Dreamtime
The Dreaming, also referred to as Dreamtime, is a term devised by early anthropologists to refer to a religio-cultural worldview attributed to Australian Aboriginal mythology. It was originally used by Francis Gillen, quickly adopted by his colleague Walter Baldwin Spencer, and thereafter popularised by A. P. Elkin, who later revised his views.
The Dreaming is used to represent Aboriginal concepts of "Everywhen", during which the land was inhabited by ancestral figures, often of heroic proportions or with supernatural abilities.
The term is based on a rendition of the Arandic word alcheringa, used by the Arrernte (Aranda, Arunta) people of Central Australia, although it has been argued that it is based on a misunderstanding or mistranslation. Some scholars suggest that the word's meaning is closer to "eternal, uncreated". Anthropologist William Stanner said that the concept was best understood by non-Aboriginal people as "a complex of meanings". Jukurrpa (or Tjukurpa), a widespread term used by Warlpiri people and other peoples of the Western Desert cultural bloc, is sometimes also translated as Dreaming.
By the 1990s, Dreaming had acquired its own currency in popular culture, based on idealised or fictionalised conceptions of Australian mythology. Since the 1970s, Dreaming has also returned from academic usage via popular culture and tourism and is now ubiquitous in the English vocabulary of Aboriginal Australians in a kind of "self-fulfilling academic prophecy".
The station-master, magistrate, and amateur ethnographer Francis Gillen first used the terms in an ethnographical report in 1896. Along with Walter Baldwin Spencer, Gillen published a major work, Native Tribes of Central Australia, in 1899. In that work, they spoke of the Alcheringa as "the name applied to the far distant past with which the earliest traditions of the tribe deal". Five years later, in their Northern Tribes of Central Australia, they gloss the far distant age as "the dream times", link it to the word alcheri meaning "dream", and affirm that the term is current also among the Kaytetye and Anmatyerr.
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- 2025-12-01T00:00:00.000000Z
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- 2019-11-21T00:00:00.000000Z
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