she walked; she found living creatures settled there,

slumbering as she had been, and she woke them up (Ellie). She made the seasons, and made a

rest time for the creatures designated by her daily descent in the West, (Ellie).

Another fable explains that there were only moon and stars before there was a moon, and

this was in a time before man existed, though larger animals than what we are used to were

thought to have roamed the world, (Ellie). Two companions were quarrelling when the lady,

Brolga, of the two companions threw an egg into the sky. This egg became the sun as its yolk

spilled upon firewood and became ignited. This lit up the world. A good spirit saw this and

decided to create a similar fire every day, which is why the sun is out every day, according to

this story, (Ellie). Another part of the story is that the laugh of the kookaburra is provided to

help wake up men and women in the morning time, (Connelly).

Pause a moment and let us compare a feature of one of these myths with a feature from

that of ancient European mythology. In the Aboriginal version of the beginning of creation,

everything was desolate before the giants sprang up to create what would become the world that

we live upon (Ellie). In an ancient Greek version of creation we also get the concept that the

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beginning was a great void and that giants or Titans were borne to create the initial mold of our

environment, (Hunt).

I have to note that one main thing this research on Dreamtime and the Dreamings has

helped me realize is the importance of illustration to convey an idea or message. Aborigines

have sought their own liberation through creating and selling the art they make which pertains to

the Dreamtime. These art pieces are created upon waking up from an instance of dreaming

something considered personally sacred (Price-Williams, 378). They want to continue to be

able to create these pieces of art which link them to the sacred Dreamtime. Their method of

selling art to outsiders is one that allows them to continue with this tradition as well as raise

recognition among outsiders concerning this important part of their culture. The epiphany I had

is that the vast majority of research literature that I read to use as sources in these papers

generally lack pertinent illustrations which could come in useful to express the ideas the authors

are trying to put forth in the texts. Also, reading page after page of black and white paragraphs

tends to be quite straining on the eyes. The sociological or academic jargon incorporated is

boring and can become monotonous to say the least. If we want everyone to understand what we

are writing about, the extremely literate as well as the less literate, it might be more beneficial to

everyone if we were to incorporate pictures, personal drawings, and a more widely used lexicon

than what we use at this point. An irony I am trying to exemplify here is that I am required by

the academic institution to which I belong to mirror the same boring, monotonous format of

academically condoned along with impressive sesquipedalian terms. An female Aborigine who

is also Harvard Law graduate and professor at New South Wales University explains that

“experience is valued over study and academic discourse,” and that academia is based so much

on the writing rather than cultural tradition, (Behrendt, 32). She also notes the difference in our

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citing sources, explaining that European academics are taught to use the words of other people

while citing the original authors as sources, whereas it would be considered rude in her

community to do so without explicit permission, (Behrendt, 33). Note the additional irony in my

using her words here. She holds that it would be prudent to advocate the inclusion of the

experiences of those with oral history; this will “allow them a voice where they have previously

been silenced,” (Behrendt, 33).

The Aborigines in Australia do not actually have a written language, but they do have

rock art drawings of the Dreamtime. These ancient paintings on rock are their reflections on the

Dreamtime. Their art is like their history book as a guide for living. The illustrations have

different intentions and meanings. These pictures are supposed to harvest powers; the drawing

of a big fish could bring forth a plentiful supply of fish during fishing season. Specific clans are

supposed to draw the animal of their totem and no totem of any other clan. Now the illustrations

are being created on wood panel and on other mediums that can be used for transportable

commercialization. (“Rock Art).

