The first hundred years of colonization

Abstract

Human language has existed in Australia for some 40,000 years. In that time the Aboriginal peoples of Australia — perhaps from the beginning of their occupancy of the land, perhaps much more recently — developed a very rich oral literature. It contains long song cycles (many of them dealing with hidden sacred meanings), shorter communal songs for dancing and entertainment, songs of love and of mourning, songs on contemporary events, spoken poems, and prose tales. Those who perform them believe that the inspiration for the sacred song cycles came from the mythical time of the Dreaming and that in his dreams and in performance the poet is in contact with the ancestral spirits. In contemporary poems, too, the songman or songwoman is thought to have attained material and inspiration through communion with his or her personal spirit in dreams. It is not surprising, then, that much of the material concerns the mythical time of the making of the earth, sun, and moon, the making of human beings and their arrival in their own land, and the making of trees, birds and animals. Much also concerns the right relationships that human beings must have with the land, its creatures, relatives and others in the clan, and the spirits: some of it is concerned with sacred sites, some of it with secret symbols whose meaning is known only to the initiated; some of it with the rituals expressing the meaning of puberty, marriage, old age and death.