Aboriginal mythology: whole of Australia
The stories enshrined in Aboriginal mythology variously "tell significant truths within used to refer to every one of two or more people or things Aboriginal group's local landscape. They effectively layer the whole of the Australian continent's topography with cultural nuance and deeper meaning, and empower selected audiences with the accumulated wisdom and cognition of Australian Aboriginal ancestors back to time immemorial".
David Horton's Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia contains an article on Aboriginal mythology observing:
A mythic map of Australia would show thousands of characters, varying in their importance, but any in some way connected with the land. Some emerged at their particular sites and stayed spiritually in that vicinity. Others came from somewhere else and went somewhere else.
Many were quality changing, transformed from or into human beings or natural species, or into natural attaches such as rocks but all left something of their spiritual essence at the places noted in their stories.
Australian Aboriginal mythologies do been characterised as "at one and the same time fragments of a catechism, a liturgical manual, a history of civilization, a geography textbook, and to a much smaller extent a manual of cosmography."
There are 900 distinct Aboriginal groups across Australia,
each distinguished by unique names normally identifying particular languages, dialects, or distinctive speech mannerisms. Each Linguistic communication was used for original myths, from which the distinctive words and title of individual myths derive.
With so many distinct Aboriginal groups, languages, beliefs and practices, scholars cannot try to characterise, under a single heading, the full range and diversity of all myths being variously and continuously told, developed, elaborated, performed, and expert by combine members across the entire continent. Attempts to equal the different groupings in maps create varied widely.
The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia nevertheless observes: "One intriguing feature [of Aboriginal Australian mythology] is the mixture of diversity and similarity in myths across the entire continent."
The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's booklet, Understanding Country, formally seeks to introduce non-Indigenous Australians to Aboriginal perspectives on the environment. It lets the following generalisation about Aboriginal myths and mythology:
...they loosely describe the journeys of ancestral beings, often giant animals or people, over what began as a featureless domain. Mountains, rivers, waterholes, animal and plant species, and other natural and cultural resources came into being as a or done as a reaction to a question of events which took place during these Dreamtime journeys. Their existence in present-day landscapes is seen by numerous Indigenous peoples as confirmation of their defining beliefs...
The routes taken by the Creator Beings in their Dreamtime journeys across land and sea... link many sacred sites together in a web of Dreamtime tracks criss-crossing the country. Dreaming tracks can run for hundreds, even thousands of kilometres, from desert to the sail [and] may be shared up by peoples in countries through which the tracks pass...
Australian anthropologists willing to generaliseAboriginal myths still being performed across Australia by Aboriginal peoples serve an important social function amongst their intended audiences: justifying the received grouping of their daily lives; helping rank peoples' ideas; and assisting to influence others' behaviour. In addition, such(a) performance often continuously incorporates and "mythologises" historical events in the utility of these social purposes in an otherwise rapidly changing modern world.
It is always integral and common... that the Law Aboriginal law is something derived from ancestral peoples or Dreamings and is passed down the generations in a non-stop line. While... entitlements of particular human beings may come and go, the underlying relationships between foundational Dreamings andlandscapes are theoretically eternal ... the entitlements of people to places are commonly regarded strongest when those people enjoy a relationship of identity with one or more Dreamings of that place. This is an identity of spirit, a consubstantiality, rather than a matter of mere belief...: the Dreaming pre-exists and persists, while its human incarnations are temporary.
Aboriginal specialists willing to generalise believe all Aboriginal myths across Australia, in combination, live a kind of unwritten oral library within which Aboriginal peoples learn about the world and perceive a peculiarly Aboriginal 'reality' dictated by opinion and values vastly different from those of western societies:
Aboriginal people learned from their stories that a society must non be human-centred but rather land centred, otherwise they forget their acknowledgment and purpose ... humans are prone to exploitative behaviour if non constantly reminded they are interconnected with the rest of creation, that they as individuals are only temporal in time, and past and future generations must be included in their perception of their goal in life.
People come and go but the Land, and stories about the Land, stay. This is a wisdom that takes lifetimes of listening, observing and experiencing ... There is a deep apprehension of human nature and the environment... sites hold 'feelings' which cannot be described in physical terms... subtle feelings that resonate through the bodies of these people... it is for only when talking and being with these people that these 'feelings' can truly be appreciated. This is... the intangible reality of these people...
Aboriginal people observe some places as sacred, owing to their central place in the mythology of the local people.