Teaching Indigenous perspectives in VCE Art and Studio Arts 

"Our spirituality is a oneness and an interconnectedness with all that lives and breathes, even with all that does not live or breathe" 

 

Aboriginal spirituality involves the land

Aboriginal spiritual beliefs are about the land Aboriginal people live on. It is ‘geosophical’ (earth-centred) and not ‘theosophical’ (God-centred).

 

The earth, their country, is “impregnated with the power of the Ancestor Spirits” which Aboriginal people draw upon [2].

 

They experience a connection to their land that is unknown to white people. A key feature of Aboriginal spirituality is to look after the land, an obligation which has been passed down as law for thousands of years.

 

“Spirituality is about tapping into the still places I go to when I’m on country and I feel like I’m part of all the things around me,” explains Senimelia Kingsburra, from the far north Queensland Yarrabah community [2].

 

Quandamooka woman Evelyn Parkin also values the silence which connects her with the land. “The spiritual contact with mother earth holds me in my place,” she says [8].

 

We don't own the land, the land owns us. The land is my mother, my mother is the land. Land is the starting point to where it all began. It's like picking up a piece of dirt and saying this is where I started and this is where I'll go. The land is our food, our culture, our spirit and identity.—S. Knight [3]

 

Aboriginal spirituality is the belief that all objects are living and share the same soul or spirit that Aboriginals share.—Eddie Kneebone, Aboriginal Reconciliation campaigner and painter [5]

 

This is a very fundamental statement about Aboriginal spirituality. It implies that besides animals and plants even rocks have a soul.

 

An Aboriginal person’s soul or spirit is believed to “continue on after our physical form has passed through death”, explains Eddie Kneebone [5]. After the death of an Aboriginal person their spirit returns to the Dreamtime from where it will return through birth as a human, an animal, a plant or a rock. The shape is not important because each form shares the same soul or spirit from the Dreamtime.

 

One might believe that Aboriginal spirituality is similar across Australia but this is not the case.

There were more than 250 languages prior to invasion and each language group had its own creation stories and spirituality.

 

“Aboriginal spirituality is so incredibly diverse,” says Aboriginal director Warwick Thornton, “there are 50 languages left, 30 of them critical but all of them with their own culture, their own spirituality, their own creation stories, their own everything.”

- article from creative spirits website Korff, 2015

 

 

 

 

English cannot express the ‘Dreaming’

‘Dreamtime’ or ‘Dreaming’ has never been a direct translation of an Aboriginal word. The English language does not know an equivalent to express the complex Aboriginal spiritual concepts to white people.

Aboriginal languages contain a lot of words for spirituality and beliefs, such as

 

• tjurkurrpa, jukurrpa, tjurgurba (Pitjantjatjara people, north-western South Australia),

• altjeringa, alcheringa, alchera, aldjerinya (Arrernte people, central Australia),

• palaneri,

• bugaregara,

• ngarangani,

• ungud (Ngarinyin people, north-Western Australia),

• wongar (north eastern Arnhem Land),

• bugari (Broome, north-Western Australia).

 

There is no spelling orthodoxy because native speakers did not write down Aboriginal languages.

 

'The Dreaming' or 'the Dreamtime' indicates a psychic state in which or during which contact is made with the ancestral spirits, or the Law, or that special period of the beginning.—Mudrooroo, Aboriginal writer [1]

 

Dreaming is timeless

Aboriginal spirituality does not consider the ‘Dreamtime’ as a time past, in fact not as a time at all. Time refers to past,present and future but the ‘Dreamtime’ is none of these. The ‘Dreamtime’ “is there with them, it is not a long way away. 

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