Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

On Being Woken Up: The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture
Author(s): Patrick Wolfe
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Apr., 1991), pp. 197-224
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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 On Being Woken Up:
The Dreamtime in Anthropology
and in Australian Settler Culture
PATRICK WOLFE

University of Melbourne

In the wake of decolonisation, an increasing number of analyses turned the

ethnographic gaze onto anthropology itself. Humbler postcolonial strategies
emerged, designed to democratise anthropology's intercultural staging by
means of an exchange of dialogue (Crapanzano 1977, 1980; Dwyer 1977,
1982). Though sensitive to the backdrop of neocolonialism, however, these
strategies largely ignored anthropology's own cultural genealogy in favour of
a more particularistic focus on the scene of ethnographic interaction.
Stepping back from the front line of ethnography, James Clifford, in partic-
ular, has sought to situate anthropology in a richer intracultural setting-or
"predicament"-which highlights the interplay between ethnographic trends
and developments in artistic, literary, dramatic (but, interestingly, not musi-
cal) modes of expression. Nonetheless, his analyses are simultaneously inter-
cultural (1988). Despite establishing an impressive range of connections,
however, Clifford tends to depict anthropology passively, as simply congruent
with, rather than dialectically productive of, other cultural practices. Accord-
ingly, for all their thickness, his descriptions are ultimately apolitical. They
neither analyse anthropology's role in sustaining and reproducing colonialism
nor in delimiting indigenous responses to it.
Though Talal Asad's (1986, cf. 1973) critique of anthropology is overtly
political, he fails to account for his own ability to frame it. Thus the inequality
whereby "strong" imperial codes can subordinate third-world languages is
depicted as a one-way process. There is no evaluation of the possibilities for
native subjects to appropriate the code to their own ends. In particular, al-
though Asad's selection of language as a synecdoche for the ubiquitous effects
of colonial domination is effective, he does not go on to analyse what it means
when the colonised subject speaks the language of nationalism. Thus he
cannot analyse that language's dialectical confinement within terms imposed
by the very code which it strives to resist.

For their advice and criticism, I would like to thank Maurice Bloch, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Michael
Muetzelfeldt, and Linda Williams. For their editorial responses, I would like to thank Professors
Raymond Grew and Aram Yengoyan.

0010-4175/91/2191-1100 $5.00 ? 1991 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

197

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 I98 PATRICK WOLFE

To acquire a hegemonic language is to submit to a framework in which local

meanings can take on unpredictable significance in relation to oppositions or
associations whose determination is independent of local factors. In such a
language, nationalism does not just speak. It also bespeaks an unequal history,
which preempts and delimits the scope of what can be said. Thus learning a
strong language is not enough to give strength to a colonised subject. Like-
wise, simply letting both parties speak cannot redress an all-encompassing
machinery of inequality. In both cases, the consequences of speaking cannot
be assumed but should be located within the overall machinery.
In what follows, I attempt to trace an item of anthropological language
through a context of unequal power. In keeping with Asad, the analysis is
political. It also stresses language's role in sustaining and reproducing a larger
machinery of power relations, to which end it is appropriate to develop
Clifford's contextual lead.

Anthropology is analysed here, in a manner adapted from Mauss, as a total

cultural practice: in this case, one which both expresses and sustains the
hegemonic process of colonial settlement.' In other words, my tribe is the
anthropologists. Anthropological debates are my primary data, rather than a
means to a shared end. Thus I am neither attempting to answer the questions
which anthropologists have asked themselves, nor am I arbitrating their dis-
putes, since to do so would be to analyse indigenous, as opposed to an-
thropological, discourse. Indigenous discourse only intrudes into the analysis
when it submits to anthropological language, at which point it acquires sig-
nificance in relation to oppositions and associations which have developed
within the colonising culture. The object of the following analysis is, there-
fore, an anthropological construct called the Dreamtime, and not any pre-
sumptive Koori precedent.2

1 "In these total social phenomena, as we propose to call them, all kinds of institutions find
simultaneous expression: religious, legal, moral, and economic. In addition, the phenomena have
their aesthetic aspect and they reveal morphological types" (Mauss 1925 [1970]:1). Apart from
the obvious differences of application, I have supplemented Mauss' formula with a Marxist
emphasis on sustaining (i.e., contributing to the reproduction of) social processes.
2 The object of analysis is anthropological discourse. Accordingly, aborigines, savages, black-
fellows, and so forth, are figures of discourse, reproduced here as they appear in the primary
textual data, spelled and capitalised according to the usages of texts under discussion. Indigenous
people in Australia no longer generally name themselves according to the single category avail-
able in settler nomenclature, so they do not have a collective name. Accordingly, when it is
necessary to distinguish the generality of indigenous people in Australia from the figures of
discourse, I use the name Koori, since that is the appropriate name in Melbourne, which is the
place of writing. In other words, I am aware that Koori is the name of the people from the south-
east, but I use it because it is a name which is sanctioned by indigenous people in Australia.
Similarly, the term "settler" suffers from its suggestion of a homogeneous uniformity. "Settler
culture" is shorthand for a dominant, distinctive or generalisable set of Australian popular
discourses with which anthropological concepts are here held to be continuous. Nevertheless, the
following discussion exemplifies both anthropological opposition to the prevailing disciplinary
consensus (the Strehlows) and antagonism within settler society at large (Gillen versus Willshire).
Such controversies do not, however, detract from the manifest generality of the Dreaming
complex as here analysed.

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 199

In Australia, the Dreamtime and its variants signify everything that was or
remains aboriginal. Its currency encompasses scholarly and popular dis-
course. Though introduced into the Australian settler vocabulary through the
writings of white anthropologists, the Dreamtime has become the central
symbol of Koori cultural revivalism. In the context of the Australian cultural
field as a whole, however, the Dreamtime concept encodes and sustains the
subjugation and expropriation of the Koori population. This cultural irony is
the object of the following analysis.
This paper traces the origin and historical development of the Dreamtime
concept and shows how its affinity with the theoretical environment of late
nineteenth-century anthropology followed from an ideological legacy linking
the concept to themes that were fundamental to European colonial expansion.
These themes penetrate cultural reaches which would otherwise appear to be
historically and geographically distinct. Thus, from situating the Dreamtime
in relation to broad post-Enlightenment generalities, the paper more specifi-
cally traces the concept's genealogy through anthropological theorising to the
local ideologies of a frontier culture, where it provides a rationale for the
seizure of territory occupied by nomads. The local ideology is not simply a
reflection of macrohistorical determinations but a culturally specific formula-
tion which undergoes transformations as settler society develops.
The discussion therefore covers a number of historical and cultural regis-
ters, between which there is some terminological variation, but in which a
reference to dreaming is constant. To express this continuity, the term Dream-
ing complex will be adopted. This term has the further significance that, as a
focus of intersection, a complex reflects the paper's holistic approach. The
Dreaming complex is, in short, a total cultural practice, the special term being
necessitated by the variety of names which its referent has borne.

That the Dreaming complex was an invention of the anthropologists' own

culture3 can be seen from the extraordinary success which it enjoyed once it
had been coined in the ethnography of Frank Gillen. Indeed, before Gillen's
phrase was even introduced, it had been advertised in advance by an En-
glishman, Baldwin Spencer, who spoke no Koori language, as "aptly" and
"appropriately" rendered from the aboriginal (Spencer 1896b:50, 111). The
phrase subsequently acquired such a peerless hegemony over Australian ab-
original anthropology that the discipline's foremost practitioners mutually
misrepresented the phrase's history in order to associate themselves with its
discovery. The sequence of events was as follows.
Spencer, professor of biology at the University of Melbourne, met Gillen,
postmaster at Alice Springs, in 1894, while Spencer was on the Horn Scien-
tific Expedition to central Australia.4 The ensuing partnership between the
3 Cf. Urry 1979:15.
4 Mulvaney and Calaby 1985: ch. 9.

