Indigenous Australia Paper 1

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The Dreaming (1953)

The Australian Aborigines’ outlook on the universe and man is shaped by a remarkable conception, which Spencer and Gillen immortalised as ’the dream time’ or alcheringa of the Arunta or Aranda tribe. Comparable terms from other tribes are often almost untranslatable, or mean literally something like ‘men of old’. Some anthropologists have called it the Eternal Dream Time. I prefer to call it what many Aborigines call it in English; The Dreaming, or just, Dreaming.

A central meaning of The Dreaming is that of a sacred, heroic time long ago when man and nature came to be as they are; but neither ‘time’ nor ‘history’ as we understand them is involved in this meaning. I have never been able to discover any Aboriginal word for time as an abstract concept. And the sense of ‘history* is wholly alien here. W e shall not understand The Dreaming fully except as a complex of meanings. A blackfellow may call his totem, or the place from which his spirit came, his Dreaming. H e may also explain the existence of a custom, or law of life, as causally due to The Dreaming.

A concept so impalpable and subtle naturally suffers badly by translation into our dry and abstract language. T he blacks sense this difficulty. I can recall one intelligent old man who said to me, with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking verse:

WHITE MAN GOT NO

DREAMING Essays 1938-1973

W. E. H. STANNER

Australian National University Press

White Man got no Dreaming

W hite man got no dreaming, Him go ’nother way.

W hite man, him go different. Him got road belong himself.

Although, as I have said, T he Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present. One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen. We should be very wrong to try to read into it the idea of a Golden Age, or a Garden of Eden, though it was an A ge of Heroes, when the ancestors did marvellous things that men can no longer do. T he blacks are not at all insensitive to Mary Webb's ‘wistfulness that is the past", but they do not, in aversion from present or future, look back on it with yearning and nostalgia. Yet it has for them an unchallengeably sacred authority.

Clearly, T he Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal man. If I am correct in saying so, it is much more complex philosophically than we have so far realised. I greatly hope that artists and men of letters who (it seems increasingly) find inspiration in Aboriginal Australia will use all their gifts of empathy, but avoid banal projection and subjectivism, if they seek to honour the notion.

Why the blackfellow thinks of ‘dreaming’ as the nearest equivalent in English is a puzzle. It may be because it is by the act of dreaming, as reality and symbol, that the Aboriginal mind makes contact—thinks it makes contact—with whatever mystery it is that connects The Dreaming and the Here-and-Now.

II H ow shall one deal with so subtle a conception? One has two options: educe its subjective logic and rationale from the ‘elements’ which the blackfellow stumblingly offers in trying to give an explanation; or relate the objective figure it traces on their social life to things familiar in our own intellectual history. There are dangers in both courses.

T he first is a m atter of learning to ‘think black’, not imposing

The Dreaming (1953)

Western categories of understanding, but seeking to conceive of things as the blackfellow himself does.

In our modern understanding, we tend to see mind’ and body’, body' and ‘spirit’, ‘spirit’ and ‘personality’, ‘personality’ and 'name' as in some sense separate, even opposed, entities though we manage to connect them up in some fashion into the unity or oneness of ‘person’ or ‘individual’. The blackfellow does not seem to think this way. The distinctiveness we give to ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ and ‘body’, and our contrast of body’ versus ‘spirit’ are not there, and the whole notion of ‘the person’ is enlarged. T o a blackfellow, a man’s name, spirit, and shadow are ‘him’ in a sense which to us may seem passing strange. One should not ask a blackfellow: ‘What is your name?’ T o do so embarrasses and shames him. The name is like an intimate part of the body, with which another person does not take liberties. The blacks do not mind talking about a dead person in an oblique way; but, for along time, they are extremely reluctant even to breathe his name. In the same way, to threaten a man’s shadow is to threaten him. N or may one threaten lightly the physical place from which his spirit came. By extension, his totem, which is also associated with that place, and with his spirit, should not be lightly treated.

