Australian Aboriginal

This entry covers hundreds of distinct peoples, with hundreds of languages, across a continent, and treating them as one religious tradition would be false. The atlas holds the label as a heading and says so here rather than implying a unity that does not exist.

What can be said at this level is limited and is worth saying plainly. Across many of these traditions, the ancestral beings who shaped the land are understood to have travelled through it, to have made its features by their actions, and to remain present in those features. The relationship is between a specific people and specific country, and it is not transferable. A story, a design or a ceremony belongs to particular people who are responsible for it, and that responsibility is the organising principle of the whole religious system.

This is why there is no roster to enumerate. The ancestral beings of one people are theirs, and a neighbouring people has its own; what is shared between them is shared by agreement and along established lines, not because there is a common pantheon underneath.

These are living traditions with living custodians. A great deal of the material is restricted, some to initiated men, some to women, and the protocol on the names and images of the deceased is current practice rather than historical curiosity. This atlas states that the restriction exists and reproduces none of what it covers.

The transmission of these traditions is oral, ceremonial and geographic. Knowledge is held in song cycles that follow the routes of ancestral beings across country, in designs, in dance, and in the land itself, and it is transferred in stages, over a lifetime, to people entitled to receive it. It was never a corpus awaiting collection.

The outside record begins in the nineteenth century, produced during dispossession, and it carries every problem that implies. Early collectors recorded what they were shown or what they could obtain, sometimes from people who were not entitled to give it, and published it without restriction into a world that had no idea what it was reading. Some of that published material is now the subject of active requests for return and for restriction, and some has been withdrawn from circulation at the request of the communities concerned.

Twentieth-century anthropology produced much better work and repeated some of the same errors, including the publication of restricted men's material in books that women of the relevant communities were then not permitted to open.

Since the later twentieth century the position has changed substantially. Communities control access to their own material, keeping places and archives operate under community protocols, and Indigenous scholars and knowledge holders determine what is published.

The atlas records that the traditions exist and how they are organised, and defers on everything held.