“Aboriginal Australian” is an umbrella term that covers one of the two groups of the indigenous population of Australia, the other one being Torres Strait Islanders. It encompasses a broad range of cultures and communities, with languages alone numbering in the hundreds. With this in mind, it is clear that speaking about Aboriginal Australian cultural tradition as one single thing is a considerable generalization that almost invariably leads to oversimplification. However, the community and continuity of the pre-colonization Australian experience, as well as the hunter-gatherer economies promoting nomadic lifestyle and cultural interaction, had historically ensured that most Aboriginal peoples share at least some cultural notions. In this sense, it is possible to speak of Aboriginal cultural tradition that, while not universal, is still practiced across the continent. Since the colonization, Aboriginals’ cultural perspective shifted from maintaining the cosmic order to preserving the culture itself, but it remains relevant for the solutions to global environmental problems.
One characteristic feature of the Aboriginal Australian cultural tradition is the holistic way in which it approaches to time and space. In this regard, it is necessary to cover its key concept of “Dreaming,” although, admittedly, it may be hard to articulate it in terms of Western knowledge. In a very broad sense, one may describe Dreaming as a collection of cosmogonist, cosmologic, and epic myths and related beliefs. The central premise of the Dreaming is that of supernatural creatures fashioning the universe and establishing norms that are “permanent and ordained at the very basis of the world and life” (Stanner, 2016, p. 204). However, Aboriginal Australian culture does not perceive the Dreaming as a distant mythical past – it covers all of existence through all of the time it exists and has never stopped. Aboriginal Australian tradition does not view time as linear or finite it does not even have a word for “time” as an abstract concept (Stanner, 2016, p. 201). Instead, it views the universe as one continuous and interconnected process of existence that has no end.
This holistic approach to existence on the grand scale also transfers to individual existence. Aboriginal Australian culture does not perceive personhood in the same way as European does by separating it into classifications of mind, body, and spirit (Stanner, 2016). Instead, it views personhood as a unity of all its elements, which are intertwined in a complex system and not juxtaposed to each other in any sort of philosophical dichotomy or trichotomy. In Aboriginal Australian cultural tradition, a person’s name may be as intimate as the private bodily parts – and, hence, not easily given to a stranger (Stanner, 2016). Similarly, the shadow cast by a body is as much a part of a person as the body itself, and threatening it is no different than threatening the individual in question (Stanner, 2016). Moreover, Aboriginal culture may apply the same holistic thinking to a couple of siblings, a parent and a child, or even a person and an inanimate object (Stanner, 2016). The central point here is that Aboriginal Australian culture deals in unities rather than components even when perceiving the existence on a small scale.
Closely related to the holistic worldview briefly covered above is the importance of external reference and contextual knowledge. Walsh (2016) points out that, when Westerners first encounter an Aboriginal narrative, they can be utterly bewildered by its structure. As mentioned above, Aboriginal Australian culture does not view time as either linear or finite. Consequently, an Aboriginal narrative does not necessarily follow the chronological order of the events – or, at the very least, is less explicit about it (Walsh, 2016). Moreover, the narrative relies extensively on the audience’s understanding of the supporting context, which may be merely implied rather than explicitly mentioned. As a result, only those privy to the “shared knowledge base of an Aboriginal audience” may understand the narrative in its full, while those without it will have no such opportunity (Walsh, 2016, p. 198). This example demonstrates the difference in how Western and Aboriginal cultures approach learning and information sharing. While the Western cultural tradition aims to break knowledge into functional pieces and structure it for effective distribution, the Aboriginal one puts a heavy emphasis on a holistic understanding of knowledge as a reference system.
That is not to say that the perspectives entertained by the Aboriginal cultural tradition did not shift over time. As far as a Western anthropologist can judge, for most of its history, the Aboriginal tradition was predominantly concerned with the maintenance and renewal of stable social and ecological frameworks. It was already mentioned before that the Dreamtime, among many of its other meanings, refers to a set of cosmological beliefs commonly practiced throughout Australia. However, Dreaming as a concept has a much broader application, and an Aboriginal may use it to describe all sorts of things, from a personal totem to the principles of customary law (Stanner, 2016). Hence, one can reasonably assume that the primary role of the Aboriginal tradition is to maintain and reproduce the Dreaming as a set of meanings and beliefs. These meanings, describing a holistic system where “man, society, and nature and past, present, and future” are all intertwined in one continuous unity, represent a status quo to be upheld (Stanner, 2016, p. 203). This was probably the way the Aboriginal Australians perceived their cultural tradition for most of its history.
