ABORIGINAL PHILOSOPHY
by Vicki Grieves
(Aboriginal) traditions embody a unique and
profound view of reality that may even now be developed by Aboriginal
scholars to enrich the mainstream of human thought. The skills
are precisely what the nation needs to appreciate and to conserve
a unique environment in real danger. - Charles Rowley 1970
Like all human societies, Aboriginal society
has operated on a core set of values and beliefs that are complex
and that form the basis for religious practice and ways of being
and doing. This philosophy constitutes a set of "truths"
for people that define the parameters of knowledge, reality and
cultural practice.
Human culture is learned, shared and complex.
It is continually adapting beliefs, values, attitudes, language,
patterns of thought and communication, religion and knowledge
as well as tools and technology. Adaptation is a human response
to changes in the environments in which they live. Aboriginal
society has never been static but it has been essentially non-materialist
and extremely conservative of the environment.
The colonial encounter has meant that Indigenous
cultures, including the Aboriginal Australian, have been robbed
of their integrity and viability by implying that they are not
as advanced as that of the colonising power. It has been through
the colonial encounter that terms such as primitive, pre-literate,
stone age, underdeveloped have been used to imply that Indigenous
cultures are simplistic and unworthy. Similarly, Aboriginal religious
practice has been characterised as simple, crude and irrational,
from a Christian and Eurocentric perspective, and has been variously
described by terms such as magic, shamanism fetishism, animism,
pre-animism and totemism that often fail to explain its true worth
and significance.
In contemporary times, in the context of ongoing
colonisation, we tend to measure other cultures against the lifestyles
and values of the modern capitalist consumer societies. An alternative
would be to measure the worth of societies and their philosophical
bases by considering their longevity. A feature of many early
civilisations is that they have sealed their own doom by an exploitation
of the natural environment.{1}
By contrast, Aboriginal civilisation has been notable for its
survival over at least 80,000 years.
The key to this survival lies in Aboriginal philosophy,
expressed in religious practice that has been paramount in peoples'
day-to-day lives, informing all their actions. For any human society:
" religion represents a symbolic view of people and their
universe which regulates their actions, supports them in crisis,
orders their lives, gives their actions meaning and validity -
it represents their conception of the world" (Eckerman 1995)
For Aboriginal people, this is embodied in the
canon left by the supreme beings who created the landscape, all
species and humans, transmitted in an oral culture and commonly
known in English as "the law".
The concept of the Dreaming
Aboriginal religious philosophy has
come to be called "the Dreaming " in English. This was
the understanding reached by the early anthropologists Spencer
and Gillen from their research published as The Native Tribes
of Central Australia (1899). Arrente elders had endeavoured
to explain the basis of their religious philosophy to them by
describing the alcheringa, their religious philosophy, as the
mythic times of the ancestors of the totemic groups. They had
not initially grasped its full meaning and later Spencer explained
that this past mythic time was only a part of the meaning of alcheringa,
that it also meant "dream". Since then it was commonly
adopted by Aboriginal people across Australia that the ancestral
heroes, their past times and everything associated with them is
encapsulated in the English language word "Dreaming".
While there is an equivalent concept to the Arrente alcheringa
in Awabakal, it is not known to the author at this time.
Thus Aboriginal philosophy comes from the time
of creation when the world was very "mixed up" and not
at all like it is in modern times. Supreme beings, great ancestors
who were human, animal and bird all at the same time, anthropomorphs,
were powerful enough to create order in this chaos. These ancestral
heroes are responsible for life itself; life that arose in a time
when all the natural species, the land and humans, were part of
the same ongoing life force. They had powers to turn themselves
into geographic or natural features, they descended into the ground
and reappeared as a species of bird or animal, or as a waterhole,
or they ascended into the sky and became constellations. As they
moved around they created all the species, humans, the landscape
and all the features of it, then they tended to settle down and
remain as a feature of the landscape.
For the Awabakal, the supreme being who created
their world is Biame, part human and part kangaroo or wallaby.
In a rock cave on Bulgar Creek near Singleton Biame is depicted
in a drawing approximately eight feet high as if his legs and
arms are lying on the ground. The perpendicular lines drawn under
the arms, three on right and four on the left, represent the seven
tribes of the region for whom this supreme being had great significance:
Worimi, Awabakal, Wonarua, Gamillaroi, Darkinjung, Gringai (Matthews
1893; Heath 1998).