In such a context one has not succeeded in ‘thinking black’ until one’s mind can, without intellectual struggle, enfold into some kind of oneness the notions of body, spirit, ghost, shadow, name, spirit-site, and totem. T o say so may seem a contradiction, or suggest a paradox, for the blackfellow can and does, on some occasions, conceptually isolate the ‘elements’ of the ‘unity’ most distinctly. But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself. The separable elements I have mentioned are all present in the metaphysical heart of the idea of ‘person,’ but the overruling mood is one of belief, not of inquiry or dissent. So long as the belief in The Dreaming lasts, there can be no momentary flash of Athenian questioning' to grow into a great movement of sceptical unbelief which destroys the given unities.

There are many other such ‘onenesses’ which I believe I could substantiate. A blackfellow may ‘see’ as ‘a unity' two persons, such as two siblings or a grandparent and grandchild; or a living man and something inanimate, as when he tells you that, say, the wollybutt tree, a totem, is his wife’s brother. (This is not quite as strange as it may seem. Even modern psychologists tend to include part of ’environment’ in a definition’ of 'person' or ‘personality’.) T here is also some kind of unity

/ ' ■ *

Pandak, ¿ríijí, as an old man. H e is a member of the D im tn in elan, and painted the picture on which the endpapers are based as a g if t to the author, who has been a close friend for over forty years.

The painting is an attempt by Pandak to depict ‘all the world*, the totality of things in the cosmos. It is a work of high imagination.

T he symbolism of the painting is somewhat obscure, and draws upon a mythology too tenuous for a clear account. B ut it depicts five strata or bands of reality. The topmost stratum is that of the four suns, which move clockwise. The first-appearing sun (or the sun in its first ascension— Stanner could not determine which) is both female and ophitic, the second and third suns are male, but the fourth is again female, surrounded by clouds. The suns are depicted as nearer the earth than the remote stars, which again are female (and unmarried). The second stratum is that of the M ilky W ay, the third that of the moon (shown as a cluster of forms between Ínew* and fu ll) , the planets, and the morning star. T he planets are male, the morning star female, w ith children. The fourth stratum is th a t of the earth itself, which is depicted as a steady platform of earth and trees and places near and far, with a fa in t hint of perspective. The fifth stratum is the within' or the Íunderneath’ of the earth, through which great (male) stars pass nightly. Each segment of the earth is depicted as a d is t in c t icountry \

P a m h i as a young man w ith his w ift L itttha

between waking-life and dream-life: the means by which, in Aboriginal understanding, a man fathers a child, is not by sexual intercourse, but by the act of dreaming about a spirit-child. His own spirit, during a dream, 'finds* a child and directs it to his wife, who then conceives. Physical congress between a man and a woman is contingent, not a necessary prerequisite. Through the medium of dream-contact with a spirit an artist is inspired to produce a new song. It is by dreaming that a man divines the intention of someone to kill him by sorcery, or of relatives to visit him. And, as I have suggested, it is by the act of dreaming, in some way difficult for a European to grasp, because of the force of our analytic abstraction, that a blackfellow conceives himself to make touch with whatever it is that is continuous between The Dreaming and the Here-and-Now.

The truth of it seems to be that man, society and nature, and past, present and future, are at one together within a unitary system of such a kind that its ontology cannot illumine minds too much under the influence of humanism, rationalism and science. One cannot easily, in the mobility of modern life and thought, grasp the vast intuitions of

White Man gat no Dreaming

stability and permanence, and of life and man, at the heart of Aboriginal ontology.

It is fatally easy for Europeans, encountering such things for the first time, to go on to suppose that ‘mysticism’ of this kind rules all Aboriginal thought. It is not so. ‘Logical’thought and ‘rational’ conduct are about as widely present in Aboriginal life as they are on the simpler levels of European life. Once one understands three things—the primary intuitions which the blackfellow has formed about the nature of the universe and man, those things in both which he thinks interesting and significant, and the conceptual system from within which he reasons about them, then the suppositions about prelogic- alky, illogicality, and non-rationality can be seen to be merely absurd. A nd if one wishes to see a really brilliant demonstration of deductive thought, one has only to see a blackfellow tracking a wounded kangaroo, and persuade him to say why he interprets given signs in a certain way.

