Water, Law and Ongoing Environmental Significance

Deborah Bird Rose's work on Aboriginal views of landscape situates Rainbow Serpent traditions within a wider, still actively significant Aboriginal environmental and legal framework in which the great creative serpents associated with particular waterholes and rivers are understood as continuing to inhabit and hold responsibility for those places, meaning their significance is not confined to a past creative era but remains a live, present consideration in how the relevant communities relate to and care for country today, including in contemporary land and water management contexts where traditional owners are consulted specifically because of this ongoing connection. As with Baiame and Bunjil, the fuller ceremonial and Law content connected to any specific regional Rainbow Serpent tradition is properly the domain of the community that holds it, restricted in many cases by gender, age or initiation status, and this atlas keeps its account at the level of the widely published comparative pattern, water, fertility, land-shaping and continuing custodianship, without describing or summarising restricted material belonging to any one nation's specific tradition.