Australian Aboriginal Religion

The single label used here covers the traditions of hundreds of distinct peoples across a continent, speaking more than 250 languages before 1788 and around 120 today. They are not dialects of one religion. Ancestral narratives, ceremonies, songs, designs, kinship systems and law differ between neighbouring groups, and rights in them are held by particular people, not shared in common. There is no Aboriginal word for the whole, because the whole is a category created by outsiders needing a heading.

What can be said across groups is limited but real. Religious authority is tied to country: a specific, bounded stretch of land and water with which a group of people stands in a relationship of descent and responsibility. Sites within it are where ancestral beings acted, and those actions are recorded in song, design and ceremony held by the people responsible for that site. Knowledge is therefore located rather than universal, and someone from elsewhere has no standing to speak for it.

Kinship organises the rest. Most systems divide people into named categories that determine who may marry whom, who is responsible for whose ceremony, and who speaks for which country. Totemic relationships link people to species, features and ancestral beings, carrying obligations to look after them.

Songlines, sometimes called dreaming tracks, follow the routes ancestral beings travelled, crossing many groups' countries and many language boundaries. Each group holds the section passing through its own country and performs it with the neighbours who hold the adjoining sections, which makes long ceremonies collaborative undertakings between peoples rather than the property of one.

These are living traditions. Writing about them in the past tense, as much older literature does, is both inaccurate and a habit worth breaking.

Yolngu religion is better documented than that of most Aboriginal nations, and the reason is not that less of it is restricted. It is that Yolngu leaders have repeatedly decided to present parts of it deliberately, in their own terms and for particular purposes. The bark petitions did this in 1963. The Yirrkala church panels, painted in the 1960s by senior men of both moieties for a mission church, set out clan narrative and design at monumental scale in a building where they could be seen.

The Saltwater bark paintings of the late 1990s were made to assert sea rights and were afterwards exhibited and published. Ronald and Catherine Berndt worked in Arnhem Land from the 1940s and produced a large body of published ethnography, and Yolngu knowledge holders have since collaborated with linguists, ethnomusicologists and astronomers on work published under joint authorship. Djulpan, the canoe of three brothers formed from the stars a Greek list calls Orion's belt, is in this atlas because of that kind of work.

None of it makes the whole of the tradition public. There is Yolngu knowledge restricted by clan, by moiety, by age and by initiation, and it is not in the literature; the absence of an account of something is not evidence that no account exists, only that none has been released. What the record contains is material Yolngu chose to put there, and for a living tradition that is the only kind of documentation this atlas treats as usable.

In the 1990s a proposal to bridge the channel between Goolwa and Hindmarsh Island in Ngarrindjeri country produced the longest and most damaging public argument Australia has had about restricted religious knowledge. Ngarrindjeri women stated that the area held knowledge belonging to women, which they could not disclose in general terms and which the bridge would harm. A South Australian royal commission in 1995 concluded that the restricted women's knowledge had been fabricated.

In 2001 the Federal Court, hearing a different case on much fuller evidence, took the other view: Justice von Doussa stated that he was not satisfied that the restricted women's knowledge had been fabricated. Both findings stand on the record, and the two camps that formed around them have not merged. The atlas takes no side, and it is worth being explicit about why. Deciding the question would mean examining material Ngarrindjeri women say is theirs to withhold, which is the thing the dispute was about in the first place. What the atlas records instead is the shape of the problem: that a legal process which requires disclosure in order to test a claim of restriction cannot test such a claim without breaking it, that this was recognised at the time by people on several sides, and that Australian practice has since moved slowly toward mechanisms for receiving restricted evidence in closed session. The bridge was built and opened in 2001.

The English terms the Dreaming and the Dreamtime entered use through anthropologists working in central Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rendering the Arrernte word altyerre. They were then applied to comparable but distinct concepts across the continent: Jukurrpa in Warlpiri, Ngarrankarni in the Kimberley, Wongar among Yolngu peoples, Tjukurpa in the Western Desert, and many more. The words are not synonyms and the concepts do not map onto one another exactly.

The English term also imports two things that are not in the originals. The first is sleep. The connection to dreaming in the English sense is at best partial, and many communities regard it as misleading. The second is time. "Dreamtime" suggests an era that finished, whereas the concepts generally describe something that is ongoing and present, established when ancestral beings shaped the land and continuing to operate in it now. Country is not a record of past events; it is where those beings are.

What the concepts do broadly carry is a unity of origin, law and land. The ancestral beings travelled, made the landforms, water, species and people, laid down the rules under which people live, and remained in the country in one form or another. Ceremony, song and design maintain that arrangement rather than commemorating it, and neglecting them is understood to have consequences for the country itself.

Many communities now prefer their own language terms, or use "the Dreaming" only when speaking to outsiders. Using the local word where it is known is more accurate and is generally what the people concerned would rather see. Where this encyclopedia uses the English term, it is a convenience for readers and not a claim that one concept lies behind it.

A great deal of Aboriginal religious knowledge is restricted. Particular songs, designs, objects, narratives and places are held by particular people and may be seen, heard or spoken of only by those with the right, which typically depends on gender, on stage of initiation, and on descent or standing in relation to the country concerned. This is not secrecy for its own sake. Holding knowledge carries responsibility for it, and disclosing it to people without standing is a serious wrong against the holders and, in many traditions, dangerous to everyone involved.

Men's business and women's business are separately held in most traditions, each with sites, ceremonies and knowledge closed to the other. Early ethnographers, almost all male, recorded men's material and often concluded that women had little religious life; work from the 1970s onward by researchers with access to women's ceremony showed that conclusion to be an artefact of who was allowed to watch. Older published sources should be read with that in mind, and a good deal of what they printed was published without permission and is now formally restricted by the communities concerned.

Related conventions govern the dead. Many communities avoid speaking the name of a person who has died, or displaying their image, for a period after death or permanently, and substitute names are used instead. This is why Australian broadcasters and publications carry warnings that content may include images or voices of people who have died. It is a live protocol, not a historical curiosity.

The practical consequence for an encyclopedia is a limit that should be stated rather than worked around. This entry describes structure, and describes the fact of restriction, using material communities have made public. It does not reproduce restricted content, and any account that claims to give the full contents of a ceremony has either been given specific permission or has committed a breach.