T h e second means of dealing with the notion of T he Dreaming K as I said, to try to relate it to things familiar in our own intellects.! history. From this viewpoint, it is a cosmogony, an account of the begetting of the universe, a study about creation. It is also a cosmology, an account or theory of how what was created became an ordered system. T o be more precise, how the universe became a moral system.

II one analyses the hundreds of tales about The Dreaming, one can see within them three elements. The first concerns the great awr- veh—how all the fire and water in the world were stolen and recaptured ; how men made a mistake over sorcery and now have to die from it; how the hills, rivers, and waterholes were made; how the sun, moon, and stars were set upon their courses; and many other dramas of this kind. T h e second element tells how certain things were instituted for the first time—how animals and men diverged from a joint stock that was neither one nor the other; how the blacknosed kangaroo got his black nose and the porcupine his quills; how such social divisions as tribes, clans, and language groups were set up; how spirit-children were first placed in the waterholes, the winds, and leaves of trees. A third elem ent, if I am not mistaken, allows one to suppose that many of the main institutions of present-day life were already ruling in The Dream ing, e.g. marriage, exogamy, sister-exchange, and initiation, as well as many of the well-known breaches of custom. The men of The Dreaming committed adultery, betrayed and killed each other, were

The Dreaming (1953)

greedy, stole and committed the very wrongs committed by those now alive.

Now, if one disregards the imagery in which the oral literature of The Dreaming is cast, one may perhaps come to three conclusions.

The tales are a kind of commentary, or statement, on what is thought to be permanent and ordained at the very basis of the world and life. They are a way of stating the principle which animates things. I would call them a poetic key to Reality. T he Aboriginal does not ask himself the philosophical-type questions: What is ‘real?’ How many ‘kinds’ of ‘reality’ are there? What are the ‘properties’ of ‘reality?’ How are the properties ‘interconnected’? This is the idiom of Western intellectual discourse and the fruit of a certain social history. His tales are, however, a kind of answer to such questions so far as they have been asked at all. They may not be a ‘definition’, but they are a ‘key’ to reality, a key to the singleness and the plurality of things set up once-for-all when, in The Dreaming, the universe became man’s universe. The active philosophy of Aboriginal life transforms this ‘key’, which is expressed in the idiom of poetry, drama, and symbolism, into a principle that The Dreaming determines not only what life is but also what it can he. Life, so to speak, is a one-possibility thing, and what this is, is the ‘meaning’ of The Dreaming.

The tales are also a collation of what is validly known about such ordained permanencies. T he blacks cite The Dreaming as a chapter of absolute validity in answer to all questions of why and haw. In this sense, the tales can be regarded as being, perhaps not a definition, but a ‘key’ of Truth. '

They also state, by their constant recitation of what was done rightly and wrongly in The Dreaming, the ways in which good men should, and bad men will, act now. In this sense, they are a ‘key’ or guide to the norms of conduct, and a prediction of how men will err.

One may thus say that, after a fashion—a cryptic, symbolic, and poetic fashion—the tales are ‘a philosophy’ in the garb of an oral literature. T he European has a philosophic literature which expresses a largely deductive understanding of reality, truth, goodness, and beauty. The blackfellow has a mythology, a ritual, and an art which express an intuitive, visionary, and poetic understanding of the same ultimates. In following out The Dreaming, the blackfellow ‘lives* this philosophy. It is an implicit philosophy, but nevertheless a real one. Whereas we hold (and may live) a philosophy of abstract propositions,

White Man got no Dreaming

attained by someone standing professionally outside ‘life' and treating it as an object of contemplation and inquiry, the blackfellow holds his philosophy in mythology, attained as the social product of an indefi nitely ancient past, and proceeds to live it out ‘in' life, in part through a ritual and an expressive art, and in part through non-sacred social customs.

