Making and Mobilising Worlds

Were the dream-times an invention of Western anthropology or an autochthonous aspect of Aboriginal cosmology? Patrick Wolfe, in arguing the former, attributes the primary responsibility for its fabrication to Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen. ¹ The term was first used by Gillen in the memoir he contributed to the report of the 1894 Horn Expedition into Central Australia. Discussing Arunta ² accounts of the origins of fire, Gillen reported that it was believed to have been acquired by ancestors ‘in the distant past (ūlchurringa), which really means in the dream-times’ (Gillen, cit. Wolfe, 1991: 200). In his introduction to the report of the Horn Expedition, which he edited, Spencer, transforming Gillen’s spelling into alcheringa, also widened the term’s reference by describing it as a more general system of morality. Used again in their 1904 book The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, the concept was subsequently extended beyond the Arunta to encompass other tribes and, in a further step, to function as a pan-Australian marker of a generalised Aboriginal culture. Wolfe interprets this extension of the term as being ideologically motivated rather than resting on ethnographic evidence. He traces the history of the associations which, in the natural history of the Comte de Buffon, had connected the inability to distinguish dreams from reality to animality and which subsequently, in Darwin’s work, were interpreted as a marker of the distinction between primitive and civilised humans. His contention, in the light of this, is that the anthropological invention of ‘the Dreaming complex’ was, when viewed in association with evolutionary conceptions of time, ‘the culmination of a historical discourse which subordinated dreaming savages to the level of animal nature’ (Wolfe, 1991: 206).