Nowra, NSW

Dreamtime - a 'What Afterlife' special

'What Afterlife' has been striving to get a handle on Aboriginal belief systems. A quick google reveals umpteen creation myths; as many as there were Aboriginal Peoples, which is a lot.

However, asking a curator in the Australian Museum 'Where do Aborigines go, or think they go, or would like to go, when they die', WA was met with shifty looks and a vague refusal to answer...'Er, there are lots of different beliefs, actually'. Anyway, Museum policy, it was explained, prohibits Caucasian staff from answering such questions on behalf of Aboriginal staff. As the one Aboriginal staff-member was out to lunch, WA was left rudderless.

After a bit more digging, WA is unsure whether this reluctance was due entirely to political correctness or a genuine inability to explain what can't be understood. It may be that Aboriginal beliefs are genuinely unintelligible to the outsider. The language is obscure, even deliberately so...here's a 'for instance'..."The Australian Aborigines speak of jiva or guruwari, a seed power deposited in the earth. In the Aboriginal world view, every meaningful activity, event, or life process that occurs at a particular place leaves behind a vibrational residue in the earth, as plants leave an image of themselves as seeds. The shape of the land - its mountains, rocks, riverbeds, and waterholes - and its unseen vibrations echo the events that brought that place into creation. Everything in the natural world is a symbolic footprint of the metaphysical beings whose actions created our world. As with a seed, the potency of an earthly location is wedded to the memory of its origin. The Aborigines called this potency the "Dreaming" of a place, and this Dreaming constitutes the sacredness of the earth. Only in extraordinary states of consciousness can one be aware of, or attuned to, the inner dreaming of the Earth."

What on Earth does this mean? WA is baffled.

However, let's remember that most of the Aboriginals were killed off by settler-carried smallpox, and those that survived are hardly integrated into modern Australia. There are some who make a living as artists, but many more didgeridoo buskers, bag-people, and others comprising a whole, largely urban, underclass.

The Dreaming was never written down until this modern era. It's about all the Aboriginals have left and it's not surprising that they might want to keep it to themselves.