Dreamtime Quotes

There was a time when fire and story would fall asleep in unison. It was dream time.

I lived for a couple of years when I was 9 years old on beautiful Aboriginal sacred land in a town of a thousand people in northwestern Australia. It's where the Aborigines are still very connected to their culture, the Dreamtime culture. It was really quite a special experience.

Didgeridoo was something I picked up while I was on tour in Australia with Peter Gabriel in '93. I found out later that it's only meant to be played by men.

There's something about Australia that feels prehistoric.

Aboriginal art and culture draws from the land, for Aboriginality and the land are essential to each other and are inseparable.

We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.

Trees always remind me of Aboriginal people.

It takes time--loose, unstructured dreamtime-- to experience nature in a meaningful way. Unless parents are vigilant, such time becomes a scarce resource, not because we intend it to shrink, but because time is consumed by multiple, invisible forces; because our culture currently places so little value on natural play.

At its best, Aboriginal art has been effective in translating an entire culture and the understanding of an entire continent. Indeed, the more we interpret Australia through Aboriginal eyes, through the experience of their long and epic story, the more we allow ourselves to understand the land we share.

Animal totems, like the tiger, come from the Other Side to protect us while we are away from Home.

There is a reason why the cultures of Indigenous Australia inspire such fascination. And that is that they represent a unique way of thinking about the world. A vision that over tens of thousands of years has risen out of the land, the power, the very being of our continent, Australia.

The celebrated Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira loved the Ghost Gums of the Northern Territory... They are evocatively Australian, their white trunks contrasting with the red earth and the deep blue sky of the Dreamtime region that has for centuries sustained Namatjira's Aranda people.

O foolish writer. Now moves. Even in storytime, dreamtime, once-upon-a-time, now isn't then.

It's a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again.

Aborigines are not just the oldest race in Australia; they are the oldest race on the planet. They look like dinosaurs.

I heard stories from my mother's mother who was an American Indian. She was spiritual, although she did not go to church, but she had the hum. She used to tell me stories of the rivers.

...yesterday and today and tomorrow are not an arrow that shoots from past to present to future; rather all tenses, and sleeping and waking, mix and cohabit in an atemporal duration beyond clocks and calendars. The Aboriginal world began long ago when the Ancestors sang in Dreamtime the cosmic rhythms that give shape to the things we see, and it is the beginning right now, when a living Tiwi sings the Dream songs that continue, or are, the world.