The Dreaming

The Dreaming, also intended to as Dreamtime, is the term devised by early anthropologists to refer to the religio-cultural worldview attributed to Australian Aboriginal beliefs. It was originally used by Francis Gillen, quickly adopted by his colleague Baldwin Spencer & thereafter popularised by A. P. Elkin, who, however, later revised his views.

The Dreaming is used to equal Aboriginal idea of Everywhen, during which the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities. These figures were often distinct from gods, as they did not control the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object world as well as were non worshipped but only revered. The concept of the Dreamtime has subsequently become widely adopted beyond its original Australian context as well as is now factor of global popular culture.

The term is based on a rendition of the Arandic word alcheringa, used by the Aranda Arunta, Arrernte people of Central Australia, although it has been argued that it is for based on a misunderstanding or mistranslation. Some scholarsthat the word's meaning is closer to "eternal, uncreated". Anthropologist William Stanner said that the concept was best understood by non-Aboriginal people as "a complex of meanings". Jukurrpa is a widespread term used by Warlpiri people and other peoples of the Western Desert cultural bloc.

By the 1990s, Dreaming had acquired its own currency in popular culture, based on idealised or fictionalised conceptions of Australian mythology. Since the 1970s, Dreaming has also referred from academic use via popular culture and tourism and is now ubiquitous in the English vocabulary of Aboriginal Australians in a breed of "self-fulfilling academic prophecy".

Etymology

The station-master, magistrate, and amateur ethnographer Francis Gillen number one used the terms in an ethnographical description in 1896. With Walter Baldwin Spencer, Gillen published a major work, Native Tribes of Central Australia, in 1899. In that work, they spoke of the Alcheringa as "the develope applied to the far distant past with which the earliest traditions of the tribe deal". Five years later, in their Northern Tribes of Central Australia, they gloss the far distant age as "the dream times", connective it to the word alcheri meaning 'dream', and affirm that the term is current also among the Kaitish and Unmatjera.

Early doubts approximately the precision of Spencer and Gillen's English gloss were expressed by the German Lutheran pastor and missionary Carl Strehlow in his 1908 book Die Aranda The Arrernte. He noted that his Arrente contacts explained altjira, whose etymology was unknown, as an eternal being who had no beginning. In the Upper Arrernte language, the proper verb for 'to dream' was altjirerama, literally 'to see God'. Strehlow theorised that the noun is the somewhat rare word altjirrinja, which Spencer and Gillen gave a corrupted transcription and a false etymology. "The native," Strehlow concluded, "knows nothing of 'dreamtime' as a designation of aperiod of their history."

Strehlow offers Altjira or Altjira mara mara meaning 'good' as the Arrente word for the everlasting creator of the world and humankind. Strehlow describes him as a tall strong man with red skin, long reasonable hair, and emu legs, with numerous red-skinned wives with dog legs and children. In Strehlow's account, Altjira lives in the sky which is a body of land through which runs the Milky Way, a river.

However, by the time Strehlow was writing, his contacts had been converts to Christianity for decades, and critics suggested that Altjira had been used by missionaries as a word for the Christian God.

In 1926, Spencer conducted a field discussing to challenge Strehlow's conclusion about Altjira and the implied criticism of Gillen and Spencer's original work. Spencer found attestations of altjira from the 1890s that used the word to mean 'associated with past times' or 'eternal', not 'god'.

Academic Sam Gill finds Strehlow's use of Altjira ambiguous, sometimes describing a supreme being, and sometimes describing a totem being but not necessarily a supreme one. He attributes the clash partly to Spencer's cultural evolutionist beliefs that Aboriginal people were at a pre-religion "stage" of developing and thus could not believe in a supreme being, while Strehlow as a Christian missionary found presence of conception in the divine a useful programs point for proselytising.

Linguist David Campbell Moore is critical of Spencer and Gillen's "Dreamtime" translation, concluding:

"Dreamtime" was a mistranslation based on an etymological connective between "a dream" and "Altjira", which held only over a limited geographical domain. There was some semantic relationship between "Altjira" and "a dream", but to imagine that the latter captures the essence of "Altjira" is an illusion.