The Power of Dreaming

As previously discussed, the 'discovery' of Dreaming/Dreamtime by settler-colonists (i.e., "English Dreaming") empowered them to appropriate land from Australian Indigenous peoples, using their supposed lack of understanding of both time and space as people "in the original state of nature" as justification for doing so (Perkins, 1998, 338). Furthermore, Aboriginal people were scorned and discriminated against for their 'inability' to act according to the 'correct' passage of time - for instance, historically, they had no right to equitable pay as, compared to white workers, they could not be trusted to be timely employees. On the flip side, Australian Indigenous societies were also heavily romanticized as a "romantic version of primitivism" (Wolfe, 1991, 338-339). Either way, Aboriginal people were not supposed to co-exist with colonists within the time or place of settled Australia, which was arguably only possible when they accepted the language of their colonizers. 

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Wolfe (1991) succinctly described this process of assimilation in his article, "On Being Woken Up:  The Dreamtime in Anthropology and in Australian Settler Culture", stating that:

 

"The twin aspects, origin and presence, have in common the feature of being discontinuous with the economic realities of settlement. Thus the Dreamtime as pre-contact 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" (214).

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In other words, with the closing of the Australian frontier, the 'primitive mystique' of the Indigenous died and the Aboriginal people had to finally be brought within the bordered spaces of the Australian nationstate. The price of assimilation while as the Indigenous 'other' however was having to live within the eternity of the Dreaming. This is evidenced by the adoption of anthropological language such as Dream terms and "pan-Aboriginal" identities, like that of the Koori (Wolfe, 1991, 216). Thus, in this manner, the morphing of "English Dreaming" into Aboriginal Dreaming gained double-edges through the simultaneous disempowerment and empowerment of Aboriginal peoples by holding the key to Indigenous rights and identity.