This perception certainly changed during and after the colonization of Australia. Contemporary Aboriginal perspectives on their cultural tradition are rarely if ever, not affected by the sheer fact of the British colonization. As a result, the perceptions shift from the maintenance of the cosmic order preordained in the Dreaming to the maintenance and even reclamation of lore and knowledge that pertains to it. In an attempt to preserve and protect their cultural tradition, some Aboriginal people adopt Western cultural media as a vehicle for it. For example, Wirrinyga Band is an Aboriginal rock group from Milingimbi, an island in Australia’s Northern Territory (Dunbar-Hall, 2006). The band’s work is strongly rooted in the Aboriginal cultural tradition – in fact, both of its albums issued as of 2006 were called Dreamtime Shadow and Dreamtime Wisdom Modern Time (Dunbar-Hall, 2006). While certainly being a statement of and about the Aboriginal culture by those belonging to it, Wirrinyga Band still uses a Western music style (Dunbar-Hall, 2006). Thus, the Aboriginals’ contemporary perception of their cultural tradition leans closer to preserving it rather than maintaining the balance of existence long upset by eh colonization.
While it does not dominate the entire Australian continent as it once used to, the Aboriginal cultural tradition remains relevant in the global movement for environmental preservation. Its holistic approach, which has been stressed time and again in this paper, necessarily leads to the Aboriginal perception of Australian ecosystems as part of the cosmic order outlined by the Dreaming. As a result, Aboriginal communities have amassed a vast knowledge of sustainability practices of, as they put it, “relating with, knowing about, and looking after Country” (Austin et al., 2019, p. 582). This knowledge, firmly embedded in the Aboriginal cultural tradition, is directly relevant to environmental protection and sustainability in the Australian context. Austin et al. (2019) note that utilizing it entails difficulties inevitable in the attempt to refrain Aboriginal Australian knowledge in terms of Western scientific knowledge. However, this very fact stresses the importance of understanding the Aboriginal cultural tradition to be able to acquire both information and knowledge from it. In this sense, Aboriginal Australian culture, while having lost much during the colonization, maintains its relevance until the present day.
As one can see, the Aboriginal Australian cultural tradition is profoundly non-Western and approaches time, space, and existence itself in ways that are hard to comprehend within the Western rationalist tradition. Its characteristic feature is a holistic approach to the universe that, unlike the Western culture, does not aim to separate existence into distinct elements and stresses their coherent unity instead. The key concept of the Aboriginal Australian cultural tradition is Dreaming, which primarily refers to a set of creation myths but has a very broad range of other meanings related to all aspects of life. Colonization changes impacted the meaning that the Aboriginal Australians assigned to their culture and, instead of the maintenance of the cosmic order, they now often focus on the maintenance of the culture itself. However, the knowledge embedded in the Aboriginal Australian tradition remains relevant for environmental protection even today.
References
Austin, D. J., Robinson, C. J., Matthews, D., Oades, D., Wiggin, A., Dobbs, R, J., Lincoln, G., Garnett, C. T. (2019). An indigenous-led approach for regional knowledge partnerships in the Kimberley region of Australia. Human Ecology, 47, 577–588.
Dunbar-Hall, P. (2006). ‘We have survived’: Popular music as a representation of Australian Aboriginal cultural loss and reclamation. In I. Peddie (Ed.), The resisting Muse: Popular music and social protest (pp. 119-131). Routledge.
Stanner, W. E. H. (2016). The Dreaming. In J. Rothenberg and D. Rothenberg (Eds.), Symposium of the whole: A range of discourse toward an ethnopoetics (pp. 201-205). University of California Press.
Walsh, M. (2016). Ten postulates concerning narrative in Aboriginal Australia. Narrative Inquiry, 26(2), 193-216.