The Dreaming

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, 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.

Early doubts about the precision of Spencer and Gillen's English gloss were expressed by the German Lutheran pastor and missionary Carl Strehlow in his 1908 book Die Aranda (The Arrernte). He noted that his Arrernte contacts explained altjira (also spelled alchera), whose etymology was unknown, as an eternal being who had no beginning. In the Upper Arrernte language, the proper verb for "to dream" was altjirerama, literally "to see God". Strehlow theorised that the noun is the somewhat rare word altjirrinja, which Spencer and Gillen gave a corrupted transcription and a false etymology. "The native," Strehlow concluded, "knows nothing of 'dreamtime' as a designation of a certain period of their history."

Strehlow gives Altjira or Altjira mara (mara meaning "good") as the Arrernte word for the eternal creator of the world and humankind. Strehlow describes him as a tall, strong man with red skin, long fair hair, and emu legs, with many red-skinned wives (with dog legs) and children. In Strehlow's account, Altjira lives in the sky (which is a body of land through which runs the Milky Way, a river).

However, by the time Strehlow was writing, his contacts had been converts to Christianity for decades, and critics suggested that Altjira had been used by missionaries as a word for the Christian God.