European minds are made uneasy by the facts that the stories are, quite plainly, preposterous; are often a mass of internal contradictions; are encrusted by superstitious fancies about magic, sorcery, hobgob lins, and superhuman heroes; and lack the kind of theme and struc tu re—in other words, the ‘story’ element—for which we look. Many of us cannot help feeling that such things can only be the products of absurdly ignorant credulity and a lower order of mentality. This is to fall victim to a facile fallacy. O ur own intellectual history is not an absolute standard by which to judge others. T he worst imperialisms are those of preconception.

Custom is the reality, beliefs but the shadows which custom makes on the wall. Since the tales, in any case, are not really ‘explanatory’ in purpose or function, they naturally lack logic, system and complete ness. It is simply pointless to look for such things within them. But we are not entitled to suppose that, because the tales are fantastical, the social life producting them is itself fantastical. T he shape of reality is always distorted in the shadows it throws. O ne finds much logic, system and rationality in the blacks' actual scheme of life.

T hese tales are neither simply illustrative nor simply explanatory; they are fanciful and poetic in content because they are based on visionary and intuitive insights into mysteries; and, if we are ever to understand them, we must always take them in their complex concent. If, then, they make more sense to the poet, the artist, and the philosopher than to the clinicians of human life, let us reflect on the withering effect on sensibility of our pervasive rationalism, rather than depreciate the gifts which produced the Aboriginal imaginings. And in no case should we expect the tales, prima facie, to be even interesting if studied out of context. Aboriginal mythology is quite unlike the Scandinavian, Indian, or Polynesian mythologies.

The Dreaming (1953)

I I I

In my own understanding, T he Dreaming is a proof that the black fellow shares with us two abilities which have largely made human history what it is.

The first of these we might call 'the metaphysical gift'. I mean the ability to transcend oneself, to make acts of imagination so that one can stand ‘outside’ or 'away from’ oneself, and turn the universe, oneself and one's fellows into objects of contemplation. T he second ability is a ‘drive' to try to ‘make sense' out of human experience and to find some ‘principle’ in the whole human situation. This 'drive' is, in some way, built into the constitution of the human mind. N o one who has real knowledge of Aboriginal life can have any doubt that they possess, and use, both abilities very much as we do. They differ from us only in the directions in which they turn their gifts, the idiom in which they express them, and the principles of intellectual control.

T he Aborigines have no gods, just or unjust, to adjudicate the world. N ot even by straining can one see in such culture-heroes as Baiame and Darumulum the true hint of a Yahveh, jealous, omniscient, and omnipotent. T he ethical insights are dim and somewhat coarse in texture. One can find in them little trace, say, of the inverted pride, the self-scrutiny, and the consciousness of favour and destiny which characterised the early Jews. A glimpse, but no truly poignant sense, of moral dualism; no notion of grace or redemption; no whisper of inner peace and reconcilement; no problems of worldly life to be solved only by a consummation of history; no heaven of reward or hell of punishment. T he blackfellow's after-life is but a shadowy replica of worldly-life, so none flee to inner sanctuary to escape the world. T here are no prophets, saints, or illuminati. There is a concept of goodness, but it lacks true scruple. Men can become ritually unclean, but may be cleansed by a simple mechanism. T here is a moral law but, as in the beginning, men are both good and bad, and no one is racked by the knowledge. I imagine there could never have been an Aboriginal Ezekiel, any more than there could have been a Job. T he two sets of insights cannot easily be compared, but it is plain that their underlying moods are wholly unlike, and their store of meaningfulness very uneven. In the one there seem an almost endless possibility of growth, and a mood of censoriousness and pessimism. In the other, a kind of standstill, and a mood which is neither tragic nor optimistic. T he

White Man got no Dreaming

Aborigines are not shamed or inspired by a religious thesis of what men m ight become by faith and grace. Their metaphysic assents, without brooding or challenge, to what men evidently have to be because the term s of life are cast. Yet they have a kind of religiosity cryptically displayed in their magical awareness of nature, in their complex totemism, ritual and art, and pechaps too even in their intricately ordered life.