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200 PATRICK WOLFE

biologist and the local man harnessed scientific credentials to an otherwise

incompatible familiarity with savagery.
"The dream-times" was one of the first fruits of this partnership. Spencer
(1896a) edited the report of the Horn Expedition. At his instigation, Gillen
(1896) contributed a memoir on some manners and customs of the Arunta.
This memoir was appended to the fourth volume of the report, an arrangement
which enabled Gillen's phrase to have been explicitly corroborated on two
occasions by Spencer, in his sections of the report, before the reader had even
encountered it.

In the first volume of the report, Spencer condemned the Hermannsburg

Mission, near Alice Springs, emphasising the wretched condition of the rem-
nants of its aboriginal population and maintaining that there was no evidence
that the mission had ever done them any good. He contended that the mission-
aries should give up the attempt to improve the moral order of the Arunta,
which, though it could not compare with white morality, was unequivocally
preferable to the degeneracy which followed acculturation. This undisturbed
order was the Dream times:

The morality of the black is not that of the white man, but his life so long as he remains
uncontaminated by contact with the latter, is governed by rules of conduct which have
been recognised amongst his tribe from what they speak of as the "alcheringa", which
Mr. Gillen has aptly called the "Dream times" (Spencer 1896b:111).

From the outset, therefore, the Dream times were fatally susceptible to
contact. According to Spencer's Social Darwinist rationale, aborigines con-
fronted their far-distant future in the form of the whites, a strain whose
superiority exemplified the cumulative operation of selection in a whole range
of ways, from cranial enlargement to the attainment of abstract thought. Thus
the ensuing doom of the aborigines was a result inscribed in the natural order
of things and bound to accrue once others had reached a level of progress
which enabled the crossing of barriers which were at once both geographic
and phylogenetic.5
Gillen's actual translation, which followed in the fourth part of the report,
was a nondescript debut. It occurred during an exposition of Arunta explana-
tions for the origin of fire, which ancestors were held to have acquired "in the
distant past (ulchurringa), which really means in the dream-times" (Gillen
1896:185). Yet the anticlimax is immaterial, since what matters is not Gillen's
coinage of the term but the cultural logic whereby Spencer, who gave "Al-
cheringa" its new spelling, should have found Gillen's rendering so apt.6 This
was the moment when a mere aside-one of many, which could otherwise
only have been regarded as equally random and inconsequential7-was first
5 He maintained this outlook until the end of his career: "The greater the difference between
the cultural levels of two associated races, the more rapidly does the lower one succumb; there is
no such thing as grafting the higher upon the lower" (Spencer 1921:29).
6 Cf. Mountford 1976:53, n. 12.
7 For instance, in the same Memorandum, Gillen had referred on various occasions (1896:177,
181, 185) to "the long, long ago."

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 201

appropriated into discourse. Spencer's selection was not unmotivated. Nor did
it cause the term's success. Rather, it was but the first in a cognate series of
such selections whose aggregation consolidated the Dreaming complex.
Once coined, Gillen's phrase took off immediately. By 1900, it had found
its way into the writings of European theorists who had not been to the
ethnographic field but who had encountered it in a number of articles pub-
lished jointly by Spencer and Gillen after 1896:
I dislike offering a theory about what occurred in the "Dream-time" (Alcheringa)
behind our historical knowledge of mankind (Lang 1900:9).

Though the Alcheringa featured prominently in Spencer and Gillen's classic

1899 book on the Arunta, the term dream-times did not appear in it. But, in
her book The Euahlayi Tribe, which went to press around the time that
Spencer and Gillen's 1904 book (in which the phrase did appear) was pub-
lished, Langloh Parker (1905:2) was already referring to "the Arunta myth of
the Dream Time, the age of pristine evolution" without further explanation.
The phrase would seem to have travelled by way of Oxford, since Andrew
Lang, who wrote the introduction to Langloh Parker's book, had corre-
sponded with her over its preliminary drafts. In any event, the Euahlayi were
not from central Australia but from the east coast, so the equivalence asserted
between their ideology and that of Spencer and Gillen's Arunta constituted an
enormous geographical diffusion of the dream-times-one which was soon to
extend to all aborigines.8
Yet one needs to go no further than the initial move from the Arunta to the
Euahlayi for clear evidence that the extension of the term Dream Time was not
ethnographically motivated. Not only was there no suggestion that the Eu-
ahlayi equivalent had anything to do with dreaming, but the doctrine to which
the term was reapplied differed fundamentally from its original Arunta refer-
ent. For, although, as will be seen, Spencer and Gillen went to considerable
lengths to refute Strehlow's claim that the Aranda (as he called them) had a
monotheistic All-Father, insisting instead that the Alcheringa referred to an
age of mythical but non-theistic ancestors, Langloh Parker's Euahlayi had a
monotheistic supreme being in Byamee. Yet it was this Byamee who "in the
first place, is to the Euahlayi what the 'Alcheringa' or 'Dream Time' is to the
Arunta" (Langloh Parker 1905:6) Thus no claim about Koori discourse is
necessary to invalidate the extension of the Dreaming complex from the
Arunta to the Euahlayi.
The diffusion of the Dreaming complex through anthropological writing
will be considered in greater detail below. For the moment, the point is that
this diffusion was not prompted by ethnographic observation. The Dream
Time was appropriate to the Euahlayi because they were aborigines, rather
than because of any particular beliefs which they may have espoused. The

8 Exceptions such as "The Law," "History" or "Stories," though used locally by Kooris, have
not affected the Dreaming complex's monopoly in settler discourse.

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 202 PATRICK WOLFE

meaning of the term resided not in the doctrinal content of Alcheringa but in a
thematic affinity between the two signs "dream" and "aborigine," which
affinity obtained within the anthropologists' culture rather than within that-
or those-of their subjects. Thus the success of Gillen's translation did not
simply result from Spencer's having approved it in advance. Rather, that
approval was itself culturally prefigured.
To set the subsequent demonstration of the Dreaming complex's prefigura-
tion into context, it should first be noted that the concept's very opportuneness
encouraged a mystification of its origins. This was because its success gave it
high value in anthropological discourse: the Dreaming complex was some-
thing to be associated with. Thus two of the three most eminent figures in
Australian aboriginal anthropology misrepresented its origins in order to ap-
propriate it to their own respective names, whilst the third (Radcliffe-Brown)
left the field to the first two by ignoring the concept altogether.9 It is, there-
fore, little wonder that its true origins should have become obscured. This
explains the otherwise puzzling fact that, even though the occurrence of the
Horn Expedition was well-known-and an afternoon in a reasonable public
library would have been more than enough to trace the origin of the Dreaming
complex-none of the major figures in Australian aboriginal anthropology
could correctly locate the concept's introduction.10
The obscurity surrounding the origins of the Dreaming complex enhanced
its ethnographic credibility by virtue of its marginalising the role of an-
thropologists. Indeed, it was appropriate that the aboriginal category par
excellence should have no beginning, since aborigines were a people without
a history. Even if its original authorship had been recognised, therefore, the
concept's universal distribution within aboriginal culture would mean that
Gillen's happening to be the first to place it on record could hardly be ac-
counted a discovery, much less an invention. Thus a circle is closed: The very
cultural appeal which first commended the concept to anthropologists subse-
quently effaces itself, in the process reinforcing the hold of the concept.
The two who muddied the water were Spencer himself and, later, Elkin.
Although Gillen's memoir was published in 1896, the Horn Expedition had
actually taken place in 1894. Writing in 1926, however, Spencer was to trace
the term back to fieldwork among the Arunta which he and Gillen had under-
taken together two years after the Horn Expedition and which had formed the
basis for their first major work, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, which
had appeared in 1899:

9 Radcliffe-Brown (1913:169) referred early to "the times long ago," a formula consistent
with Gillen's initial (1896:177) "the long long ago." Later, when the Dreaming complex was
firmly established, Radcliffe-Brown claimed (1952 [1945]:166) for his term "World Dawn" the
preposterous ethnographic warrant that it "corresponds to certain ideas that I have found amongst
the aborigines of some tribes."
10 See Appendix (a).

