Australia: The Culture of Distance - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 287

Figure 19.2. The Aborigines,
The Gliwice Metamorphoses
by William Blandowski
WHAT IS DREAMTIME?
What the Australians of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries did not know
were the richness and beauty of the Aboriginal culture. When the Europeans first arrived,
the Aborigines spoke as many as 700 languages (today, about 200.) Their gods had differ-
ent names in different languages, but like the Greek poet Hesiod's account of creation and
Kipling's “Just So” stories, the gods of the Original People created the world, its moun-
tains, rivers, rocks, streams, and all living things. And they created the sun, the moon, and
all celestial things. Gods and their spirits still live in nature and natural things. Each god has
an ancient and contemporary form, and the gods protect the tribes that worship them. Each
tribe venerates the totem of its god. To the Original People, death is the return of the spir-
it to its originating source—to nature and natural things and to the gods who made them.
Memory and dreams unite people and gods, and past and present are woven in a seamless
web called Dreamtime: what once was and still is. [257]
Dreamtime is a moral code and a wanderer's guide. As the Original People moved
across the landscape in an endless quest for food, they sang songs of places and ancestors