ABSTRACT
Paddy Japaljarri Stewart, Michael Anderson, and Agnes Palmer share an Aboriginal heritage, but they come from different parts of Australia and have experienced different histories. To read what they have to say about their religion is to be struck by diverse, yet closely connected, events and themes. Stewart’s account of Jukurrpa or ‘Dreamings’ resonates most closely with anthropological and popular portrayals of traditional Aboriginal society. The Dreaming has almost become pantheistic, singular spiritual essence belonging to all Aboriginal people and connecting them to one Aboriginal country – Australia. Nym Bandak’s 1958–1959 painting All the World, best known as endpiece illustration for W. E. H. Stanner’s White Man Got No Dreaming, illustrates the way in which traditional Aboriginal religion reconciles the synthetic cosmology of the Law with the plurality of Dreamings. Virtue in Aboriginal religion lies in the obligation to follow ancestral precedent, which involves keeping the stories and countries alive as part of a living tradition steeped in ritual sensibilities and regulations.
