In many Aboriginal Australian traditions, the period during which ancestral Creator Beings traveled across a formless land, shaping it through their actions into the rivers, waterholes, rock formations, and other features that define particular Countries today, is known in English as the Dreaming, translating terms that differ by language group, such as Tjukurpa among Anangu peoples of the Western Desert, and rendered in other contexts as the Dreamtime. As these beings traveled, hunted, fought, transformed, and eventually settled or returned into the land itself at particular sites, their journeys are held to have simultaneously established the physical landscape and the laws, kinship structures, and ceremonial responsibilities that continue to govern the lives of the people connected to that Country.
A defining feature of the Dreaming, distinguishing it from a purely historical account of a closed mythological past, is that it is understood as an ongoing spiritual reality rather than a finished era: the ancestral beings and the power of their original actions remain present in the land, in ceremony, and in the responsibilities carried by living custodians, so that engaging properly with a site or performing the associated ceremony is understood to renew and maintain the ancestral order rather than merely to commemorate it. Songlines, or Dreaming tracks, are the specific paths ancestral beings are held to have traveled, and they frequently cross enormous distances and multiple language groups, encoded across that distance in song cycles, ceremony, and art for which responsibility is distributed among many different custodians along the route.
Sources The World of the First AustraliansRonald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt with Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and WildernessDeborah Bird Rose