T hey are, of course, nomads—hunters and foragers who grow nothing, build little, and stay nowhere long. They make almost no physical mark on the environment. Even in areas which are still inhabited, it takes a knowledgeable eye to detect their recent presence. W ithin a m atter of weeks, the roughly cleared camp-sites may be erased by sun, rain and wind. After a year or two there may be nothing to suggest that the country was ever inhabited. Until one stumbles on a few old flint-tools, a stone quarry, a shell-midden, a rock painting, or something of the kind, one may think the land had never known the touch of man.

They neither dominate their environment nor seek to change it. ‘Children of nature’ they are not, nor are they nature’s ‘masters'. One can only say they are ‘at one’ with nature. T he whole ecological principle of their life m ight be summed up in the Baconian aphor ism— natura non vincitur nisi parendo: ‘nature is not to be conquered except by obeying'. Naturally, one finds metaphysical and social reflections of the fact.

They move about, carrying their scant possessions, in small bands of anything from ten to sixty persons. Each band belongs to a given locality. A number of bands—anything from three to four up to twelve o r fifteen, depending on the fertility of the area—make up a ‘tribe’. A tribe is usually a language or dialect group which thinks of itself as having a certain unity of common speech and shared customs. The tribes range in size from a few hundred to a few thousands souls.

O ne rarely sees a tribe as a formed entity. It comes together and lives as a unit only for a great occasion—a feast, a corroboree, a hunt, an initiation, or a formal duel. After a few days—at the most weeks—it breaks up again into smaller bands or sections of bands: most com monly into a group of brothers, with their wives, children, and grandchildren, and perhaps a few close relatives. These parties rove about their family locality or, by agreement, the territories of imme diate neighbours. They do not wander aimlessly, but to a purpose, and

The Dreaming (1953)

in tune with the seasonal food supply. O ne can almost plot a year of their life in terms of movement towards the places where honey, yams, grass-seeds, eggs, or some other food staple, is in bearing and ready for eating.

T he uncomplex visible routine, and the simple segmentation, are very deceptive. It took well over half a century for Europeans to realise that, behind the outward show, was an inward structure of surprising complexity. It was a century before any real understanding of this structure developed.

In one tribe with which I am familiar, a very representative tribe, there are about 100 ‘invisible’ divisions which have to be analysed before one can claim even a serviceable understanding of the tribe’s organisation. T he structure is much more complex than that of an Australian village of the same size. T he complexity is in the most striking contrast with the comparative simplicity which rules in the two other departments of Aboriginal life—the material culture, on the one hand, and the ideational or metaphysical culture on the other. W e have, I think, to try to account for this contrast in some way.

T heir creative ‘drive’ to make sense and order out of things has concentrated on the social rather than on the metaphysical or the materials side. Consequently, there has been an unusually rich deve lopment of what the anthropologist calls ‘social structure,’ the network of enduring relations recognised between people. This very intricate system is an intellectual and social achievement of a high order. It is not, like an instinctual response, a phenom enon of ‘nature’; it is not, like art or ritual, a complex type of behaviour passionately added to ‘nature’, in keeping with metaphysical insight but without rational and intelligible purposes which can be clearly stated; it has to be compared, I think, with such a secular achievement as, say, parliamentary government in a European society. It is truly positive knowledge.

One may see within it three things: given customs, 'of which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary’; a vast body of cumulative knowledge about the effects of these customs on a society in given circumstances; and the use of the power of abstract reason to rationalise the resultant relations into a system.

But it is something much more; their social organisation has become the source of the dominant mode of Aboriginal thinking. T he blacks use social organisation to give a bony structure to parts of the world-outlook suggested by intuitive speculation. I mean by this that they have taken

White Man got no Dreaming

som e of its fundamental principles and relations and have applied them to very much wider sets of phenomena. This tends to happen if any type of system of thought becomes truly dominant. It is, broadly, what Europeans did with 'religion' and 'science' as systems: extended their principles and categories to fields far beyond the contexts in which the systems grew.

