Aboriginal stories may preserve volcanic eruptions from more than 10,000 years ago
On Queensland's Atherton Tableland, Aboriginal narratives describe how three crater lakes were born. Geologists dated those eruptions to over 10,000 years ago, and pollen buried in the lake silt matched details in the tellings. The account is now listed nationally as a record reaching back to the Pleistocene.
Aboriginal spirituality lives in stories performed in ceremony by each language group, bound up with the Dreaming, songlines and oral literature. Most belong to a particular people and describe their own country, though some span the continent. With around 900 distinct groups, each with its own language or dialect, scholars say no single label can capture the full variety. One encyclopedia still remarks on a striking blend of diversity and similarity from coast to coast.
The linguist R. M. W. Dixon, recording myths in their original languages, kept finding landscape details that science later confirmed. Tellings about Lake Eacham, Lake Barrine and Lake Euramoo led the Australian Heritage Commission to put the Crater Lakes story on the Register of the National Estate and into the World Heritage nomination for the wet tropics. Other narratives recall lower seas: an 1850 telling describes Port Phillip Bay as dry land, and one from Yarrabah, near Cairns, names now-drowned places along an old shoreline at the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. Stories from around Lake Eyre, written down in 1906, speak of lush plains where desert now lies, fitting an early Holocene wet phase.
Many narratives describe ancestral beings, often giant animals or people, travelling across a featureless world and creating mountains, rivers, waterholes and species as they went. Their routes link sacred sites into Dreaming tracks that can run hundreds or even thousands of kilometres and be shared by several peoples. Aboriginal Law is understood as flowing from those ancestors, and people's strongest ties to a place come from a spiritual identity with its Dreamings.
In 1926 the British anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown noticed that groups across the continent told versions of a powerful, sometimes dangerous giant snake linked with rainbows, rain and deep waterholes. He coined the name Rainbow Serpent, which museums, galleries and Aboriginal organisations now use widely.
Source: Australian Aboriginal religion and mythology
