Excerpt from IKC101 Assessment Task 1

Annotation:
This assessment task is a document for professional peers who will work with Indigenous
Australians. It explains aspects of Indigenous culture, and has given me a deeper
understanding on the cultural identity of students from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
backgrounds (1.4).

Indigenous Australian Cultures

• The Dreaming

The Dreaming is an Indigenous Australian spiritual belief system that explains how
everything in the world came to be, and is passed down from generation to generation
through story, ceremony, and song. The Dreaming describes how from a featureless plain
the Ancestral spirits emerged and created the landscape.

Each language group has a different term for The Dreaming, as Edwards (1998, p. 79)
explains the Ngarinyin people refer to it as Ungud, the Pitjantjatjara as Tjukurpa, and the
Yolngu as Wongar. Each language group also has its own stories of the Dreaming activities.
A rainbow serpent creation story is told in the Northern Territory, where Lumerai, the
Mother Snake journeyed across the empty land, leaving winding rivers in her tracks. She
dipped her nose into the earth and created mountains and valleys, and in doing so, roused
the animals. Finally, she awoke a man and a woman. (Barker, Jones, McKay & McLeod,
2001, pp. 41-42).

The Dreaming stories are a guide to living and a ‘law’. Keen (2004, p. 212) points out that
there is no Aboriginal word that can be translated as ‘law’ but the Western Desert word
tjukurrpa and the Yolngu word rom, translate to ‘the proper way’. The Dreaming establishes
a pattern of daily life, and the importance of the land and kin. For example, Lumerai, the
Mother Snake, taught the man and the woman “to share with one another and take only
what they needed to live and to respect the Earth itself”, and “that they were brother and
sister and they should support life and learn from each other” (Barker et al., 2001, p. 42).

• Kinship

The kinship system in Aboriginal culture extends beyond the Western notion that to be
“family” is to be a blood relative. The purpose of the kinship system is to determine “how
people are related, who one can marry, and who supports who” (“Kinship learning module”,
2014).
One method of identification is the totemic system. Every Aboriginal person has several
totems, usually an animal, or plant. Each group shares a common totem in the form of a
Spirit Ancestor, linking the group identity to the events of The Dreaming. For some groups
an important part of the totemic relationship is that a member is not allowed to kill or eat
the totem.

Moieties is a complex system that governs marriages. A group is divided into two groups,
with spouses chosen from the opposite moiety. This ensures good economics between
moieties, enabling the trade of goods and services. Fryer Smith (2008, p. 2:11) gives an
example of a traditional moiety system in the Gunditjamara community, “the two moieties
are Krokitch (symbolised by the white cockatoo) and Kaputch (symbolized by the black
cockatoo)” and a Krokitch must marry a Kaputch.

There are many systems to identify kinship, but it is important to note that every
community has different methods. For instance, some groups follow the patrilineal line, but
other groups follow the matrilineal line. Fryer Smith (2008, p. 2:13) notes that “both
patrilineal and matrilineal descent are common, and some groups have local totemic
affiliations rather than moieties or sections”. Alternatively, Pitjantjatjara people of the
Western Desert are classified into generational levels, and “each person marries another on
the same generational level” (Fryer Smith, 2008, p. 2:11).

• Economic Organisation

The use of the land, and the hunting and gathering of its produce were the principal
economic activities of the Aboriginal people before colonisation. Prior to colonisation, the
land had already been altered through years of ecological management. Sustainability was
an important part of this management and groups moved according to season, so as not to
deplete resources.

However, the Aboriginal people did not depend on the act of “nature” alone to provide
food, and practised many techniques to encourage plentiful resources. These techniques
were diverse and chiefly influenced by the type of landscape a group lived in. Goodall (1996,
p. 11-12) explains that the grassland people, Wiradjuri, used firestick farming to attract
grass-feeding game and increase grain harvest, whereas the language groups who lived on
the Darling River used fish traps to maintain a consistent yield of fish.

The use of the land is deeply tied to the laws bestowed by the Ancestors in the Dreaming
and the protection of totemic identities. Clarke (2003, p. 64) comments that “Aboriginal
people believe their resources will decline through any lack of observance towards rituals
set down in the Dreaming”. For example, the Arrernte people were forbidden from hunting
red kangaroo in the area surrounding the sacred site of the Ancestral Red Kangaroo.
According to Goodall (1996, p. 4) this “ensured the red kangaroo was protected near its best
habitat”.

Trade was also an important part of economic lifestyle, and special kinship relationships
were formed to facilitate trading between language groups. Clarke (2003, p. 110) explains
that trade practices “were associated with quite elaborate rituals” and gifts were exchanged
to encourage groups to be allies.