ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on what is known about the beliefs and customs of Aboriginal parenting prior to colonisation. Aboriginal Australians cultural systems provided the best conditions for women to have safe births and raise healthy children within the environments they confronted. Australians today use the term dreaming to refer to the complex Aboriginal system of belief and law which is their cosmogony and cosmology. The system creates the extensive and close networks that form the social world of every Aboriginal person. Scholarship continues to deepen understandings of how Aboriginal people lived before the British arrived, and the depth of knowledge they held about the demanding Australian environment and how to live well within it. Aboriginal children were born into worlds shaped by kin relatedness. The umbilical cord is intrinsic to the Childs identity and its wellbeing. The chapter discusses the Nurturing was a core metaphor or idiom of life: it speaks of interdependence, responsiveness and responsibility.
