Australia: The Land Where Time Began

A biography of the Australian continent 

According to the stories of the Pitjantjatjara of the desert country, during the Dreamtime or Creation period, Tjukurpa, the creation beings, who had previously lived under the ground, emerged on the surface. The ancestral beings created the features of the landscape with their heroic deeds, prior to which its had been flat, featureless and desolate. These Tjukurpa beings are credited with creating all the animals and plants, as well as the landscape, and made the first tools and weapons for the people, and gave the laws and rituals to the people. These beings travelled around, leaving landscape features wherever they stopped and every thing they did. Though they had the forms of animals and plants, they lived as the people who followed them did.

In central Australia there is no single totemic creation being, but many, all existing during the Dreaming, or Dreamtime. They gave rise to all the people, each being giving rise to the people who lived after the Dreaming. Each man has his own Dreaming path to follow, the path first followed by his totemic ancestor as he travelled around creating all the places the man visits to perform various rituals.

When the men carried out the sacred ceremonies, covered with feathers, ochre, grass seeds that are stuck to their bodies with blood from their own bodies, the participants at various Dreamings become a particular being from the Dreamtime, such as Nintaka the perentie, Windaroo the bandicoot, Kalaia the emu, Kanga the crow, Malu the kangaroo, Mala the hare-wallaby.

Sources & Further reading

Jennifer Isaacs, Australia Dreaming: 40,000 years of Aboriginal History, New Holland Publishers, 2005