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The Aboriginal Dreaming, where time does not exist…

 In central Australia, there is a curious ring-shaped mountain, 22 km in diameter and 180 meters high. Its Aboriginal name is Tnorala. Westerners discovered it in 1872 and named it Goss Bluff in honor of the explorer William Gosse. Scientists took a closer look in 1960 and determined that it was the result of an asteroid impact at the beginning of the Cretaceous period. The strongest evidence comes from the abundance of blast cones. The Arrente people, who have been its traditional guardians since time immemorial, have never needed satellite imagery or blast cone analysis to know that it was a celestial body that struck the Earth.

And as is always the case with Aboriginal people, this is sung, danced, and celebrated in a mytho-poetic form. Thus, the “Dreamtime” (myth) of Tnorala is as follows: In the Dreamtime, a group of star women (ancestral giantesses) danced in the Milky Way. One of the women, weary, placed her baby in a coolamon (a hollow wooden dish). The women danced so vigorously that the coolamon tipped over, and the baby fell to earth, pushing the rocks upward and forming this mountainous crown. The baby’s parents, the evening star and the morning star, continue to search tirelessly for their child. The coolamon itself can still be seen in the sky as the constellation “Corona Australis.” Tnorala is a highly sacred place for the Arrente people.

We know that the transmission of knowledge is extremely sophisticated and controlled among Aboriginal peoples, and that it can span many generations, which in itself is already astounding. But this event occurred approximately 145 million years ago, long before the appearance of humankind. And yet, they have always known. This is one of many examples of an innate, timeless knowledge of the genesis of the world, its aspects, its transformations, and its beings.

Let me give yet another example of these intuitions recently confirmed by our religion, Science.

DNA analysis of the only palm tree native to the Australian outback, Livistona mariae, found exclusively in Palm Valley in the bed of the Finke River, the oldest river in the world, indicates that it originated from seeds brought from the north of the country and that it genetically diverged between 7,000 and 31,000 years ago from its cousin found in the north of the continent. Aboriginal myth recounts precisely how ancestral spirits from the north brought the seeds of this palm, which is found nowhere else in Australia. The German anthropologist Carl Strehlow recorded this story in the 1900s.

For the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, past and present merge, contract, and exist simultaneously. A world we call past exists in the interstices of what we believe to be emptiness. In this space, there is primal energy and knowledge for those not “sterilized” by the scientific/Cartesian mindset. This is what they call the Dreaming. A woman I wanted to photograph once told me, “You see me sitting on a rock, but I am sitting on the body of my ancestor. This land is my ancestor, and it is also me.” Let those who can understand…

In her interviews with Felix Gattari ( Spaces of Dreams, The Warlpiri ) , anthropologist Barbara Glowzewski clarifies: “It is very important to say that the notion of the dream, of the ancestors of the dream, of the time of the dream, is not simply a time of origins, but is the space, at once of the past, present and future, where all possible combinations between the elements of existence are stored.  “

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