Conceptions of women in Aboriginal culture vary depending on the author, the sex of the

author, and the timeframe within which the author wrote the material concerned. The articles I

have read coming from Aboriginal women themselves do not explain that the women are

experiencing any type of sexism from within their own communities. The only literature that

tries to explain the subordination of women to the men in Aboriginal societies comes from

various pieces of literature written by European-descended males from around the later 1980s

and before. I have noticed this to be the case concerning many different research projects

concerning a variety of cultures: prior to the 1980s, predominantly male European

anthropologists and other academics tend to portray women as subordinate to the men in the

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cultural accounts being noted. I think this is a reflection of the European model itself and that

the idea that the women are treated unequally is only an assumption based from conceptions

concerning male and female social and role dynamics within the European pattern. Newer

representations by female writers on the subject have noted this issue, and they differ in their

view that the women are considered subordinate to the men in Aboriginal societies.

According to Ward, from a 1988 article, Aboriginal groups are divided into two classes:

men and women, (Ward, 5). The men were the hunters and the women were the vegetable-

gatherers. Although this may seem quite egalitarian at first, both classes having their distinct

category with its own rules to follow, Ward hurts my heart a little with what he explains next.

He writes that there were many fights among men in the culture, not over land, but over women

(Ward, 5). He explains that women were “regarded as the disposable property of her husband,”

(Ward, 5). Around 1923, three men were tried by the Australian government for the murder of a

woman who was killed by her two brothers and husband. The murder was deemed necessary by

them in order to pay the penalty in tribal law for her the act her husband had committed—killing

a different woman and fleeing into the woods, (Ward, 6). This was the only incidence I heard

concerning women being treated in this particular way. If this sort of custom has been practiced

frequently and on any grand scale, I hope that its occurrence has been diminished in recent

history. I am a bit suspect to the argument made because it is only one incidence given by the

author in an argument concerning a larger issue. It happened after colonization occurred, so I

think the imposition of a patriarchal dominant structure could have had something to do with it

as well. As will be noted later, Ohnuki-Tierney depicts aspects within the Ainu culture as being

separated into two categories, the sacred and the profane, with women being considered an

aspect of the profane and men the holy, (296). Another type of incidence concerning the

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mistreatment of Aboriginal women, although in this example is a side-effect of colonization, is

that sailors and settlers would take the women from Aboriginal tribes and rape them for months

before killing them or leaving them somewhere they were not safe, (Yunupingu, 74). Often the

women would wait to die or kill themselves rather than return to their home community in order

to spare their community the possibility of contracting foreign disease she may have contracted

during her abduction, (75). If she returned home, her community would kill her for these same

reasons.

What I can hold as a common tradition, based from a number of sources, is that the

women and the men did keep to their separate domains. In one article titled, “Elders from

Australia,” some of the elder women made this claim and talked a bit about some of the things

that would be considered taboo to our culture. The main thing I thought interesting was that the

father of babies are not allowed to touch the baby and has to sleep away from it for four or five

months, (Yunupingu,17). Evidently the brother or sister of the mother can hold the baby, but

the father cannot. This makes sense in that the father might bring disease or illness from the

germs gathered while out hunting. Wingfield explains that the women keep separate from men

and that they get along fine, (Yunupingu, 20). Babies are actually born in the sand; this is

symbolic of being one with the land, (63).

The way time is perceived in Aboriginal culture is much different than how it is

perceived in a Western conception of time. In an article on Time Reckoning, it is noted that

“there is a culturally constituted temporal domain” for time although there is no specific word for

it, (Ohnuki-Tierney, 285). The lifespan of the universe contains the beginning and the present.

The beginning was when the giants roamed the land. The present refers to the span of time that

began long ago which “will continue until the end of the universe”, at which point the universe is

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reborn, (Ohnuki-Tierney, 286). Ohnuki-Tierney depicts time as being separated into the sacred

and the profane. The first halves of the lunar months are depicted as sacred and religious matters

are supposed to be conducted during this time; the days are divided the same, with the morning

being for the sacred and the evening being for the profane, (293). Night is a time of danger and

one should not be out in the night, according to this author, (294). Seasons are initiated and

marked by memorable annual events and ceremonies rather than abstractly by a numerical

calendar system. “The beginning of the cold season is marked by marten-trapping and the bear

ceremony,” (Ohnuki-Tierney, 294).

