The spirit of Dreamtime
Thirty thousand years ago, Europeans were creating the treasuries of cave paintings that so amaze modern observers. Yet even as those works were being painted, humans had already been settled in Australia for at least 20,000 years. Through most of their vast time on that continent, Australia’s indigenous peoples—Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders—lived in isolation from other human communities. They have had many millennia to familiarize themselves with every aspect of their land and to make it the basis of a profound spirituality. Only in very recent times have Western Christians begun to acknowledge and respect those ideas.
Aboriginal faith is rooted in the sanctity of nature and the landscape, every aspect of which carries a story or myth. The origins of all things are traced to a Dreamtime, an archaic mythical universe. That realm can be visited today through dreaming or through rituals that induce ecstasy or mystical experience. The standard Western distinction between sacred and profane worlds simply does not exist. Nor does the concept of linear time, with its rigid divisions between past, present, and future. Dreams and stories unite the whole known universe, everywhere and everywhen.
In 1770, after some earlier contacts with the continent, Europeans began the systematic occupation of territory they claimed under the legal doctrine of Terra nullius, “Nobody’s Land.” Under that principle, Australia was a blank slate, a vacant territory awaiting possession and exploitation.