T hus, the blacks have taken the male-female social principle and have extended it to the non-human world. In one tribe I have studied, all women, without exception, call particular birds or trees by the same kinship terms which they apply to actual relatives. In the same way, all me n without exception use comparable terms for a different set of trees or birds. From this results what the anthropologist calls 'sex totemism'. T h e use of other principles results in other types of totemism. An understanding of this simple fact removes much of the social, if not the ritual, mystery of totemism. Again, the principle of relatedness itself, relatedness between known people by known descent through known marriages, is extended over the whole face of human society. The same term s of kinship which are used for close agnatic and affinal relatives are used for every other person an Aboriginal meets in the course of his life: strangers, friends, enemies, and known kin may all be called by the same terms as one uses for brother, father, mother's sister, father's m other's brother, and so on. This is what an anthropologist means when he says 'Aboriginal society is a society of kinship'.

I t might even be argued that the blacks have done much the same thing with 'time'. T im e as a continuum is a concept only hazily present in the Aboriginal mind. What might be called social time is, in a sense, 'bent' into cycles or circles. The most controlled understanding of it is by reckoning in terms of generation-classes, which are arranged into named and recurring cycles. As far as the blackfellow thinks about time at all, his interest lies in the cycles rather than in the continuum, and each cycle is in essence a principle for dealing with social inter-relatedness.

IV O ut of all this may come for some an understanding of the blackfellow very different from that which has passed into the ignorance and vulgarity of popular opinion.

The Dreaming (1953)

One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysic goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood and spirit of 'assent'; neither despair nor resignation, optimism nor pessimism, quietism nor indifference. T he mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the Renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism, and science challenge their own hopes, indeed, their beginnings.

Much association with the blackfellow makes me feel I may not be far wrong in saying that, unlike us, he seems to see 'life' as a one-possibility thing. This may be why he seems to have almost no sense of tragedy. If 'tragedy is a looking at fate for a lesson in deportment on life's scaffold', the Aboriginal seems to me to have read the lesson and to have written it into the very conception of how men should live, or else to have stopped short of the insight that there are gods either just or unjust. N or have 1 found in him much self-pity. These sentiments can develop only if life presents real alternatives, or if it denies an alternative that one feels should be there. A philosophy of assent fits only a life of unvarying constancy. I do not at all say that pain, sorrow, and sadness have no place in Aboriginal life, for I have seen them all too widely. All I mean is that the blacks seem to have gone beyond, or not quite attained, the human quarrel with such things. Their rituals of sorrow, their fortitude in pain, and their undemon strative sadness seem to imply a reconciliation with the terms of life such that 'peace is the understanding of tragedy and at the same time its preservation’, or else that they have not sensed life as baffled by either fate or wisdom.

Like all men, he is also a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his mitier, and—in some sense—his fate, is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, 'making sense’ out of the social relations among men living together. His intricate social organisation is an impressive essay on the economy of conflict, tension, and experiment in a life situation at the absolute pole of our own.

Like all men, too, he pays the price of his insights and solutions. We look to a continuous unfolding of life, and to a blissful attainment of the J>etter things for which, we say, man has an infinite capacity. For some time, nothing has seemed of less consequence to us than the maintenance of continuity. T he cost, in instability and inequity, is

White M an got no Dreaming

proving very heavy. Aboriginal life has endured feeling that continuity, not man, is the measure of all. The cost in the world of power and change is extinction. What defeats the blackfellow in the modern world, fundamentally, is his transcendentalism. So much of his life and thought are concerned with The Dreaming that it stultifies his ability to develop. This is not a new thing in human history. A good analogy is with the process in Chinese poetry by which, according to Arthur Waley, its talent for classical allusion became a vice which finally destroyed it altogether.