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 203

It was during our work amongst the Arunta in 1896, when we were able to watch and
study in its entirety the long and great Engwura ceremony that we first became
acquainted with the terms Alchera and Alcheringa. ... As indicating a past period of
a very vague and, it seemed to us, "Dreamy" nature, we adopted, to express as nearly
as possible the meaning of the word alcheringa (alchera, a dream, and ringa, a suffix
meaning "of" or "belonging to") the term "dream times" (Spencer and Gillen 1927:
592).

Though this account leaves no room for doubt as to the year 1896, Elkin
was later to use it to claim that Spencer had not discerned the dreaming
connotation of Alcheringa until 1926. This then enabled Elkin to suggest that
he had discovered the term at around the same time as Spencer but over a
much wider ethnographic range:
The concept "Dream-time" arose out of Spencer and Gillen's use of the Aranda word
Alcheringa (Altjiranga) in their classic The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899)
to denote the mythic times of the ancestors of the totemic groups. However, when
revising that book in Alice Springs in 1926, Professor Spencer found that "past mythic
time" was only part of the meaning of Altjira; it also meant dream and, moreover,
those Aborigines who were becoming familiar with English referred to the ancestral
heroes, their past times and to everything associated with them as their Dreaming.
And, in my own field-work from 1927 onwards in southern, central, north-western and
northern regions of Australia, whatever the term, it was the "dreaming". Altjira in the
Aranda tribe, Djugur in the vast western region of South Australia and neighbouring
areas of Western and Central Australia, Bugari around La Grange and Broome, Ungud
on the north of the King Leopold Range, Northern Kimberley, Wongar in North-
Eastern Arhem Land, and so on (Elkin 1964:210).

Three points anticipated in this version of events will figure prominently

below. First, the fact of a single English word being interchangeable for all
these different words derived from separate cultural regions has the effect of
smothering multiplicity under a single undifferentiated category-"aborig-
inal"-defined in contradistinction to settler society. Second, Elkin represents
Aborigines as proffering the English word dreaming as if they had been the
authors of its translation. The third point is the terminological shift from
dream-times to Dreaming, especially in so far as a reference (or lack of it) to
time is concerned.

Before developing these points, however, the cultural background to the

Dreaming complex needs to be sketched in. Since I do not intend to account
for Eurohistorical watersheds, socially contexted analysis will be restricted to
the local level, where it is possible to show the cultural selection and specifi-
cation of a general post-Enlightenment theme.

II

Dreaming has long signified the subordinate aspect of a lop-sided am-

bivalence between scientific empiricism and various forms of subjective or
romantic idealism in European discourse. Needless to say, this ambivalence

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204 PATRICK WOLFE

also extends to dichotomous representations of nature and of the female, as

well as to the enduring alternation of base and noble savagery. This double-
edgedness endows the romantic aspect with a contrary subtext, so that when,
say, Andrew Lang (1898:xviii) places aborigines amongst the "most dis-
tinguished" of the world's dreamers, the distinction is bestowed to satirical
ends. This ambivalence continues to the present day in the common settler
quip equating the Dreamtime with alcoholic stupor. As will be shown, this
ambivalence, which is an aspect of the cultural irony to which this paper is
addressed, has substantial implications for settler ideologies concerning rights
to land.

Being both subjective and impervious to logic, dreaming was bound to

invite scientific antipathy (which was indeed expressed at least as early as
Descartes' first Meditation11). In particular, dreaming's notorious disregard
for sequential regularity ran counter to the whole discourse of time, discipline
and order which Foucault (1967, 1977) has famously analysed. A century
after Descartes, Buffon, one of the greatest of the Enlightenment system-
atisers, made the capacity to distinguish between dreams and reality a thresh-
old which separated humans from animals. For Buffon, the reason that ani-
mals were incapable of distinguishing between dreams and reality was that
they lacked a sense of time:

We remember dreams for the same reason that we remember former sensations: the
only difference between us and the brutes is, that we can distinguish dreams from ideas
or real sensations; and this capacity of distinguishing is a result of comparison, an
operation of memory, which includes the idea of time. But the brutes, who are
deprived of memory and of the faculty of comparing past and present time, cannot
distinguish their dreams from their actual sensations (Buffon 1812 [1749]: 530-1).

By the second half of the nineteenth century, within the emergent discipline
of anthropology, aspirations to scientific status ruled out any romantic rever-
ence for dreaming's creative freedom. Rather, the abasement and promiscuity
which characterised dreaming in the private realm were transferred to a scien-
tifically constructed realm of savagery. From within the heartland of roman-
ticism, for instance, the German anthropologist Adolf Bastian, whose interna-
tional standing was yet to be rivalled by that of the Englishman Tylor, could
hardly have expressed the construction more clearly:

Tribes in the state of nature surrender passively to the all too overwhelming impres-
sions of the external world. For them, hallucinations and illusions maintain a half-
conscious oscillation between dreaming and waking as a normal condition. Their
entire mental condition enables them to create supernatural agencies or to believe in
these unconditionally, with an intensity and to an extent, to the direct understanding of
which luckily our logical thinking has long ago destroyed the bridge, or at least should
have done so (Bastian 1868:118). 12
11 Descartes 1954 [1642]:61-3.
12 F. Goodman, translator.

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 205

The difference between this statement and Buffon's is that, whereas Buffon
had distinguished between people and animals, Bastian, through citing essen-
tially the same criteria, was distinguishing between types of people. The
theoretical watershed separating the two approaches was Darwinism, which
both relativised Buffon's hiatus and enabled the opening up of comparable
divisions within genus homo. Indeed, a quarter of a century before the emer-
gence of the dream-times, Darwin himself, who had been to Australia, had
compared the consciousness of Australian aborigines, who had "hardly any
abstract words" and could not count above four, to the twitching of a sleeping
dog reliving the chase in its dreams (Darwin 1871:i, 62).
Aborigines' unquestioned proximity to the animal state entailed in advance
that they, like animals, should be held to confuse dreaming with everyday
experience. An anthropological preoccupation with ritual encouraged such a
conclusion, since ritual added to the input of the irrational. In this regard,
scientific rationalism sustained discursive continuities which encompassed
centuries. Thus, by way of Spencer and Gillen's account of totemic announce-
ments among the Arunta, Frazer attributed precisely the same role to aborig-
inal ritual as, over a hundred and fifty years earlier, Buffon had attributed to
animals' lack of a sense of time:

These announcements perhaps sometimes originate in dreams, for what a savage sees
in a dream is just as real to him as what he sees in his waking hours. The thoughts of
the natives are at times so much taken up with the performance of sacred ceremonies
that it is quite natural that they should dream of them and take the visionary images of
sleep for revelations of those spirits with whom their own spirit has been communing
during the lethargy of the body (Frazer 1910:i, 212).

To turn more specifically to anthropology, Frazer's estimate of dreaming's

importance in savage life did not simply reflect European rationalism in
general. Within that overall tradition,13 his estimate was specifically predi-
cated upon Tylor's theory of Animism, whose key premise was dreaming, and
which dominated late nineteenth-century anthropological thought. According
to this theory, whose paradigm enunciation was Tylor's landmark (1871)
Primitive Culture, the first abstract conception was the notion of a soul, or of
a spiritual double detachable from the body, which occurred to savages as an
explanation for the sensation of moving about in their dreams. Animism had
both cognitive and religious significance since, once spirit doubles had been
conceptualised, they could be attributed to a whole range of objects-hence
fetishism, totemism and other forms of idolatry.
In keeping with the conventional evolutionary conflation of individual and
species development, Tylor (1871:i,431) deemed animism a childish doctrine,

13 For a classical precedent opposing dreams and science in a manner closely anticipating
Tylor's theory of Animism, see Lucretius (1886:iv, 29-39). Voltaire (1967 [1770]:425) antici-
pated the theory by a century, whilst Hobbes (1909 [1651]:17, 83) had anticipated it a century
before Voltaire.

