What Is the Dreaming? Law, Land and Story as One Thing
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
The Dreaming is an English word standing in for concepts from hundreds of distinct Aboriginal Australian languages, and the translation is poor, because the ideas it names are not about sleep or fantasy. They describe the period in which ancestral beings formed the land and established its law, a period that is not simply in the past but continues to be present in the country itself.
Why the English word misleads
The term came into English through late nineteenth-century anthropologists rendering the Arrernte word altyerre, and the resemblance to the English word for sleep appears to be partly a mistranslation that stuck. Other language groups have their own terms, including Tjukurpa among Anangu peoples, Jukurrpa in Warlpiri and Wongar in parts of Arnhem Land, and they are not identical concepts. What they broadly share is a description of a formative era in which ancestral beings travelled across a featureless land, creating its features through their actions, establishing the relationships between people, species and places, and laying down the law governing conduct, marriage, ceremony and the use of country. Crucially, the beings did not leave. They became the country, so a particular rock, waterhole or ridge is the ancestor rather than a memorial to one, and the formative period remains accessible through ceremony rather than being a closed chapter, which is why some writers translate the term as the everywhen.
What it does
The Dreaming is a working system rather than a body of stories, and it carries functions that in other societies are distributed across separate institutions:
- •Law, since the rules governing behaviour, obligation and punishment derive from what ancestral beings established, which makes them non-negotiable in a way legislation is not
- •Land tenure, since responsibility for particular country is inherited through the ancestral tracks running across it, which defines who may speak for a place and who must care for it
- •Kinship, since the system of relationships determining marriage, avoidance and obligation is grounded in the same source
- •Ecological knowledge, since stories encode the location of water, seasonal availability of food and the behaviour of species in a form that is memorable and transmissible
- •Navigation, since songlines trace the routes ancestral beings travelled, and the sequence of a song corresponds to the sequence of places along a route, so singing it in order is a way of holding a map
- •Ceremony, art and performance, which are the means by which the knowledge is transmitted and the connection maintained
Songlines and how knowledge is held
A songline, or dreaming track, follows the path of an ancestral being across the landscape, and the associated song, dance and design record it. These tracks cross enormous distances, frequently passing through the country of many language groups, with each group holding responsibility for its own section and the sequence continuing beyond into languages the singers may not speak. That arrangement distributes a single body of knowledge across many custodians and requires cooperation to maintain it whole. The system is also a demonstrably effective memory technology, since attaching information to a sequence of real places produces recall far more durable than unstructured memorisation, which is the same principle as the classical memory palace and is being studied as such. Knowledge within it is graded and restricted, with some material public and some available only to initiated people, to particular genders or to specific custodians, which is why researchers and publishers now work under protocols governing what may be recorded and shown.
Continuity and pressure
These systems have been maintained under sustained attack. Dispossession removed people from the country their knowledge is attached to, which matters because the knowledge is place-based and does not transfer. Removal of children from families broke transmission between generations directly. Missions and government policy suppressed language and ceremony, and a substantial number of Australian languages have been lost, each taking its own body of knowledge with it. Despite that, the systems persist and are being actively renewed, with language revival programmes, return to country, ranger programmes combining traditional and scientific land management, and formal recognition in law. The 1992 Mabo decision overturned the doctrine that Australia had been legally unoccupied at settlement, and native title law since then requires claimants to demonstrate continuing traditional connection to land, which has placed the Dreaming in the awkward position of being evidence in a court operating under a different legal system. Significant sites remain vulnerable, as the destruction of the Juukan Gorge rock shelters in 2020 demonstrated.
The takeaway
The Dreaming is an inadequate English translation covering distinct concepts across hundreds of Aboriginal Australian languages, describing a formative era in which ancestral beings made the land and established its law, and which remains present because those beings became the country. It functions simultaneously as law, land tenure, kinship, ecological knowledge and navigation, with songlines encoding routes across enormous distances held in sections by many groups. Dispossession, child removal and language loss attacked transmission directly.