Aboriginal Australians

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.

There is no Aboriginal Australian nation. Before 1788 the continent and Tasmania held several hundred distinct polities with their own languages, territories and laws, connected by trade and ceremony routes running for thousands of kilometres. The single category is a colonial administrative product, and it remains in use because governments, courts and censuses need one. That is why the atlas keeps it as a heading and files particular peoples such as the Anangu, the Yolngu, the Wiradjuri and the Kulin under their own names.

The Berndts wrote their survey across a period in which Aboriginal people were counted, moved and legislated for as a single class, and it documents both the diversity that the class concealed and the mission and reserve system that pressed against it. Stanner's 1968 Boyer Lectures gave that pressure its most quoted name, the great Australian silence, meaning the absence of Aboriginal people from the national history then being taught.

The legal position changed slowly. Land rights legislation in the Northern Territory from 1976, and the Mabo judgment of 1992 which rejected the doctrine that the continent had belonged to no one, opened a process by which particular peoples now hold or jointly manage their country. Religious consequences follow directly from it. Joint management arrangements at places such as Uluru give traditional owners standing to decide what visitors may do, what may be photographed, and what may be told.