While the sacred quality in time diminishes as the days, months, or seasons pass, the

quality of human life increases the longer they age. The super-human quality in an individual is

at its maximum point upon the time of death, when one is at the closest point in life to being

borne into its next cycle, (Ohnuki-Tierney, 295). One other possible reason for this is that, as

was earlier noted, in Aboriginal society experience is deemed more important than academic

qualification. Larissa Behrendt explained in her article the way she felt about teaching an elder:

“Teaching an older Aboriginal woman of high standing in my community, one for whom I have

much personal respect and admiration, felt not only uncomfortable but disrespectful,” (Behrendt,

32). This is an example of the way that the dynamics of European culture clashes with the

dynamics of that of the Aboriginal.

Another aspect I had hoped to deal with more concerns that of telepathic powers claimed

to be possessed by some of the Aborigines. I did not find enough literature to write as

extensively on the subject as I had originally planned, so I will touch up on the matter here. The

best article I found that explains this is the article on Elders, which explains that “some gifted

people in the communities” are able to “communicate through minds from one place to

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another…but being so far apart,” (Yunupingu, 89). It explains that what is communicated is not

the voice of the person but the actual thought that was given where the location of telepathy

occurred, (89).

Colonization has been occurring since white people decided to move to Australia.

Fortunately, concerning the educational domain, people from Aboriginal communities are now

allowed to pursue the educational level of their choice whereas not long ago and before, they

were only allowed to learn until the age of fourteen, (Behrendt, 32). On the other hand, the

domination has not ceased in terms of its mistreatment of the land. The government has been

putting nuclear waste on indigenous land and has also used the land to practice the firing of

nuclear bombs, (Yunupingu, 22). The claim is made that Mother Nature should be left as it is,

and that there will be big repercussions for all the mining and explosions that are being done to

it, (22). This feature of the exploitation of indigenous resources by a European-ascended

colonizing body in Australia has many of the same features colonization has brought about for

the indigenous American population. Only one example of a similar incidence in America is the

chemical waste recycling plant in Arizona, near the Gila River Community. The plant is

“located on tribal lands and poisoning the community with mercury, dioxin and other toxic

chemicals” and has helped cause the increased number of “miscarriages, misdiagnosed rashes,

breathing problems, problems with bone marrow, and regenerating blood cells,” in the

indigenous community, (Women’s Earth Alliance).

Another common colonization exploitation tactic practiced by the dominant Western

culture within various indigenous groups is that of grave-robbing, or of taking the sacred bones

of the ancestors of indigenous cultures and not giving the bones back. In any case, it is rude to

steal the bones of a dead person out of a gravesite, regardless of their cultural background or any

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other characteristic they might exhibit. Moreover, the reason this was done on a mass scale at a

time when the use of phrenology was popular and the Western prerogative was to attempt to

prove their superiority over the indigenous by comparing skulls of various groups with skulls

from their own group, (Delamothe, 1564).

The same thing has occurred in the West due to colonization. In 1990, a Native American

Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed, according to which, the return of Native

American skeletons was mandated. In 2010, the skeletons are finally being returned. “Since

1994, institutions and government agencies…have asked the secretary of the Interior 82 times for

special permission to return more than 4,000 unaffiliated human remains. Over the last two

years, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science has consulted with 121 tribes over unaffiliated

remains –and found common ground,” (Colwell-Chanthoponh). According to this source, 32,000

out of the 116,000 Native American skeletons that have been put on display in museums are

being returned to their descendants, (Colwell-Chanthoponh). In other news, a lawsuit was filed

earlier in 2009 with the intention to have a secret society known as the Skulls at Yale University

return the skull and bones of Geronimo to his descendants. The grandfather of George W. Bush,

Jr. is reported to have been involved in the group stealing the bones, (Caplan-Bricker). In

August, 2010, the case was dismissed against the Skull and Bones society by the judge (Caplan-

Bricker).

