Aboriginals regarded their land as sacred. Places on earth share the sacredness of dreaming as they were formed in their present shape by the journeys of the ancestors. Aboriginal tradition, culture, religion, law and kinship were derived from “their” land. High mountain peaks may represent a place where one of their ancestors reared up and looked over the surrounding country, and a ridge along a range could be an ancestral track. To the Aboriginal people the land is not dead. It’s alive with power and history marked by their ancestors.
For Aboriginals the land is the core of all spirituality and the ownership of this land means that they had the responsibility to care for and nurture it. Aboriginals consider the land as sacred not only for food and water, but because it is also the depot of the secret and sacred activities of dreaming ancestors. Dreaming is a complex concept of importance to Aboriginal culture, embracing the creative era long past as well as the present and the future. For most Aboriginal people their religious beliefs are derived from a sense of belonging to the land, to the sea, to other people and to ones culture. Dreaming is the centre of Aboriginal religion and life; it is the closest translation of Aboriginal concept of how the world works. Kinship is the system of relationship traditionally excepted by a particular culture and the rights and obligations they involve.
Traditional Aboriginal society is an all-inclusive network of giving and receiving. Kinship is not only ones place and role but it also extends to the whole environment, being the land. These aspects are also all supported by dreaming which was initially derived from the land. When Europeans arrived in 1788 the connection between the Aboriginals and the land was taken away through the doctrine of “terra null ius.” In 1788 when the Europeans arrived they declared Australia as inhabited therefore the land belonged to no body. Aboriginals began to face hardship, developed disease and faced dispossession… Aboriginal people could no longer call the land “theirs”, because this right was removed from them.
The Essay on Aboriginal Dreamtime Dreaming Earth Time
... is that part of aboriginal culture which explains the origins and culture of the land and its people. Aborigines have the longest continuous cultural ... be aware of, or attuned to, the inner dreaming of the Earth. The Australian aboriginal shamans, 'clever men' or 'men of high ... as 'The Dreaming'. What is certain is that 'Ancestor Spirits' came to Earth in human and other forms and the land, the plants ...
Aboriginal children were taken from there parents, Aboriginals were discriminated against, forced onto reserves which were often run by missionaries and forced to work as slaves. Before the arrival of Europeans, Australia was inhabited by over 500 groups of Aboriginal people. These groups by the 1850’s were on the point of extinction because many of these groups’ culture, and language was devastated by white settlement, welfare, disease, religion, education and economic exploitation. Therefore as a result of white settlement aboriginal status remarkable dropped due to mistreatment, dispossession and discrimination..
