Who Are The Aboriginals?

The first question I wondered to myself was who are these so called ‘Aboriginals’? What aspects of their lifestyle are different from my own and why? Numerous questions filled my mind, I believed that answering them would let me understand this culture in entirety. Then I learned in class that the only way I could ever fully understand a culture would be to share their same web of meaning, something that would now be borderline impossible because I have already built my own. Instead, I will hunt the answers to my questions and hope to understand how the Indigenous Australian web was woven.

I picked up a book called Indigenous Australian Voices from the library. One of the editors of this book is a Nyungar woman, which I found out is a Western Australian based group of Aboriginals. In the Preface, she gives a brief account of the origins of the Indigenous People. Although scientific studies provide evidence that the Aboriginals inhabited the Australian continent for about 175,000 years and experts say the culture has the longest continuous cultural history in the world, Aboriginal People reject this approach. Instead, the trace their origins to what they call the Dreaming, or Dreamtime. This belief encompasses the period of creation in which it is believed that mythical beings came out of the earth, water and sky and created the mountains, water holes, rivers, flora & fauna, and the Indigenous People; who were given the job of caretakers of the world that surrounded them. In order to maintain a balance between humanity, life, and non-life, the Aborigines created a system of rules and regulations.

I find the clash between scientific evidence and Indigenous belief to be interesting because a very similar conflict exists between those in Western Society who believe God created the earth and all its inhabitants in seven days, and the scientists who support the Big Bang theory. I personally am not religious nor heavily into science, so I find it easy to have an unbiased view on this concept. In my opinion, a belief in a God constitutes a belief in an after life which is probably quite appealing to some people, whereas a scientific approach would suggest death is the absolute end of life. I’ve never been one to dwell heavily on the idea of death, but the guarantee of an after life would probably be a great motivator to life your life ‘by the rules’ so to speak. This idea is most likely the reason the Aboriginal cultural did survive all those years, when so heavily influenced by a belief in spirits.

Works Cited:

1998 Indigenious Australian Voices: A Reader.
Jennifer Sabbioni, Kay Schaffer, and Sidonie Smith, eds. Pp. xx–xxi.
Rutgers, The State University: Rutgers University Press.

Photo Source: http://www.crystalinks.com/dreamtime.jpg