Totemism
The sites which mark the resting place or activity of the
supreme beings have become special or sacred places. These are
the places of the spirits of creation, where their spirit lives
on, totem sites, with meaning described by the stories for that
place, and the place from which the spirit of the new born child
comes. Through the totemic site an Aboriginal person comes to
have identity, an understanding of his/her relationship with the
natural world and other human beings. Those people connected to
it have sacred obligation to its upkeep, such as repainting the
figures, and performing appropriate ceremonies. The stencilled
hand prints of the custodians on the Biame cave wall are often
freshened to this day; the area outside the cave a bora ring for
ceremonies. (Matthews
1893; Heath 1998)
This concept has connected Aboriginal people
inextricably to the land and all of creation and into a set of
obligations and cultural practices that ensured the conservation
of the natural world. All Aboriginal people are related to the
species and to the landscape as kin, through the process of being
born from a totemic site, as are the species to whom one is related.
Through totemism , everything - humans, animals,
land, weather (sun, wind, rain), moon, sky, stars - belongs to
a conceptual, spiritual and social whole. Thus it is that Aboriginal
societies across Australia have a culture that accords metaphysical
primacy to place rather than time. Thus, while Europeans ignore
the Aboriginal notion of being in the world, of connectedness
to place, kin, community, all species and the natural world, they
have insisted on the perspective of time and history.
Stories, songs and ceremonies recreate Dreaming,
explain the laws left for the people by the supreme beings and
fulfill sacred obligations to kin, the species and the landscape.
The conceptual framework of this philosophy is expressed through
ceremonies that include:
- Increase ceremonies - expressing human ties
and responsibilities to land;
- Initiation rites - the ways of making men
and women in the proper way of knowledge and awareness
- Mourning ceremonies - which guide spirits
back to their sacred, totem site;
- Healing and harming - which call on the power
of the spirit ancestors to assist.
In colonial contexts the stories of the Dreamtime
and supreme beings have been often portrayed in English as stories
for children when they are in fact the expression of a profound
and deeply held philosophy.
Conclusion
It is important to note that the core
of Aboriginal philosophy and religious practice is subject to
secrecy and knowledge on a "need-to-know" basis. Within
Aboriginal society people are chosen as the eventual repositories
of such knowledge, often over many years of proving their worth.
There is much that is not known to the broader Australian society
and non-Indigenous researchers such as those whose published work
appears on this site, often have incomplete and sometimes puzzling
information. Enright's account of Worimi peoples' behaviours around
secrecy, when he was attempting to collect inforamtion from them,
are informative of this. (Enright
1936)
Often the terms that are used in English are
inadequate to the task of explaining Aboriginal ways of being
and doing. For example, the term "trade" is inadequate
to explain the complex system of ceremonial and obligatory gift
giving that occurs in a society based around the fundamental value
of "giving" as the primary motivation. There is no aim
for a surplus, or to store more than is immediately required or
to receive tribute from others - the impetus is to give, status
comes from sharing. Similarly, one does not "own" land
but rather is a part of it from creation and bound to ceremonial
obligation and custodianship from the original "kinship"
that flows from once having been at one with the land and all
of creation. This is the basis of life.
Interpretations of Aboriginal ways of being and
doing through western consciousness is often inadequate. For example,
how to comprehend a society that is at once highly prescriptive
of behaviours through philosophy and religious practice backed
up by swift, apprehended punishments, and also lacking in heirachial
authority, prizing a high level of individual and family group
autonomy? In Aboriginal society group agreement or consensus is
developed over extended periods of communication and is not designed
for group decision-making but rather as an agreed position and
a guide to future decisions by individual family groups.
Aboriginal philosophy is a wholistic template
for living in the Australian environment, for the conservation
of the species and the natural world, for minimising conflict
in human relations and for ensuring the continuation of the conditions
for survival. Aboriginal understandings of the process of creation
and of peoples' place in the natural world, which does, after
all, sustain all of humankind, is a valuable source of knowledge
and inspiration for all peoples. Finally, Aboriginal "law"
is fixed, immutable and constant:
One cannot fix the Dreaming
in time: it was, and is, everywhere. We should be very wrong
to try to read into it the idea of a Golden Age or a Garden
of Eden, though it was an age of heroes, when the ancestors
did marvellous things that men can no longer do…...clearly
the Dreaming is many things in one…….among them a
kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter
of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle
of order transcending everything significant for (Aboriginal)
man.
- W E H Stanner 1979
References
Eckerman A Introduction to Aboriginal Societies 1995
Hiatt L R Arguments about Aborigines: Australia and the evolution
of social anthropology Cambridge: University Press, 1996
Rowley C D The Destruction of Aboriginal Society 1970
Stanner W E H White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938 - 1973
1979
Further reading
Bell Diane Daughters of the Dreaming 1983
Hume Lynne Ancestral Power: The Dreaming, Consciousness and
Aboriginal Australia 2002
http://www.dreamtime.net.au/main.cfm
for stories of the Dreaming
{1} An interesting recent discussion
of this issue by Prof Jared Diamond of UCLA, though he does not
include Indigenous Australian civilisation in this discussion,
can be located at:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/bbing/stories/s707591.htm
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