In conclusion, the Aborigines in Australia have been living in the same area for over

40,000 years. They experience the world in terms of being a part of their traditional landscape,

as continuous creators in the Dreamtime. They are very concerned for their land as of late

because there has been nuclear waste disposals posited on it as well as mining and nuclear

bombing practice by the Australian government. The Aborigines pass on much of their cultural

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and spiritual beliefs orally, through ceremony, dance, story, and through artwork concerning the

Dreamtime. Two aspects of time are the present and the beginning; the beginning was a time

when the ancestors roamed and shaped the Earth in search for food. The seasons are reckoned in

terms of major events marking the beginning and end of a season. A first hunt for a certain

animal associated with a given season may mark the beginning of that season, along with a

ceremonial ritual or dance conducted by the Aborigines. The present refers to time spanning

from long ago and stretching until the end of time. Women and men are concerned with separate

spheres or domains but neither men nor women are necessarily considered superior to the other,

and if it is so the present case, it may only be so to the extent that Western patriarchal tradition

has been reinforced through law and colonization during the past few hundred years.

Colonization has led to many of the same types of exploitations of indigenous cultures not only

to the Aborigines in Australia, but also to indigenous groups that have been dominated by

European societies around the world.

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Works Cited

Behrendt, Larissa. "At the Back of the Class, At the Front of The Class:

Experiences as Aboriginal Student and Aboriginal Teacher." Feminist Review.

52. (1996): 27-35. Print.

Caplan-Bricker, Nora. "Judge dismisses Apache suit against Skull and Bones." Yale Daily News

27 Aug 2010: n. pag. Web. 10 Dec 2010.

<http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2010/aug/27/judge-dismisses-apache-suit-against-

skull-and/>.

Caplan-Bricker, Nora. "Skull & Bones sued for Geronimo's Remains."

Yale Daily News 17 Feb 2009: n. pag. Web. 10 Dec 2010.

<http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2009/feb/17/skull-bones-sued-for-geronimos-

remains/>.

Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip. "Opening America's Skeleton Closets." Denver Post

09 May 2010: n. pag. Web. 10 Dec 2010.

<http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_15034481>.

Connely, Michael J., "Goo-Goor-Gaga the Kookaburra.

" Dreamtime Kullilla-Art. Dreamtime Kullilla-Art, 2009. Web. 10 Dec 2010.

<http://www.dreamtime.auz.net/default.asp?PageID=62>.

Crystal, Ellie. "Australian Dreamtime." Crystalinks. Crystalinks, n.d. Web. 10 Dec 2010.

<http://www.crystalinks.com/dreamtime.html>.

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Delamothe, Tony. "Aboriginal Skeletons in the Closet: Time to Send Them Home."

BMJ Publishing Group. 303.6817 (1991): 1564. Print.

Hunt, J.M. "Greek Mythology Story Creation." Forscherwelt., n.d. Web. 10 Dec 2010.

<http://www.desy.de/gna/interpedia/greek_myth/creation.html>.

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. "Akhalin Aunu Time Reckoning." Man. 8.2 (1973): 285-299. Print.

Price-Williams, Douglass.

"The Dreamtime and Dreams of Northern Australian Aboriginal Artists."

Ethos. 22.3 (1994): 373-388. Print.

"Rock Art." Australia and Oceania. National Geographic: Web. 10 Dec 2010.

<http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/places/regions-

places/australia-and-oceania/australia_rockart.html>.

"Team and Partners: GRACE." Women's Earth Alliance. Earth Island Institute Organization, n.d.

Web. 10 Dec 2010. <http://www.womensearthalliance.org/section.php?id=139>.

Ward, Russell. "Aboriginal Communists." Labour History. 55. (1988): 1-8. Print.

Yunupingu, Mandawuy. Elders: Wisdom from Australia's Indigenous Leaders.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 1-126. Print.

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