The UUCW Nugget
January 17, 2018 
The Songs of Aboriginal Dreamtime, Part One


 
 
Hello my friends,
 
For the past couple decades, I've been exploring spirituality from many different cultures.  I've offered you glimpses of my inquiry into astronomy, Hinduism, Tao, poetry, Buddhism, biology, Wicca and tea.  Recently I've been feeling the spirit in music.  It reminded me ...
 
A few years ago I read a marvelous book by Bruce Chatwin called The Songlines .  The whole book is a paean to life on the road, but at its heart is a particular road-trip through the Australian outback.  One evening, sitting by the fire, he hears the Aboriginal song describing the land they've been traveling through, and for me it was like watching the magic of a fantasy novel come to life in our ordinary world.  I want to share that magic with you, but just as Bruce took us on a long and meandering journey before we encountered that moment, I'm going to walk you back through the Aboriginal mythos that leads, via a different path, to that same moment.  Our guide is David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous...
 
What is the Dreamtime - the Jukurrpa, or Alcheringa - that plays such a prominent part in the mythology of Aboriginal Australia?  
 
It is a kind of time out of time, a time hidden beyond or even within the evident, manifest presence of the land, a magical temporality wherein the power of the surrounding world first took up their current orientation with regard to one another, and hence acquired the evident shapes and forms by which we now know them.  It is that time before the world itself was entirely awake (a time that still exists just below the surface of wakeful awareness) - that dawn when the totem Ancestors first emerged from their slumber beneath the ground and began to sing their way across the land in search of food, shelter, and companionship.
 
The earth itself was still in a malleable, half-awake state, and as Kangaroo Dreaming Man (the ancestral progenitor not only of kangaroos but of all humans who are born of Kangaroo Dreaming), Frilled Lizard Man, Tortoise Woman, Little Wallaby Man, Emu Woman, and innumerable other Ancestors wandered, singing, across its surface, they shaped that surface by their actions, forming plains where they lay down, creeks or waterholes where they urinated, forests where they kicked up dust, and so on.
 
Abram discovered some examples of these stories in " The Speaking Land " by Ronald and Catherine Berndt.  Here is one.
 
Gabidji, Little Wallaby, came from the West to Ooldea Soak.  He came across the large western sand-ridge, close to a black desert-oak tree.  He was carrying a malu-meri or buda skin waterbag, which was full.  He crossed the ridge and came to Yuldi.  There he put his buda at the base of a large sand dune to the south, and urinated in a depression which became the present-day Ooldea Soak ("That's the water we drink now!" said the people in 1941.)  He stayed there for a while, and then went on to another sandhill to the north; from there he looked out toward the east.  That sandhill was named Bimbali.  He returned to pick up his buda, and then he spilt a little water, and that became the lake.  However, he was not sure whether he should go farther and finally decided to return to Ooldea.  He left his duba there and it was metamorphosed as the large southern sandhill.  "That's why there is always water there."  He camped for a while, then decided to go east again...
Eventually, having found an appropriate location, or simply exhausted from the work of world-shaping, each of the Ancestors went "back in" (becoming djang, in Gunwinggu terminology), transforming himself (or herself) into some physical aspect of the land, and/or metamorphosing into the plant or animal species from which he takes his name.  
 
Again from the Berndts...
 
Leech Man looked this way, that way, as he was coming.  He saw a good place.  He said, "I do this, because it's a good place.  I'll settle down, I'll stay always."  That man who was eating fish, Naberg-gaidmi, asked him, "What are you?," and he said, "I'm turning into Leech, I'm going to stay in one place.  I'm going to become a rock, a little rock, and stay here, with a flat head, a short head.  I'm Leech djang, Leech Dreaming!" he said.  "I'm Leech!" and he said, "Here I sit.  This is my creek flowing, this is mine, where I'm staying.  I'm djang, Dreaming!"
 
Each Ancestor thus leaves in his wake a meandering trail of geographic sites, perceivable features in this land that are the result of particular events and encounters in that Ancestor's journey, culminating in that place where the Ancestor went "back in," metamorphosing entirely into some aspect of the world we now experience.
 
In our next installment, we will discover how each child gets her own song of the land ...
 


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