Dreamtime
Also called: The Dreaming · Topic: Settler Colonialism: Native Peoples of America and Australia · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 6 "Displacing Indigenous Peoples"
Meaning
The Dreamtime is how the Aborigines of Australia think about the past. They believe they did not travel to Australia from somewhere else but have always been there. In the Dreamtime, past and present are not kept apart, and they flow into each other. Europeans found this hard to understand because they saw time as a straight line running from past to present.
Example
European settlers wrote Australia's history as starting with Captain Cook's "discovery" of Botany Bay in 1770. In the Aboriginal Dreamtime, the land had always been theirs. This clash between the two views of history lay behind later debates on land rights.
Don't confuse with
- Native American idea of time: the native peoples of North America believed that time moves in cycles. The Dreamtime is the Australian idea that past and present are blurred together.