Early Australian Anthropology

During the 1890s, biologist and anthropologist W. B. Spencer collaborated with Francis J. Gillen, an ethnologist who was an Arrernte speaker and had used the expression "dream times" when attempting to translate the Arrernte word-concept altjira/alcheringa. Baldwin (1896) then popularized "dream times" in an account of the Horn Expedition, stating that it was a term Mr. Gillen had "appropriately" rendered (50). Following the use of "Dreamtime" and then "Dreaming" during the 20th century by Australian anthropologists - such as Adolphus Elkin and W. E. Stanner - the terms became widely and interchangeably used to describe all systems of Aboriginal belief and practices. And given appearance of the word "dream" in both terms, Australian Indigenous people and their folklore became associated with dreams, resulting in literature that described Aboriginal people as “dreamers of the desert,” for instance (Nicholls, 2014). 

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It should also be noted that despite their interpretive biases and proclivity towards cultural evolutionism, Gillen and Spencer's anthropological work in Australia was groundbreaking research. Their dedication combined with their ability to study Aboriginal folklore before significant contact with colonial and Christian influences helped establish one of the most extensive and influential collections of ethnographic material, including the documentation of Aboriginal languages through written and oral recordings. Furthermore, later anthropologists were able to use data gathered by Gillen and Spencer and reinterpret Indigenous folklore in order to challenge the idea that hierarchical differences between the social and intellectual capacities of different ethnic groups exist. For instance, in analyzing the work of anthropologists in Australia including that of Gillen and Spencer, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) stated that:

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"Here, as elsewhere, among the Australian aborigines as in our own peasant societies the combination of general conformity (which is a feature of a closed world) with the particularism of the parish results in culture being treated like themes and variations in music" (90).