by Bhupinder Singh
One of the best-kept secrets of Australian tourism is its Aboriginals with a complex, age-old society and a culture of dance, music, art and stories that are unlike anything else in the rest of the world. People from overseas are, quite rightly, fascinated by it; so are many locals. Yet little attention has been paid to it until very recently.
The heart of Australia's indigenous people lies in the centuries old art form that is rooted as it is in the land, expressing a harmony of spiritual, moral and physical elements of the world, called the "Dreaming"; it is a collective consciousness(or unconscious) of a past that goes all the way back before the creation of land and its physical features (the Dreamtime), to ancestors who were the creators, and lives on today in a philosophy that sees spiritual, physical and moral ties between all the creations. The Dreaming manifests itself in songs, paintings, ceremonies and the Aboriginal worldview. Each Aboriginal group/clan has their own words for this concept: for example the Pitjantjatjara people use the term Tjukurpa, the Arrernte refer to it as Aldjerinya and the Adnyamathanha use the word Nguthuna.
It is a view in which the Ancestors rose from the earth itself making cave openings or waterholes. As they rose they sang in identification of themselves: I am the Rainbow Serpent, I am the lizard, I am the platypus, I am the Kangaroo. . . . As they traversed the flat and barren land they created trees, mountains, rivers and deserts with their verses, by singing them into existence. Their songs still remain in the layout of the land, and the topography is seen as “song lines”. Good and bad behavior is demonstrated in Dreaming stories as ancestors hunt, marry, care for children and defend themselves from their enemies. At the end of their long journey the ancestors sang themselves into mountains and other various landforms and thus returned to where they came from—the land. The land and all natural things are therefore sacred to the Aboriginal people; as far as they are concerned, these are their spiritual ancestors.
The Dreaming is also a "personal thing" for every individual who believes in the system. It is the source of the totem of that person. If you hear somebody saying that they have the Water Dreaming or the Kangaroo Dreaming, they're in all probability referring to the landscape that their mother first felt in an intimation of her pregnancy. They might also be referring to the location of their particular belief system within the Dreaming; one can have a combination of Dreaming too.
Whenever a traditional Aboriginal looks at the landscape, he or she always sees much more than just the physical features. There is a deep awareness of the presence of the Dreaming ancestors. All around are signs of their presence, their tracks, places where they had dug out valleys, split rocks or disturbed the ground in their passing. Sometimes even their bodies or those of their enemies are perceived in rocks, boulders and trees. Their actual spirits are also there, not dangerous or unfriendly, just living on in the world they made. It is possible to communicate with ancestor spirits. The bond that this creates is one of enormous strength. Overall, the earth is a “mother” in a real sense.
Dreaming in Paintings—Everyone is an Artist:
The concept of Art in the traditional aboriginal society is very different from the concept of Art in the world elsewhere. Art is one of the ways through which the aboriginals communicate with and maintain oneness with the Dreaming. When people take on the characteristics of the Dreaming ancestors through dance, song and Art and when they maintain sacred sites, the spirits of the creator ancestors are renewed. In traditional Aboriginal societies, activities like dancing, singing, body decorations, sand drawings, making implements or weaving baskets were not considered to be separate activities called Art and design. All of these were a part of the Dreaming and a part of normal daily life. There was no concept of a special type of person called an artist because, in a sense, everyone was an artist. This is changing now as tradition-oriented communities adapt to aspects of western culture; although the number of artists in any Aboriginal group would generally be far greater than the non-Aboriginal communities.
Traditionally the Aboriginals used the materials available to them to symbolize the Dreaming and their world. Symbols like concentric circles or large dots were waterholes, lines between these were paths, wavy patterns referred to running water—rain or a river, U shaped figures were views from the top of a gathering of people and small lines beside them their implements.
Dreaming Art usually depicts many animals; a particularly popular motif is the snake, which after the Rainbow Serpent, is seen as a symbol of fertility. The animals are depicted as though one was looking on from above. And this theme continues in almost all art work—a bird’s eye view of the whole dream which is depicted in the painting. Emu footsteps, kangaroos, bush flora, boomerangs, spears and 'woomera' (a type of spear thrower) are other popular symbols liberally used in the contemporary aboriginal art.
Art forms vary in different parts of Australia. In the central desert, ground drawing was a very important style of art and throughout Australia rock art, land mosaics as well as body painting and decoration were common, although varying in style, method, material and meaning. There is and was a wide range of traditional Aboriginal art forms. Though the Traditional Aboriginal Art represents the Dreaming it is often also a vital part of ceremonies. Communities today throughout central and northern Australia still produce traditional art, which has traditional content and meaning. However, some methods of producing art may be contemporary, for example, the use of acrylic paint on canvas or commercial fixatives on bark.
Paintings from the Dreaming now decorate tee shirts, boomerangs, didgeridoos, calendars, public places, mugs, placemats—you name it and the souvenir producers will ensure that you get your Personal Dreaming on it. Next time you're in an international airport try to spot "Wanula Dreaming", the spectacular Qantas Airlines painted with the Dreaming Theme.
Bhupinder Singh is a graduate of The University of New South Wales, Australia in Master of Computer Sciences. He is a talented painter, computer programmer and a creative web designer. He currently lives in Sydney, Australia