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206 PATRICK WOLFE

"the infant philosophy of mankind," which was no different to the nursery

belief that sticks or toys were alive. It was not that the conclusions which
savages drew from their experiences were invalid. Rather, an incapacity to
distinguish between dreams and veridical sense data14 rendered their reliance
upon experience a mockery of the sensory foundations of scientific
empiricism:
Everyone who has seen visions while light-headed in fever, everyone who has ever
dreamt a dream, has seen the phantoms of objects as well as of persons. How then can
we charge the savage with far-fetched absurdity for taking into his philosophy and
religion an opinion which rests on the very evidence of his senses (Tylor 1871:i,431)?

In sum, then, savages' impartial crediting of all sensation made them the
hapless dupes of somatic caprice. It is in this connection that the singular
value of dreaming for evolutionary anthropology can be most clearly seen,
for, emanating from within the private constitution of the sleeper, dreams
afforded a nexus which linked the physical and the mental. Thus they pro-
vided a bridge between the animal and the human, the concrete and the
abstract, craniology and culture. Aborigines thought with their bodies: Their
brute senses were geared to tracking game; they counted on their fingers; and
so on. Thus their sign language testified to their lingering failure to abandon
direct tactile reference in favour of the relative abstraction of vocal representa-
tion (hence they needed to stay within the light of their campfires in order to
converse at night'5). This combination of the somatic and the semiotic had
made aborigines into dreamers long before the Dreamtime.
The contention that the Dreaming complex constituted the culmination of a
historical discourse which subordinated dreaming savages to the level of
animal nature shares some ground with Ortner's (1974) claim that the female
category is universally subordinated in an analogous manner. Thus it is no
accident that the dream-times should have emerged at the same time as psy-
choanalysis, which brought together a similar assemblage of themes-wom-
en, savagery, childhood, irrationality, instinct, ritual, and so forth-within a
scientific discourse on dreaming.16
A further consequence of the theory of animism was theological, for the
idea of a world populated by a multitude of vitalised objects did not entail
their being worshipped. The issue was of some moment, as religious senti-

14 This was a common theme. Herbert Spencer (1871:150), for instance, claimed that savage
languages were incapable of distinguishing between "I saw" and "I dreamed that I saw." Thus it
was conventional that Howitt (1884:187, 1904:411) should attribute aboriginal beliefs to a failure
to distinguish between dreaming and reality. Spencer and Gillen's (1904:451) version repeated
Tylor and Herbert Spencer word for word.
15 For a model statement of the whole formula from a follower of Tylor, see Clodd (1885:223-
4; cf. H. Spencer 1871:142-97).
16 The first, German edition of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899,
though its title page was postdated to 1900 (Freud 1976:34).

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 207

ment had also been proposed as a feature distinguishing people from ani-
mals.17 In contrast, Tylor's theory eliminated moral and theological criteria
from a scientific definition of humanity. Though not jeopardising the human
status of its practitioners, however, the lowest, dream-related form of ani-
mism was categorically pretheistic in Tylor's scheme, merely furnishing the
ground upon which gods would later develop (Tylor 1871:i, 1)
This clear distinction between animism and theism illuminates one of the
transformations of the Dreaming complex. Although the Dreaming was later
to be adduced by Stanner (1965:213-21) as evidence of aboriginal religiosity,
Spencer and Gillen not only avoided the term religion in relation to the dream-
times but actually resisted its use. Following Turgot and Comte, Frazer had
ranked religion as an evolutionary advance from magic, with science subse-
quently developing out of religion. On this basis, Spencer (1904:404) ex-
plicitly proscribed the use of the word religious in relation to the Arunta, for
whom the term magical was appropriate.
This exclusion of the dream-times from religion underlay the long-running
dispute between Spencer and the Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow, whose
Hermannsburg Mission had been the subject of Spencer's disparaging re-
marks. Though they were in total opposition over the question of aboriginal
religiosity, neither doubted that the dream-times and religion were incompati-
ble. Thus the dispute was over whether or not blacks had a dream-time, rather
than over what it would have meant if they had.
Strehlow repudiated Gillen's translation, contending that "a 'dream-time'
is unknown to the blacks."18 Whilst Strehlow's rare proficiency in Aranda
might seem to have made him a more credible authority than Spencer and
Gillen, the concept of the dream-times brought the protagonists' professional
interests into direct conflict. Spencer's interest in the primitiveness of his
ethnographic discovery encouraged a denial of the very faculty-a religious
sentiment-which was prerequisite to the success of Strehlow's evangelical
enterprise. Thus Strehlow alleged that the word Altjira (the alchera in Al-
cheringa) referred to an Aranda good god, to which Spencer responded with
the claim that, in translating the Lutheran canon into Arunta, the Hermanns-
burg missionaries had rendered Gott as Altjira and had inculcated the usage in
daily prayers, which accounted for Strehlow now finding that the word had a
monotheistic import.19
Beyond the particular issue of theology, however, a more general transfor-
mation took place between Spencer's and Stanner's approaches. Though Stan-
ner is not to blame for the New Age caricature which enveloped aborigines in

17 In Australia, and with reference to aborigines, by J. Dunmore Lang 1861:374. Cf. Schmidt,
1931:58.
18 Strehlow in Thomas 1905:430. For a fuller context, see Appendix (b).
19 See Appendix (b).

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208 PATRICK WOLFE

the wake of the 1960s, his celebrated 1956 article, "The Dreaming," which
remains the definitive expression of the concept, represents a distinct shift
towards the romantic pole:
The truth of it [The Dreaming] seems to be that man, society, and nature and past,
present, and future are at one together within a unitary system of such a kind that its
ontology cannot illumine minds too much under the influence of humanism, ra-
tionalism, and science (Stanner 1956:54).

Though cautioning against a European tendency to view all aboriginal thought

as ruled by mysticism, Stanner depicts his blackfellow as a stock transcenden-
tal other in contrast to the order and efficiency of settlement:
What defeats the blackfellow in the modern world, fundamentally, is his transcenden-
talism (Stanner 1956:61).

Defeat, here, has serious implications, since it is equated-in a manner at

first sight reminiscent of Spencer's Social Darwinism-with "extinction"
(Stanner 1956:61). Yet Stanner's rhetoric is very different to Spencer's evolu-
tionist resignation. When Spencer asserted (1896b: 111) that "in contact with
the white man the aborigine is doomed to disappear," he meant that the people
would die out. For Stanner, on the other hand, extinction has the quality of a
literary event:

A good analogy is with the process in Chinese poetry by which, according to Arthur
Waley, its talent for classical allusion became a vice which finally destroyed it al-
together (Stanner 1956:61).

The apparent offensiveness of Stanner's own allusion is inexplicable until one

decodes what he means by extinction. In the overall context, this judgement
does not refer to the lives of the erstwhile inhabitants of the Dreaming (by
1956, their physical extinction was no longer a feasible prospect) but to their
transcendental mentality.
The difference between Spencer and Stanner is symptomatic of a much
more general process. On the ideational level, this process can be charac-
terised as the extension of the scientific realm. On the local level, it has a
material correlate in the extension of colonial settlement. The two are cog-
nate. Moreover, in addition to thematic continuity through the shared imper-
atives of order, regularity and control, they have a common developmental
structure.

