Aboriginal Religion In Australia

“I could see the connection in the people’s eyes. The bright North Australian sunshine even shone light on their relationship with their land, I would call it love, I could almost feel it in the air, maybe it’s the spirituality speaking!”

This month’s focus of injustice is rather different from the usual gender inequality or animal endangerment issues we cover. Rather, many may not even know that this exists as a religion, but Aboriginal Spirituality, a forgotten, yet a crucial syllabus point of Australia, being much to your surprise, a religion! Although the results can vary, as most Aborigines or Indigenous Australians, have converted into the Christian religion, integrating their beliefs in such, according to the 2006 census, 1% recognised

Aboriginal Spirituality falls under the umbrella terms of Totemism and Animism, which is a thesaurus’s version of a religion that believes that objects, animals or parts of the land possess supernatural supremacies. These apply as this religion’s backbone and answer to everything is derived from the Dreamtime. Which, as most of you have probably forgotten from every HSIE lesson in primary school are the Aboriginal’s cleverly crafted, and pleasantly entertaining “myths” for a word in explanation to everything, seriously everything. As I have discovered in my fieldwork in the meetings with these amazing and down-to-earth custodians of this land, every part of a religion is covered by the “Alcheringa”, from the elucidations of life cycles and death as well as funerals, as expressed in the popular tale “The Morning Star”. Alongside the answers to the beginnings of time, which is the basis of the dreaming itself, common origins of geological formations and animal characteristics inhabiting their land, evident in perhaps the most popular legends which you probably drew during art, being the “Rainbow Serpent” and the “Tale of the Three Sisters”. These stories have been verbally passed on through

An average view from a member of Aboriginal Spirituality on the land itself would be along the lines of “the land owns me” or “it is my mother”. However, this is where the injustice stands as many negatively interpret this land-man relationship that I cannot word with justice to these Aboriginals. The English most certainly did not take this into account, even before they inhabited this land, they were always against this nomadic nature, failing to view its beauty. This was evident in the journal of an explorer, William Dampier who wrote in “The New Voyage” that the Aboriginal people had no fencing, to mark off their land and also mentioned that they “have no houses, but lye in the open air without any covering the earth being their bed and the heaven their canopy.” The whole Land Rights controversy which was finally fixed, after the poor Aboriginals’ constant protesting and movements, such as the Yirrkala bark petitions and the Wave Hill walk off, finally being established in after a painful almost 200 years, in 1976. Let me remind you readers about the actual origins of this discrimination of land rights, which was violated when the land was invaded and stolen, there is no justification over this land