Australian Dreamtime.

[Gooding]

Here's a link that explains Australian Aboriginal beliefs. Not being an Australian Aboriginal, I don't know how well the author explains it, but I think her presentation's pretty good: http://www.janesoceania.com/australi...ime/index1.htm

[Odin]

[sean]

The Dreamtime is the aboriginal creation of myth and it refers to the beginning of the world, where the spirits created the land and the people. After that, their ancestors helped shape the land into what it was in the present day. The Dreamtime exists simultaneously in the present, past and future, therefore this is the objective truth of time, linear time being a creation of human consciousness and therefore subjective.

To the Aboriginal people, Uluru is the physical evidence of their dreamtime creation story. They have held it sacred for thousands of years.

Supposedly, 10 ancestors of the Aboriginal people created Uluru at the beginning of time. According to the legend, the world was a featureless place until their ancestors travelled across the wasteland creating places like Uluru. There are numerous ancient petroglyphs throughout the area. By touching these petroglyphs, the local tribes believe they can communicate with dreamtime and receive blessings from their ancestors.

They had a number of different mythical creatures to fear in the wild. The Bunyip was a water dwelling monster which attacked people, high magic wonderland with water stealing frogs, crocodile mermaids, mountain-sized ghost dingos, literal living mountains, giants who look after humans like babies, flying snakes giving birth to birds, eel vaudeville theater, bats getting hunted down like it was Mississippi Burning in the animal kingdom.

There were also these short, evil spirits which would follow you around and hide behind trees if you looked at them.

However, dreamtime stories were basically guides for them to navigate their land. Like in the outback there's 50km between waterholes so everyone needs to remember where shit is.

So instead of saying there is a waterhole behind the big mountain they have a story of a wet snake slithering up over the mountain and crawling into a hole behind the mountain. Many Aboriginal tribes have totemic beliefs, so animal symbolism would be important if you wanted to portray these things.

Some dreamtime stories and rock art clearly depict Ice Age mammals, and stories in Western Australia about floods have been connected to real coastline changes thousands of years ago.

A lot of aboriginal art can also be interpreted as electrical discharge diagrams.