To deal with this common structure first: when Tylor coined his theory of
animism, he was, as observed, engaged in establishing anthropology's cre-
dentials as a science.20 In the process, he not only had to carve out a space
between established sciences (archaeology, philology and so forth), but he
also took it upon himself to discredit the dissenting "pseudo-sciences" of
spiritualism, astrology, divination and the like, which he stigmatised as anom-

20 Burrow 1968:234-41. Cf. (regarding Tylor) Marett 1941:308; Stocking 1987:267.

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 209

alous modem survivals of the savage germ of animism.21 Animism's associa-

tion with dreaming was part of the stigma. There was nothing unusual about
Tylor's attitude, which Frazer and Spencer shared. It simply represented a
continuation of the long-standing scientific opprobrium which attached to
dreaming as a signifier for subjectivity and disorder. As Freud observed (1976
[1900]:212), "The phrase 'Dreams are froth' seems intended to support the
scientific estimate of dreams." This estimate is the contemporary context in
which Spencer's selection of Gillen's phrase should be understood. By con-
trast, when Stanner was writing, over half a century later, anthropology was
well established and no longer had grounds for anxiety over its possible lack
of disciplinary status.22 Stanner had no need to prove that he was on the side
of science.
This academic consolidation echoed the consolidation of settlement in Aus-
tralia. In the 1890s, when Spencer was amongst the Arunta, the frontier
remained a reality to the north and to the west.23 Hostile natives were still
being "dispersed," as the official euphemism put it, to make way for settle-
ment.24 By the time of Stanner's article, however, settlement had been effec-
tively completed. On both academic and political counts, therefore, savages
and their dreaming had become detoxified by the 1950s.
Besides the common developmental structure, there are certain thematic
continuities. So far, we have only considered ideas and theories in isolation
from the social forces which bore them. We have also remained within the
realm of learned discourse. When we move from the level of metropolitan
theories to consider their appropriation into local culture, however, it becomes
possible to suggest the diversity of the discourses which the Dreaming com-
plex combined. In the section that follows, ideologies which are distinctive of
a particular frontier culture will be shown to be adaptations of the general
post-Enlightenment themes outlined above, which are further modified as the
local situation develops. Thus, though the imperative of order is an obvious
common denominator between science and colonisation, it takes on idiosyn-
cratic forms in the Australian context.
The addition of a local dimension allows the concept of total cultural
practice to be clarified. As will be seen, the Dreaming complex tied different
levels of discourse (epistemic, local, political, poetic, and so forth) into a
culturally distinctive knot. Similarly, though expressed in language, it was
language which operated synecdochically, both encapsulating and contribut-
ing to the historical development of settler society. Thus the cultural appropri-

21 Tylor 1867:91.
22 See Markus 1990:144-5.
23 In practice, there was, obviously, no simple demarcation between two monolithic societies
but a spectrum of articulation running from first encounter to incorporation. Thus the term
frontier is used here to signify a settler construct for the continuing existence of unincorporated
aboriginal social units. It is, therefore, equivalent to the term bush black.
24 Mulvaney 1989:100.

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210 PATRICK WOLFE

ation of the Dreaming complex was not a passive process. Rather, the concept
was taken into use as an active representation within Australian settler culture,
where it took on new contextual meanings which shifted its original
significance.
As opposed to the situation in, say, most Asian or African colonies for
example the people who invaded Australia did not seek simply to dominate
indigenous society in order to extract a surplus from it. They sought to replace
indigenous society. Pastoral settlement was seen as a zero-sum conflict: as the
folk aphorism had it, "niggers and cattle don't mix."25 For this culture of
settlement, dreaming had a particular ideological salience on account of its
conformity with the idea that colonial intrusion was a form of awakenment.
Though the idea of awakenment was a commonplace of the doctrine of prog-
ress, legitimating conquest right across the colonised world, the settlement of
land belonging to nomads gave it a special twist. For what was to be aroused
there was not the people but the land itself, which, having never felt the
improving iron of cultivation, had yet to become property.26 In reducing the
land to order, then, settlement was rescuing it from nature as reason rescues
consciousness from the chaos of dreaming. Whereas the colonisation of sur-
plus-generating civilisations which had had golden ages was depicted as ren-
aissance, dreaming aborigines had merely occupied the land, so settlement
was not occupation. Like the mist, therefore (or like Freud's "froth"), the
dream-times evaporated with the dawning of settlement, leaving behind only
land as the other party to the colonial encounter. In other words, the Dreaming
complex constituted an ideological elaboration of the doctrine of terra nul-
lius,27 emptying the land so that settler and landscape formed a dual interac-
tion with the characteristic proportions of mind over matter. This ideological
bracketing-off-whereby aborigines were either effaced from the land or
assimilated to it, leaving "a blank page on which the white man could write
his will and his hopes"28-is of such cultural depth that journalists, popu-
larisers, schoolbooks and children's stories have repeated it tirelessly:
The unique aspect of the Australian colonial experience was that there were two great
protagonists, the settlers and the very land itself (Harris 1967:1-2).

The theme of precolonial somnambulance, a blend of dreaming and the

aimless Walkabout, suffuses Australian liberal culture, as evidenced by its

25 Reynolds 1982:129.
26 The reference is to Vattel's doctrine of natural law, whereby rights to land accrued from
tillage or pasturage. It was expressed in a passage from Herbert Spencer's Social Statics re-
published as a pamphlet in Melbourne in 1870 by the Land Reform League: "Cultivation is
commonly considered to give a legitimate title. He who has reclaimed a tract of ground from its
primitive wildness, is supposed to have thereby made it his own" (H. Spencer 1870:7). See also
Bridges 1970; Reynolds 1989: ch. 3.
27 Spencer himself entitled the third book of his popular Wanderings in Wild Australia
(Spencer 1928) "Australia's Great Lone Land."
28 The quotation comes from the jacket notes to Fisher 1968, a widely used school text book.
Examples of this point could be multiplied indefinitely.

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 211

coffee-table literature (Time Before Morning, The Dawn of Time, and so on).
Walkabout could only be aimless, as there was nowhere to go in a signless
void unorganised by pioneering purpose. For settlers, the wilderness was void
because its contents had no use-a random assemblage of protean forms, they
were to be replaced rather than domesticated or employed. Thus land was but
a spatial condition, rather than one of the forces, of production. Hence aborig-
ines' assimilation to the landscape amounted to the same thing as their efface-
ment from it. According to this ideology, they were part of its useless original
contents rather than acknowledged sources of labour, as witnessed by their
legendary unsuitability for work.29 In what might be called its hard version,
this formula implied that aborigines needed clearing along with everything
else on the land. Whilst it is relatively rare to find moder examples of this
version, it was predicated upon a narrative structure which remains abun-
dantly alive in the softer trappings of liberal romanticism:
What a fascinating place Australia is! When one thinks of the centuries of civilisation
that have passed over China, India, and Europe and here you have a situation-still-
in 1982 that most Australians are entirely ignorant of some parts of the continent, be it
structure, wildlife, or the heart and soul of this beautiful old bronze raft that severed
itself from the rest of the world, and slumbered in a "dream time" with its bizarre
marsupials and its gentle Aboriginal people who believed that the landscape itself was
the creation of their known world . . . (Olsen et al. 1984:12).

This theme is not dependent upon Gillen's particular verbal formula, having
been recognisably, albeit unromantically, expressed before the appearance of
the dream-times:

the weird savages, birds without wings, mysterious animals of land and water in this
weird and "Strange Land of Dawning" (Purcell 1894:289).