A ‘philosophy of life*, that is, a system of mental attitudes towards the conduct of life, may or may not be consistent with an actual way of life. W hether it is or is not will depend on how big a gap there is, if any, between what life is and what men think life ought to be. If Ideal and Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the Middle Ages, and seem increasingly to do in this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in between. We are familiar enough with the ‘war of the philosophies* and the tensions of m odern life which express them. Problems of this kind had no place, I would say, in traditional Aboriginal life. It knew nothing, and could not, I think, have known anything of the Christian’s straining for inner perfection; of ‘moral man and immoral society’; of the dilemma of liberty and authority; of intellectual uncertainty, class warfare, and discontent with one’s lot in life—all of which, in some sense, are problems of the gap between Ideal and Real.

T h e Aborigines may have been in Australia for as long as 10 000 years. N o one at present can do more than guess whence or how they came, and there is little more than presumptive evidence on which to base a guess. T he span of time, immense though it may have been, m atters less than the fact that, so far as one can tell, they have been almost completely isolated. Since their arrival, no foreign stimulus has touched them, except on the fringes of the northern and north-western coasts. T o these two facts we must add two others. The physical environm ent has, evidently, not undergone any marked general change, although there has been a slow desiccation of parts of the centre into desert, and some limited coastline changes. The fourth fact is that their tools and material crafts seem to have been very unprogressive.

If we put these four facts about the Aborigines together— 1) an

■dú'ittf. p a in tin g s from K ir in d j figures

'ingin. Below, deta ils of fu-o ot the background

White Man got no Dreaming

immensely long span of time, 2) spent in more or less complete isolation, 3) in a fairly constant environment, 4) with an unprogressive material culture, we may perhaps see why sameness, absence of change, fixed routine, regularity, call it what you will, is a main dimension of their thought and life. Let us sum up this aspect as leading to a metaphysical emphasis on abiding ness. They place a very special value on things remaining unchangingly themselves, on keeping life to a routine which is known and trusted. Absence of change, which means certainty of expectation, seems to them a good thing in itself. One may say, their Ideal and Real come very close together. The value given to continuity is so high that they are not simply a people ‘without a history’: they are a people who have been able, in some sense, to ‘defeat’ history, to become a-historical in mood, outlook, and life. This is why, among them, the philosophy of assent, the glove, fits the hand of actual custom almost to perfection, and the forms of social life, the art, the ritual, and much else take on a wonderful symmetry.

T heir tools and crafts, meagre—pitiably meagre—though they are, have nonetheless been good enough to let them win the battle for survival, and to win it comfortably at that. With no pottery, no knowledge of metals, no wheel, no domestication of animals, no agriculture, they have still been able, not only to live and people the entire continent, but even in a sense to prosper, to win a surplus of goods and develop leisure-time occupations. The evidences of the surplus of yield over animal need are to be seen in the spider-web of trade routes criss-crossing the continent, on which a large volume of non-utilitarian articles circulated, themselves largely the products of leisure. The true leisure-time activities—social entertaining, great ceremonial gatherings, even much of the ritual and artistic life— impressed observers even from the beginning. T he notion of Abori ginal life as always preoccupied with the risk of starvation, as always a hair’s breadth from disaster, is as great a caricature as Hobbes’s notion of savage life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. The best corrective of any such notion is to spend a few nights in an Aboriginal camp, and experience directly the unique joy in life which can be attained by a people of few wants, an other-worldly cast of mind and a simple scheme of life which so shapes a day that it ends with communal singing and dancing in the firelight.

T h e more one sees of Aboriginal life the stronger the impression that its mode, its ethos, and its principle are variations on a single

The Dreaming (1953)

theme— continuity, constancy, balance, symmetry, regularity, system, or some such quality as these words convey.

