The Dreamtime

People often ask us what the Dreaming actually is. It's not an easy thing to explain in a few sentences, because it isn't a story in the way a book has a story, it's everything. For Aboriginal people, the Dreaming, sometimes called the Dreamtime, is the foundation of spiritual life, connection to Country, and the right way to live as central to us as any major religion is to anyone else in the world.

The Dreaming refers to the time of creation - a time beyond living memory, when ancestral beings moved across the land in human, animal, plant and insect form. As they travelled, they shaped the world as it exists today: the rivers, the hills, the waterholes, the rock formations. Everything in the landscape carries a story from that creation time, and those ancestors are the source of the symbols, designs and sacred knowledge that Aboriginal people still hold today.

Every Aboriginal language group and family has its own Dreaming, or set of Dreamings, specific to their own Country and lineage. A Dreaming isn't a single universal story, it's deeply particular. Ownership of a Dreaming is specific to the people it belongs to, and what an artist paints is determined by their own relationship to their Country and their kinship connections, not something they can choose freely. To hold a Dreaming is also, in a real sense, to be held by it, it comes with both the right to paint that story and the responsibility to care for it properly.

This knowledge isn't written down in books. It's passed on the way it always has been from person to person, generation to generation, through story, song, ceremony and art. The Dreaming teaches children the difference between right and wrong, how to live within the lore of their community, how the natural world works, and how to find food and water throughout the year. It guides daily life just as much as it guides ceremony.

Our family has been custodians of this knowledge for generations through Emily Kame Kngwarreye, through Minnie Pwerle, through Barbara Weir and now through the artists carrying it forward today. What follows is what we can share. Some knowledge is sacred and is only known by the people with the right to hold it. What we paint, and what we explain here, is only ever a part of something much deeper.

When you look at one of our paintings, you're often looking at the Dreaming from above, like an aerial view of Country. Tracks and footprints show where ancestors travelled. A U-shape might mean a person sitting down. Circles can mean a campsite, a campfire or a waterhole.

These symbols are old - the same ones found in rock art and ceremony for tens of thousands of years, long before they ever appeared on canvas. What each symbol means in a particular painting is something only the artist truly knows in full. What you see on the canvas is only the part that can be shared.

Our great-great aunty Emily Kame Kngwarreye didn't start painting until she was around 80 years old, but in just a decade she changed the course of Australian art history and she did it by painting her own Country, her own Dreaming, the same way it had always been carried.

his is my place, my land, all my stories are in this painting. I grew up here from a little girl. Now I paint the land that owns me, and the land shows me how to paint from the inside out. It's not what you see on top, but what's beneath the ground, in the skies and the hidden treasures of the Dreaming.

— Emily Kame Kngwarreye, as recounted by our family

That's still true for every artist in our family today. When Jade paints her Grandmother's Country, we're doing the same thing Emily did, carrying something forward exactly as it was given to us, so it never gets lost.