Even on a strictly local level, the general theme was clearly present to the
minds of settlers who were responsible for dealing with the Arunta. Thus
Gillen's superior, a mounted policeman named W. H. Willshire who was local
Protector of Aborigines, wrote a number of books recounting his homicidal
exploits in the outback, one of which-published in the same year as the
report of the Horn Expedition-was entitled The Land of the Dawning
(Willshire 1896).
Despite its thematic compatibility, however, The Land of the Dawning does
not mention the dream-times.30 For the purposes of cultural selection, the
verbal difference is crucial. As the earlier outline of the significance of dream-
ing in European thought should suggest, it was simply not open to the Dawn-

29 Aboriginal resistance to the discipline of labour imposed by the settlers is encapsulated in

another English-language signifier for aborigines: Walkabout. By 1925, the dyarchy of the two
signifiers had become such that Strehlow's anthropologist friend Basedow (1925:279) asserted, in
relation to the Aranda, that "Altjerringa is the 'walk-about' of the spirit ancestors."
30 Nor does Willshire's (1888) vocabulary of the Alice Springs natives, published eight years
earlier. The first ever exhibition of aboriginal art (as "art"), held in the late 1880's in Adelaide,
was entitled "Dawn of Art" (Jones 1988:165).

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212 PATRICK WOLFE

ing, or to other local analogues, to acquire the same purchase upon an-
thropological theory. The different levels of discourse conjoined by the
Dreaming complex gave it a wide range of possible meanings, so that no
synonym could substitute for it through all its uses. A further consequence of
this versatility, to which discussion now turns, is that it enabled the Dreaming
complex to become transformed in use.
Ignored thus far has been the fact that the phrase dream-times seems to
consist in a paradox, the sense of time being conventionally excluded from
dreams.31 Indeed, controversy over whether or not the concept had a time
reference accompanied the formulation of alternative nomenclatures such as
the Dreaming, the eternal dream-time, and so forth. In its infancy, however,
as Spencer and Gillen's 1904 Glossary illustrates, the dream times unequivo-
cally referred to the past:
Alcheringa. Name applied by the Arunta, Kaitish and Unmatjera tribes to the far past,
or dream times, in which their mythic ancestors lived. The word "alcheri" means
dream (Spencer and Gillen 1904:745).

Yet this temporality contrasts with later characterisations of the Dreaming

complex:
We realise that Spencer and Gillen's translation of Alcheringa and similar words as
Dreamtime and Radcliffe-Brown's reference to World-Dawn, both meaning a past
time, are not wrong, but are inadequate. The Aboriginal word includes the idea of
"belonging to the dream" and my early translation of djugur as "eternal dreamtime",
with which Roheim agreed, at least suggests that the Dreaming is an ever-present
condition of existence (Elkin 1961:203).

The reason why Elkin deemed it not wrong, but merely inadequate, to
represent the concept as applying to a past time is that it did refer to such a
time. It was inadequate, however, so to limit it, since the concept also ex-
pressed a continuing or eternal reality, persisting, as Stanner (1956:52) put it,
"everywhen." The discursive structure is, therefore, twofold, juxtaposing
past origin and continuing present. For the argument to come, the fact that the
two are juxtaposed (and thus coexistent), rather than amalgamated or col-
lapsed, is central. Though ultimately encompassed, the two aspects are cate-
gorically distinct. A beginning did actually take place, whilst the ever-present
evades placement in time-or, as Berdt (1974:8) expressed it:
Generally, the concept of the Dreaming refers to a mythological period which had a
beginning but has no foreseeable end . . . these beings are believed to be just as much
alive today as they ever were and as they will continue to be. They are eternal.

The juxtaposition of origin and presence is echoed in Australian nationalist

ideology, in which the two are divided by a notional moment of settlement.

31 Hence Sydney Hartland objected (1909:238) that alcheringa was "not very happily ren-
dered by 'Dream-time,' seeing that the Aranda believe the events to have actually occurred in an
indefinite but far past period."

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 213

Here the retrospective aspect, which is the counterpart of origin--"back in

the Dreamtime"-refers to the inscrutable (but occasionally glimpsed) era
before Captain Cook, the First Fleet, or whatever might serve to summarise
the establishment of the nation.32 Lacking a history, precontact Australia was
unimaginable and, accordingly, unreal. Though it may seem to be labouring
the obvious to state that the Dreamtime maps on to nationalist constructions of
Australian prehistory, it is in its second aspect, that of the timeless ever-
present, that the ideological consequence of the juxtaposition can best be
appreciated. For the corollary of this unreal past became an unreal present
which was the outcome of anthropological representations in which aborig-
ines figured as ritually constituted entities.
The pervasiveness of ritual in anthropological representations of aborigines
has already been noted with reference to Frazer, who saw habituation to ritual
as encouraging savages' credulity in regard to their dreams. There are further
reasons for the attractiveness of ritual, quite apart from a certain prurience
discernible in the literature. Ritual presented condensed expressions of aspects
of social structure, especially details of kinship systems, which might other-
wise have escaped notice. In the case of small nomadic groups traversing
large expanses of territory, even the people themselves, let alone the details of
their social organisation, were liable to escape notice-a problem alleviated
by the relative conspicuousness of large-scale ritual gatherings (which, given
appropriate inducement, could usually be arranged).33 Furthermore, ritual,
with its exotica, together with the alien collectivism of classificatory kinship
systems, constituted well-defined social-anthropological subject matter at a
time when the discipline was in its institutional infancy.
In addition to these considerations, however, there was an overwhelming
economic reason for the preponderance of ritual and kinship in an-
thropological discourse, which was that the great majority of anthropological
data was collected from people who were dependent upon the settler econo-
my. This does not mean that they were necessarily residents of missions,
stations, prisons or other settler institutions, although most were. Pastoralism
had such far-reaching ecological effects upon water, vegetation and game that
people could lose control over the reproduction of their traditional mode of
production even though they might be at a considerable distance from settle-
ment, hence the cumulative pattern of nomadic groups coming in off their
land.34 Thus anthropological photographs which depicted functioning precon-
tact social systems were usually misleading-as, of course, were representa-
tions of kinship as a conceptual diagram which systematised reproduction as if

32 Scholarly examples include Flood's (1983) Archaeology of the Dreamtime and Fitzgerald's
(1982) From the Dreaming to 1915-A History of Queensland.
33 SeeT. G. H. Strehlow 1947:190, 1969:48-9, 1978:7. Cf. Howitt 1904:517-8, 624; Stirling
1896:28.
34 See Reynolds 1982: ch. 6; Rowley 1972:206-11.

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214 PATRICK WOLFE

it required no terrestrial support. Similarly, although ritual practices could be

adapted to meet changed conditions, anthropological analyses which present-
ed ritual data as if they were embedded within viably functioning traditional
societies had the effect of obscuring the expropriation of those societies.
In its second, ever-present aspect, the Dreaming complex was quintessen-
tially a ritual concept. Thus it is significant that Spencer's misrepresentation
of the history of the first, originary version of the concept should have derived
it from the Engwura ceremony. In immortalising this three-month-long series
of rituals as a kind of precontact swansong, Spencer and Gillen's 1899 book
reenacted evolutionary taxonomy through its freezing of the Arunta in a
present poised at the parting of the ways, when their empirical substrates
passed on to acculturation or beyond. Moreover, the ritual aborigine which
transpired conduced to the ideological bracketing-off whereby aborigines
were excluded from the dual encounter between settlers and the land. To make
this last observation clear, it is necessary to develop the twofold structure of
the Dreaming complex more fully.

