Aboriginal Australia is not one religion, and the phrase the Dreaming is an English approximation that W. E. H. Stanner warned against reading as a myth of the distant past. Stanner rendered the sense of the Arrernte and neighbouring terms as everywhen, a time that is also a condition: the ancestral beings who shaped the country are understood to remain in it, so that a rock, a soak or a stand of trees is not a memorial to an event but the being itself. Law, in this understanding, is not legislated. It was laid down with the country and is inherited together with responsibility for a particular tract of it.
Ronald and Catherine Berndt's survey records how that responsibility is distributed. Rights in a story, a design, a song cycle or a ceremony belong to specific people through descent and through the section systems that order kinship, and they carry duties to perform, to teach and to withhold. A great deal of what is held is restricted, to initiated men or to women, and the atlas records that restriction rather than working around it. The material is closed, and it is named as closed.
Deborah Bird Rose's work on country describes the same relation from the land's side. Country is spoken of as a living entity that is visited, sung to, worried about and looked after, and neglect of it is a moral failure rather than an economic one. Ceremony maintains that relation, and the protocol on the names and images of the recently dead, still observed across much of the continent, is a live obligation rather than a survival.