Australian Aboriginal Culture - Essay

For the Aborigines their spiritually involves everyday objects such as plants and animals which are connected to their ancestors. Their spirituality and beliefs are kept alive by passing on their knowledge through ceremonies and “Dreamtime” stories. The “Dreamtime” stories are how the Aborigines explain the beginning of the Earth and the foundation of their core beliefs. In most of the stories, ancestral spirits came to the Earth and as they moved along they created the plants, animals and even rocks. One the spirits did their job, they morphed into stars, watering holes and other objects. An example of these “Dreamtime” stories is the “Rainbow serpent” which is about a serpent who “pushed out the land to make mountains, she spilled water over the land to make rivers, lakes and billabongs. She also made the sun and fire, and all colours of the rainbow.”

Marriage Arrangement, but the power of elders still have an important role in some of the major decisions of a person, especially in area of education as it represents social class and considered as a ‘family business’ due to the foundation of Confucianism (G. Huang & M. Gove 2012).

A great sense of trust supports this mutual ‘give-take’ relationship. ‘If you take care of country, country will take care of you.’ These beliefs are totemist and animist, which basically means Aboriginals perceive all natural objects to possess a spirit or soul. While totems are quite significant within Aboriginal culture as they act as symbols in a system of beliefs, signifying a relationship between an individual or group and an animal or plant. Thus, creating a link between the human, natural and supernatural worlds. As the word ‘totem’ comes from a Native American language where it represents group membership; and literally means is ‘he/she/it is a relative of mine’.

Standard one of the Aboriginal Cultural Standards Framework is Relationships. Positive student-teacher relationships play a crucial role in building a

Aboriginal spirituality is directly linked to dreaming. The dreaming is the term which refers to the past, future and present of Aboriginal spirituality. The dreaming grasps the Aboriginal ideas of creation. It is the foundation on which the Aboriginal religion is built upon. The impacts of dispossession on Aboriginal spiritualties concerning separation from the land, the stolen generation and separation from kinship group is discussed. Departure from the land started with the European settlement. It removed the sense of belonging and sense of spiritual identity. One of the first forms of dispossession even date back to when the first fleet arrived in 1778. The removal of Aboriginal people from their land had a detrimental effect on their spirituality

Over the past 230 years, Aboriginals have protested in many different ways to gain rights, which they believe they are deserving of. Through aims of what they wanted to achieve, the processes they went through brought them disappointment over the poor results of some actions and pleasure over the success of others. Over those years, very few periods of protest have been as revelational or effective as the protests occurring between 1938 and 1972. During this period many different groups of Aboriginals have fought for the common cause of being recognised as people rather than interferences caught in the midst of Australians expansion as a nation.

Through my life, I have seen several different approaches to Indigenous people’s rights and importance in Australia. I have been fortunate enough to visit Ayers Rock and undertake a tour which allowed me to see Aboriginal culture in art and drawings as well as hearing Dreamtime stories from guides. I have also witnessed family friends who have been severely racist and disrespectful of Indigenous heritage and history. I also was lucky to work with some Indigenous students who were in Reception during my Professional Experience 1, and I was able to see first-hand how a culture clash can affect a student’s behaviour. I feel that even before entering this course, I have had the privilege of being able to observe both positives and negatives

The kinship is a system that enables people to know precisely where they stand in relation to every person and a group. It is the heart of Aboriginal culture, and controls all facets of social behaviours. The Kinship system has been around for tens of thousands of years and is still used today. (Nations, clans, family groups, 2016). It is a system that determines how people interact with others and how people become related. Thus, controls who can get married and who supports who. Because there are over 500 Aboriginal nations across Australia the system is helpful because it simplifies the different clans and groups that share common kinship and language. (Nations, clans, family groups, 2016)

Aboriginal relationships are governed by a complex and intricate system of rules, known as “the classificatory system of kinship, and is essential to physical, psychological and emotional survival in traditional Aboriginal society” (Fryer-Smith, 2008, p. 47). It organizes social and economic relationships, all of which are of “vital importance” in Aboriginal societies (Edwards, 1998, p. 85).

"For Indigenous Australians the land is the core of all spirituality." (www.dreamtime.net.au, 2003, p.1). All land is important in some way, but some places are more sacred than others. These 'sacred

The ‘colonisation' of Australia by Europeans has caused a lot of problem for the local Aborigines. It drastically reduced their population, damaged ancient family ties, and removed thousands of Aboriginal people from the land they had lived on for centuries. In many cases, the loss of land can mean more than just physical displacement. Because land is so much connected to history and spirituality, the loss of it can lead to a loss of identity. This paper will examine the works of Tim Rowse and Jeremy Beckett as well as other symbols of identity that are available to modern Aborigines in post colonial Australia.

To better understand Aboriginals as a Dream Culture I want to give more insight into Aboriginal Australians general culture and their conceptions of “Dream Time.” In his discussion of religion, Mircea Eliade describes a concept of Cosmos vs Chaos (Eliade 1957). In this notion an unordered world is chaotic only until is it transposed during a sacred time: “By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man symbolically transforms it into a cosmos though a ritual repetition of the cosmogony” (Eliade 1957:31). In other words until a land is tamed or created it is considered unordered. This can be applied to Aboriginal’s understanding of the world prior to their current presence. Aboriginals believe that in a time before the Dreamings, the land and world was a featureless earth. It was not until the dreamtime, or time of creation: “where there is contact with appearances from both realms of inside the earth itself as from ill-defined upper region” that the earth began to have its composed landscapes (Cowan 1992:26). The Dream Time is not only a period but more of a dimension where ancestral beings moved across the earth and created not only land, but every aspect of the earth including animals, plants, and man. It is important to realize that the ancestors created the natural earth and that is why Aboriginals live a particular lifestyle. Most Aboriginals living in this cosmogony are hunter-gatherer tribes. This aspect of their life can be traced to stem from the idea of

There are Tjakamarras and Jaburullas and Duburungas like me, and so on all over the country,” (Chatwin, 290). This means that they identify as their tribe and not the name that is put on them by white Australians. However, despite this, all the tribes follow the same religious beliefs. They all go on Walkabouts, they all sing the songs of the Ancestors, and they all have tjurungas that they view as sacred. Another aspect of their religion is that they have Kirda and Kutungurlu in each tribe. Kirda is “the 'owner ' or 'boss ' of the land,” while Kutungurlu is the “ 'manager ' or 'helper '” of the ‘boss’ (Chatwin, 98). The reason this binds the different tribes together is because the Kutungurlu has to be from “a different totemic clan and was a nephew” of the Kirda on his mother’s side (Ferry, 98). This ensures that the clans communicate and be at peace with each other, as they are interdependent on the other.

Mead et al. (n.d.) states that Aboriginal children are encouraged to become independent in daily activities and are allowed to be as independent as they want in other areas, whereas in Western cultures, children are not expected to be independent in eating, dressing or washing until the caregiver says so. This shows that parents in the Aboriginal culture are more lenient and willing to let their children learn how to take care of themselves at an earlier age than children in Western cultures. It allows children to explore more and they are allowed to learn, on their own, limits for everything they

Traditionally, the kinship system by which aboriginal society follows is one based highly on collectivism. Geert Hofstede defines a collectivist society as one that prefers a “tightly knit framework” in which individuals can expect “unquestioned loyalty” (The Hofstede Centre, 2013) from relatives and members of the group.