III

The twin aspects, origin and presence, have in common the feature of being
discontinuous with the economic realities of settlement. Thus the Dreamtime
as precontact idyll is lost, whilst, in the potentially more controversial realm
of the present, dreaming aborigines hover in a mystically supported ritual
space which does not conflict with the practical exigencies of settlement. The
two coexist without meeting. Thus the timelessness of the ever-present
Dreaming is actually a spacelessness.35
The primary ideological significance of the Dreaming complex was that it
established ideal versions of settlers and aborigines which excluded shared
features. Since the feature most crucially shared between the two was an
economic interest in the same land,36 it is consistent that the aspects of
aboriginal life most stressed by the Dreaming complex should be precisely
those with the least connection to economic existence. In other words, the
scheme was the simplest of binary oppositions, substituting an ideal horizon-
tal relationship-"encounter"-for the vertical reality of incorporation.
Hence ambiguity was rendered repugnant. This feature received its most
public expression where "miscegenation" was concerned, to the extent that
"mongrel" remains one of the most potent insults in the settler repertoire. In a

35 Swain (1988:454) makes a similar point, only in relation to Warlpiri, rather than settler,
ideology: "What links the Dreaming 'past' and the present is, therefore, not time but place."
Also perhaps relatedly-though with more romantic ("postrational"?) intentions-the German
anthropologist Hans Peter Duerr has intoned (1985:121) that "The 'dream place' is everywhere
and nowhere, just like the 'dream-time' is always and never. You might say that the term 'dream
place' does not refer to any particular place and the way to get to it is to get nowhere."
36 My reason for asserting that this was more crucial than the men's sexual interest in the same
women is that the initial motivation for settlement was land rather than women.

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 215

more general sense, however, mediation of the pure opposition was not adap-
tation but aberration. The cultural hybrid, even though "full-blooded," could
be ridiculous, grotesque or nefarious. Thus the incorporation of blacks into
white society split into two the ambivalent post-Enlightenment image of sav-
agery, attaching its negative side to the acculturated, leaving the good savage
(or "bush black") as a completely good residue but always somewhere else.
The ideal was a formula for imposing liability upon its empirical counterparts.
Thus the romantic ideal and the repugnant hybrid represent opposite sides of
the single message that bad savages do not deserve the land and good savages
do not use it.
The two modes of the Dreaming complex emerged at separate stages in the
history of Australian settlement. The originary, dream-times version was a
frontier concept: to cross the frontier was to go back into the deep time
preceding history. The emergence of the ever-present Dreaming, on the other
hand, did not commence until over a quarter of a century later, in the late
1920s. Thus it coincided both with the statistical turning-point at which ab-
original numbers began to rise from their lowest level, recorded in 1921
(Lancaster Jones 1970:3-6) and with the effective disappearance of a frontier.
These two developments coincided in placing aborigines within settler soci-
ety. It is, therefore, consistent that Bates, who devoted a whole book (Bates
1938) to the contention that aborigines were "passing," should have referred
in it to the Dreamtime, whilst Elkin, who opposed the claim that aborigines
were dying out (Elkin 1952:244), should have been closely associated with the
ever-present mode of the Dreaming complex.
With the emergence of the ever-present Dreaming, then, aborigines came in
from behind the frontier and were finally assimilated into the nation state,
only on terms of their economic invisibility. So far as this second mode is
concerned, therefore, Elkin's "eternal dream-times" might perhaps be en-
titled to the priority which he claimed for it (Elkin 1932:128-9, 1933:11-12).
As already observed, however, the classic statement of the ever-present ver-
sion was to be Stanner's (1956) article, "The Dreaming," which exemplifies
many of the preceding observations.
For present purposes, however, the significant feature of Stanner's article is
the way in which he refers to blackfellows as a unity, rather than to distinct
groups. Thus the diffusion of the Dreaming complex has become complete.37
Stanner's article is suggestive in this regard, since, after crediting Spencer and
Gillen with immortalising the term, he goes on to make the striking observa-
tion that it is not, after all, a translation of corresponding blackfellow words:
In their own dialects they use terms like Alcheringa, mipuramibirina, boaradja-
often almost untranslatable, or meaning literally something like "men of old" (Stanner
1956:51).

37 Though not as complete as in Micha's (1970:291) turnabout: "Thanks to Carl Strehlow, we

have numerous examples of migrations of 'dream-time' groups in Central Australia."

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216 PATRICK WOLFE

A little lower, however, we find Stanner wondering:

Why the blackfellow thinks of "Dreaming" as the nearest equivalent in English is a

puzzle (Stanner 1956:52).

Expressed thus, Stanner's puzzlement may seem curiously naive. It be-

comes understandable once it is set against the paradox of a precontact an-
thropology. For, just as the Dreaming complex had no place for the economics
of incorporation, so, by the same token, did it preclude the consequences of a
colonial lingua franca. Operating within the working assumptions of his
discipline, Stanner did not have access to a range of possible reasons why
blackfellows should so mistranslate.

IV

Reports of aborigines referring to their Dreaming raise a question not thus far
considered. The cultural affinities commending the term to a predominantly
European imagination could hardly have appealed to such Kooris as had come
to appreciate them.
Kooris' submission to anthropological language was the result of invasion
rather than of cultural selection. With the spread of settlement, settler and
Koori discourses merged. It follows that the isolation of anthropology for
discrete analysis can only be a heuristic device. For, as part of the discourse of
colonial power, anthropology becomes an object of contestation for the colo-
nised, who seek to appropriate it to their own advantage by turning it back
upon their expropriators. In the process, however, the colonised acquiesce in
the terms encoded within that discourse, whereby their collective self-asser-
tion finds expression as a species of nationalism, which, in turn, encodes the
progress-based rationale for colonisation. Thus the collective unity underlying
Koori (or "pan-Aboriginal") identity is itself the product of colonial con-
quest, which installed the prerequisite of a generalised other. More specifical-
ly, however, in adopting the twofold discursive structure of the Dreaming
complex, Koori ideology recapitulates the familiar mythology of the nation
state, which has an origin but is eternal. The irony of Kooris' adoption of the
Dreaming complex is, accordingly, a symptom of the containment, or relative
powerlessness, of their discourse.
Tracing the diffusion of the Dreaming complex does not, therefore, explain
why Kooris came to submit to anthropological language. It merely accounts
for the particular form which that language took. In this regard, as the earlier
example of Byamee suggests, the term's dissemination was a text-effect of
anthropology.
After their initial fieldwork, Spencer and Gillen mounted an expedition
from Arunta country up to the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. This resulted
in their second (1904) major book, which contained the above-mentioned
Glossary. Though the actual term dream-times only appeared once in the text

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 217

of that book, they liberally allocated synonyms for Alcheringa, which thus
entailed that the words concerned meant dream-times. Hence they opened
their account of Urabunna cosmology with the brief statement that:
the Urabunna belief is as follows:-in the Alcheringa (the Urabunna term for this is
Ularaka) . . (Spencer and Gillen 1904:145)

and then dispensed with Ularaka. Thus transmitted within the Alcheringa, the
dream-times can be followed across huge tracts of country within the space of
a sentence:

Thus the Arunta term for the far past, during which their ancestors lived, is alcheringa,
so also is that of the Kaitish and Unmatjera. In the Warramunga, Walpari, and
Wulmara it is wingara; in the Tjingilli it is mungai; and in the Umbaia and Gnanji it is
poaradju (Spencer and Gillen 1904:12).

It would seem, therefore, that the well-known overture "What is your Dream-
ing?" (Elkin 1933:11-12) was not, after all, a Koori invention but an English
lesson. Thus established, the concept could travel full circle, even back to the
Arunta themselves. Hence Spencer achieved a poker-faced reversal, whereby
the dream times became prior to the Alcheringa:
According to the Arunta ideas, their ancestors who lived in the dream times, or, as they
call it, the Alcheringa ... (Spencer 1904:392)

The fact that Alcheringa was synonymous with the dream times enabled a
syllogistic contagion whereby any number of other aboriginal words could
become dream times by virtue of their being equated with Alcheringa within
the mystifying confines of aboriginal language. The singular is significant
here, since linguistic diversity-along with aboriginal heterogeneity in gener-
al-was minimised, notably by the use of the term dialect rather than lan-
guage. Thus Alcheringa became a linguistic double-agent: a conduit whereby
an equivalence established within anthropological discourse could be pro-
jected back on to aboriginal cosmologies.38
Anthropologists' reluctance to concede the extent of their reliance upon
the pidgin lingua franca produced a linguistic levelling. On the one hand, the
differences between Koori languages are minimised, whilst, on the other, the
general use of English is largely ignored. Yet a measure of the consequences
of the settler elaborated code can be gauged from the conspicuous decline of
aboriginal sign language in the literature after the generation of Howitt, Roth,
and Spencer. Once translated into the overarching idiom of English, terms

38 Thus Howitt (1904:482, 658) equated the Dieri mura muras with the Alcheringa (cf.
Langloh Parker 1905:6). By 1908, "Alcheringa" had secured a heading to itself in Hastings'
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1908). Under this heading, which was translated as
"Dream Times," Urabunna and Warramunga beliefs were classified together despite their being
acknowledged to be "widely different" (Thomas 1908). In Oxford, then, Alcheringa and Dream
Times had become interchangeable terms for aboriginal beliefs, without reference to doctrinal
content. Across the Channel, van Gennep (1906:XLVII) reversed Spencer and Gillen's pro-
cedure, assimilating Alcheringa to Ularaka.

