Aboriginal Literature: The relevance of oneness with nature and the vitality of water

 “People think of Mother Nature as metaphor. Aboriginal peoples mean

it literally. And I, as a scientist have come to understand, they are

absolutely right in the most profound scientific way”

-David Suzuki

In Aboriginal religious belief, a person’s spirit may return in human, animal or plant form after death. So, an Ancestral Being may have the appearance of a plant or animal, but have done deeds like a human in the past life. Just imagine that the plant lying in your balcony might have been a renowned physician in the past life! That’s how the Aborigines think. Aboriginal spirituality is deeply linked to the land which “owns” Aboriginal people.

Aboriginal and non-aboriginal people are un-intentionally separated by many means. One such example would be the way each use their land and how they manage it, and different land uses stem from different values and morals. The biggest difference is the way aborigines think of their environment and its inhabitants. All other plants and animals are treated no lower than themselves.

All objects are living and share the same soul or spirit Aboriginal people share. Nature is no different.

This belief shows their concept of oneness. The hallmark of Aboriginal culture is ‘oneness with nature’. In traditional Aboriginal belief systems, nature and landscape are comparable in importance to the Western biblical references. Prominent rocks, canyons, rivers, waterfalls, islands, beaches and other natural features – as well as sun, moon, visible stars and animals – have their own stories of creation and inter-connectedness.

Over their long history, a complex and rich Aboriginal mythology has evolved. It has been passed down from generation to generation. This mythology is known as the Dreamtime (Alchera) Legends. The Dream-time is the mystical time during which the Aborigines’ ancestors established their world. These myths from ancient times are accepted as a record of absolute truth. They dominate the cultural life of the people.

Dreamings or Dream Time creates access to the ancestral world. The Aboriginal lifestyle can be divided into the human or what I think of as the real world, from the sacred world and the physical world. The human world, which I will just call their “reality,” is the world that consists of the people, their culture in the generic form, and basically their daily lives. The sacred world is where Dreamings take place. It is the ancestral world where the world was created, where ancestors are roaming and creating. This world in not situated only in the past but also in the present. Finally, there is the Physical world which connects the previous two realms. The physical world is the landscape, it is nature, it is land formations, and it is the tangible materializations of the world. During their Dreamings or Dream Time, aboriginals witness and learn the creation stories that formed the physical world. The Myths of these stories often revolve around notions like: The sky gods where sleeping but then they arose and created the landscape by transforming into different characters along the way. Once the Sky Gods were done with formations they took the shape of different features of the land like rocks or mountains (Eliade 1973:45). The Dream Time then is a time to transcend from their reality to another worldly realm. This is to discover the stories of their ancestors and their totems. This is where they learn the stories of their realities.

There are many myths of the Dreamtime. One of the Aboriginal dreamtime stories I read, named ‘The Origin of Water’ traces how the animals who were led to believe that the only way to get a drink or quench their thirst was to chew “Gulbirra”, kangaroo grass, or lick the dew from the leaves- found a solution where it was proved that the person who is thought of the least is often the one who makes the greatest discovery. In this case, the great discovery was water. As per the fable, “The animals were so happy for all the running water bubbling from the spring, they all jumped in and began to splash water everywhere and the kingfisher was so glad, he swam to and fro, and with his beak made drains and gullies in front of the running water all the way down to the sea and that is how the small creeks and gullies were made to this very day”.

A lot of Australia is covered by desert or semi-arid land. Indigenous Australians survived in this dry continent for over 60000 years according to recent evidence. They survived by finding water using different methods. Sometimes there is a lot of water underground. Some groups of Indigenous Australians dug wells and tunnels to find this water. If a group was moving away from a water supply, animal skins were made into bags that could carry water.

Aboriginal people looked around places where birds and animals found water. They followed drongoes to rock pools or watched where ants went underground. They also knew that where they were lots of trees then there must be some water underground. To the traditional Aborigine the plants and animals are all sacred: environment is the essence of Australian Aboriginal godliness. Out of this deep reverence for nature Aborigines learned to live in remarkable harmony with the land and all the living creatures on it.

Written by Lakshmi