One of the most striking things is that there are no great conflicts over power, no great contests for place and office. This single fact explains much else, because it rules out so much that would be destructive of stability. The idea of a formal chief, or a leader with authority over the persons of others in a large number of fields of life—say, for example, as with a Polynesian or African chief—just does not seem to make sense to a blackfellow. N or does even the modified Melanesian notion—that of a man becoming some sort of a leader because he accumulates a great deal of garden-wealth and so gains prestige. There are leaders in the sense of men of unusual skill, initiative, and force and they are given much respect; they may even attract something like a following; but one finds no trace of formal or institutionalised chieftainship. So there are no offices to stimulate ambition, intrigue, or the use of force; to be envied or fought over; or to be lost or won. Power—a real thing in every society—is diffused mainly through one sex, the men, but in such a way that it is not to be won, or lost, in concentrations, by craft, struggle, or coup. It is very much a male-dominated society. The older men dominate the younger; the men dominate the women. N ot that the women are chattels—D r Phyllis Kaberry in her interesting book Aboriginal Woman disposed of that Just-so story very effectively, but there is a great deal of discri mination against them. The mythology justifies this by tales telling how men had to take power from women by force in T he Dreaming. The psychology (perhaps the truth) of it is as obvious as it is amusing. If women were not kept under, they would take over!

At all events, the struggle for power occurred once-for-all. Power, authority, influence, age, status, knowledge, all run together and, in some sense, are the same kind of thing. The men of power, authority, and influence are old men—at least, mature men; the greater the secret knowledge and authority, the higher the status; and the initiations are so arranged (by the old men) that the young men do not acquire full knowledge, and so attain status and authority, until they too are well advanced in years. One can thus see why the great term of respect is ‘old man’— maluka, as in We of the Never-Never T he system is self- protective and self-renewing. The real point of it all is that the checks and balances seem nearly perfect, and no one really seems to want the kind of satisfaction that might come from a position of domination. At

White M an got no Dreaming

th e same time, there is a serpent in Eden. The narrow self-interest of m en exploits The Dreaming.

Power over things? Every canon of good citizenship and common sense is against it, though there are, of course, clear property arrangements. But what could be more useless than a store of food that will not keep, or a heavy pile of spears that have to be carried everywhere? Especially in a society in which the primary virtues are generosity and fair dealing. Nearly every social affair involving goods—food in the family, payments in marriage, inter-tribal exchange—is heavily influenced by equalitarian notions; a notion of reciprocity as a moral obligation; a notion of generously equivalent return; and a surprisingly clear notion of fair dealing, or making things 'level* as the blackfellow calls it in English.

There is a tilt of the system towards the interests of the men, but given this tilt, everything else seems as if carefully calculated to keep it in place. The blacks do not fight over land. There are no wars or invasions to seize territory. They do not enslave each other. There is n o master-servant relation. T here is no class division. There is no property or income inequality. The result is a homeostasis, far- reaching and stable.

I do not wish to create an impression of a social life without egotism, w ithout vitality, without cross-purposes, or without conflict. Indeed, there is plenty of all, as there is of malice, enmity, bad faith, and violence, running along the lines of sex-inequality and age-inequality. B ut this essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And, arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How we shall state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is ‘abidingness’. Piccarda’s answer in the third canto of the Paradiso gives the implicit theme and logic of The Dreaming: e la sua volúntate i nostra pace, ‘His will is our peace.' But the gleam that lighted Judah did not reach the Australian wilderness, and the blacks follow The Dreaming only because their fathers did.

Continuity and Change among the Aborigines

(1958)*

I Some time ago I thought that a suitable topic for my Presidential Address would be ‘The Future and the Aborigines*. A great many people seem to have had the same idea for other addresses about the same time. I did not know this because I was still in a rem ote corner of the continent studying the Aborigines’ past. I then learned that their future was to be discussed by a special symposium of this Section. The title of my address thus had to become 'Continuity and Change in Aboriginal Life*. The topic remains much the same. This is a good illustration of continuity and change.

It is not my wish to cross the wind or steal the thunder of others who are to speak later. I shall therefore limit myself to some very general observations on things which, being continuous from the past of Aboriginal life, and still of influence in the present, are likely to have force in the future, until the Aborigines cease to be themselves, which seems to be what we are about to insist upon their doing.

* Presidential Address to Section F (Anthropology) AN ZAAS, Adelaide, 1958.