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218 PATRICK WOLFE

could be exchanged outside the contexts of their customary use without local
differences becoming apparent.39 Referential heterogeneity is reinforced in
the case of secret-sacred knowledge, with access to a range of different
meanings varying according to ritual status. Since an externally imposed
universal code was necessarily the least esoteric medium, interlocutors using
it to exchange terms such as Dreaming (or totem, clan, family, and the like)
could successfully conduct parallel conversations without the code occasion-
ing their mutual interruption.40
The hegemony of an English-language formulation for an aboriginal con-
struction of the sacred is multiply ironic. Although ethnographers were gener-
ally loth to confess their reliance upon pidgin, they regularly furnished evi-
dence in other contexts of a thoroughgoing exclusion from sacred affairs of
anything associated with settlers.41 Thus the claim that the Dreaming ex-
pressed the sacred was a contradiction in terms: Rather than a way of talking
about the sacred, the Dreaming provided a way of not talking about it.42
Whether or not a particular term which a speaker intended to render by the
word Dreaming had any coincidental connection with ordinary dreaming in
that speaker's local language is, therefore, quite irrelevant, since Dreaming
was a word in English, whose semantic root system was a historical product
of that fact.43 As a single alien word, introduced through conquest, it bore no
such roots. Thus there is no puzzle attaching to Kooris' use of the word
Dreaming. They were simply speaking English.

APPENDIX

PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTS OF THE TEXTUAL ORIGINS OF THE

DREAMTIME AND THE ALCHERINGA

(a) The DreamtimelThe Dreaming

For Spencer's and Elkin's versions, see above. Stanner (1956:51) stated mere-
ly that Spencer and Gillen "immortalized" the concept, without further refer-
39 Cf. Urry 1980:71.
40 Thus for example, Howitt's (1904:513) report of the last intertribal Kuringal initiation
ceremony: "It was, in fact, the great intermarrying group which met at this ceremony, and the
component parts of it differed so much in language, that the most distant could not understand
each other without making use of the broken English which passes current all over Australia in
those native tribes which have been brought under the white man's influence."
41 Hence a reported alleviation of the rigors of initiation, since white food was not a scheduled
proscribed category (Howitt 1904:637). Similarly, "medicine men" were reported to lose their
power after drinking white man's tea (Spencer and Gillen 1904:481), a consequence extending to
alcohol and to hot liquids generally (Langloh Parker 1898:14).
42 Elkin himself acknowledged (1951:170) the occurrence of code-switching between indige-
nous and settler spheres.
43 With the exception of the Berdts (and, of course, of the Strehlows and of Spencer), the
question of the term's relationship to ordinary dreaming was scarcely ever addressed directly
(Berdt and Berndt 1946:68; cf. Elkin 1933:11, 1937:51-2). More recently, Sutton (1988:15) has
distinguished the Dreaming from ordinary dreaming: "The use of the English word Dreaming is
more a matter of analogy than of translation."

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 THE DREAMTIME IN AUSTRALIAN CULTURE 219

ence. Ronald Berdt (1974:7) found that the moment of its introduction was
"not clear from the literature", but later (Bemdt 1987:480) settled on the
probability of a Glossary of Native Terms appended to Spencer and Gillen's
(1904:745) The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, the source cited pre-
viously by Ralph Piddington (1932:374) and Carl Strehlow (1907:2). The
dream-times had actually been mentioned in the text of the 1904 book, only
in a passing reference to the Walpari rather than to the three groups (Arunta,
Kaitish, Unmatjera) mentioned in the Glossary (Spencer and Gillen
1904:576). More recently, Mulvaney (1989:116, cf. Mulvaney and Calaby
1985:124) alluded to Spencer's earliest reference to the term (Spencer
1896b:50) as "the first published general application of the concept of the
'Dreamtime', although precedence in its use belongs to a German missionary
at Hermannsburg." It is not clear either what Mulvaney meant by "general"
or which German missionary he had in mind. In any event, there had been no
preceding reference to the Dreamtime; only to altjira and the like (in
Krichauff 1890 [1887]:77, "altgiva").

(b) The AlcheringalAltjiranga

In a published letter to the Oxford anthropologist N. W. Thomas, as in his
(Strehlow 1907:2) magnum opus, Carl Strehlow referred to Spencer and
Gillen's 1904 Glossary, maintaining that its claim that "alcheri means dream,
and Alcheringa the dream-times" was a mistake: "Dream is altjirerinja, a
dreamer, altjirerana." Strehlow also contended that the word altjira (that is,
the "alchera" in Alcheringa) "has in itself no meaning; but a verb derived
from it, altjirerama, means primarily to become God; it is used in the sense of
to dream; for the blacks think that in dreams are revealed the will of Alt-
jira. . ." (Strehlow in Thomas 1905:430). Altjira was described (Strehlow
1907:1) as a God residing in Heaven (cf. von Leonhardi 1907:286-7). In a
letter to Frazer, which Frazer published in his Totemism and Exogamy
(1910:i,186, n. 2), Spencer charged that the Hermannsburg missionaries had
translated Gott as altjira for Lutheran prayers, contending that "Flour and
tobacco, etc., are only given to natives who attend church and school." Later,
Spencer quoted Strehlow's fellow Hermannsburg missionary Kempe as writ-
ing to him that Altjira did not mean God in the sense of a person but in the
sense of something existent (Spencer and Gillen 1927:596). This, however,
was in the course of an incomplete and significantly incorrect history of
accounts of the terms altjira and altjiranga as published by Strehlow's mis-
sionary predecessors at Hermannsburg, which Spencer produced in 1927 as a
continuation of his dispute with Carl Strehlow, who had by then died (Spencer
and Gillen 1927:590-6). In the course of this history, Spencer cited Schulze
(1891:239) as the first occasion on which the word Altjira was used (Spencer
and Gillen 1927:591). In fact, Schulze's first use of the word had occurred one
page earlier than this. In any event, twelve years before Schulze, Kempe
(1883:53) had reported the central Australian Blacks as saying that Altjira

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220 PATRICK WOLFE

(whom he glossed as God) gives children ("Die Kinder, sagen sie, schenkt
Altjira (Gott)"). Spencer's history would seem to have been the source used
by Dixon et al. (1990:150) and by Swain (1985:53; cf. 1989:346, n. 8) who
repeats the erroneous attribution of the word's origin to Schulze's (1891)
paper, adding the further error that the word to which Schulze referred was
alcheringa, rather than the less controversial altjira. Carl Strehlow's son later
returned to the dispute between his father and Spencer, conceding that Altjira
did not mean God, but still maintaining that Alcheringa had been "mistrans-
lated" as "dream time" on the basis of a confusion between altjiranga (al-
cheringa) and altjira rama (the altjirerama above) (T. G. H. Strehlow
1971:614-5; cf. Durkheim 1912:84, n. 2).

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