November 2004.
The Dreaming
In 1623, Dutch East India Company captain Willem Joosten van Colster sailed into the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape Arnhem is named after his ship, the Arnhem, which itself was named after the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands.
(Wikipedia)
One of the reasons we went to Kakadu National Park was to see the Aboriginal art there. Kakadu was one of the last remaining places in Australia with somewhat untarnished Aboriginal culture. The rock art of the area was well-known, so a visit to Arnhem Land was high on our list of things to do when we visited the Top End of Australia.
We had rented a car for the trip from Darwin, so it was easy to drive into the Aboriginal territory just outside of the park. On the edge of a great escarpment that ran the length of Kakadu National Park, the cliffs and rock formations were stunning. Just a short distance into the native lands we came to Ubirr with its famous rock paintings. We had a local guide who explained the paintings to us - how some were quite ancient and others very recent, but it didn't matter because they were all related to the concept of "dream time" (or the Dreaming):
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. These figures were often distinct from gods, as they did not control the material world and were not worshipped but only revered. The concept of the Dreamtime has subsequently become widely adopted beyond its original Australian context and is now part of global popular culture.
(Wikipedia)
Our guide tried to explain things to us, but it was all so foreign and so "nothing I could get my head around" that the explanations fell flat. Even the shamanistic beliefs of eastern Indonesia felt a whole lot more understandable than Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime. I felt sad because the guy was so intent on making us understand. Aboriginal dreamtime is the oldest, continually practiced religion in the world going back 65,000 years according to legend! It must be trying for Aborigines constantly explaining their religious system to people in one brief meeting. Needless to say, we liked the art and the views around the escarpment even if we didn't understand Dreamtime. We saw what we expected to see and were not let down. We soon headed back to our room in Jabiru.
The similarities, however, to the Western USA and Native Americans on reservations, were not lost on us. As soon as we crossed out of "Australia" (Kakadu National Park) into Aboriginal land we were in another country - a poor country of dispossessed people who were desperately trying to cling onto their culture. Aborigines were just as screwed by white Australians as the American Indians were by white Americans. We could have been in Arizona or New Mexico, the experience was the same. It felt profoundly sad - one of the oldest continuous cultures on earth just relegated to the margins of a country as a tourist attraction.
I wonder if the Dreamtime informed them of their fate at the hands of colonizers? Did they not understand the warnings? Did they simply not heed them? I understood so little of Dreamtime - perhaps none of that mattered anyway.
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