Dreamtime may be a mistranslation that came back as everyday English
The word Dreamtime was coined by two early anthropologists in Central Australia in the 1890s to render an Arrernte term. Critics soon argued it distorted the idea, which is less about dreams or a distant past than about a present, living order. Yet the English label is now widely used by Aboriginal Australians themselves.
Francis Gillen, a station-master and amateur ethnographer, first used the terms in 1896, and with Walter Baldwin Spencer published Native Tribes of Central Australia in 1899. They described the Alcheringa as the remote age of a tribe's earliest traditions, and five years later glossed it as the dream times, linking it to a word meaning dream. A. P. Elkin later popularised the idea, before revising his own views.
Objections came early. In 1908 the Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow reported that his Arrernte contacts described altjira as an eternal being without beginning, and insisted that locals knew nothing of a dreamtime as a period of history. His evidence has its own problems: many of his informants had been Christians for decades, and missionaries may have borrowed the word to name the Christian God. Spencer's 1926 fieldwork found earlier uses meaning eternal or of past times. The scholar Sam Gill sees both men's biases at play, Spencer's belief that Aboriginal people had no religion yet and Strehlow's interest in finding one. Linguist David Campbell Moore concludes that the dream link held only in a limited area and that treating dream as the essence of the word is an illusion.
The anthropologist William Stanner proposed a better English word: Everywhen. In this view, ancestral beings who shaped a formless land are not confined to the past; the past, present and future coexist. Landscape features can be those beings, as at Uluru, where the Anangu read rock features as traces of the carpet-snake people. A person may hold a particular Dreaming, such as Honey Ant, tied to place, age, gender or skin group, and ceremonies at sacred sites re-enact creation to keep life renewing.
Different peoples have their own names, among them Tjukurpa among Pitjantjatjara speakers and Jukurrpa for the Warlpiri, for whom it spans law and knowledge. Some groups dislike the word Dreaming because it suggests something unreal, when the concept governs kinship, marriage, land care and daily conduct.
Source: The Dreaming
