Dreaming and Aboriginal Art

Concept of Aboriginal Art:
According to Morphy in his book 'Aboriginal Art', Aboriginal art is both the product of dreaming and a way of making contact with this spiritual dimension. The term dreaming or dreamtime arose out of attempt by early anthropologists to trasnlate Aboriginal concepts into English and out of Aboriginal attempts to explain their religious values to European colonists.
The word dreaming and dreamtime, however should not be undertstood in their ordinary English sense but as to a unique and complex religious concept of Aboriginal culture.
In Aboriginal sense, the dreaming is as much a dimension of reality as a period of time. It gains its sense of time because it was there in the beginning, underlies the present and it is a determinant of the future: it is time in the sense that once there was only Dreamtime.
But the Dreamtime has never ceased to exist, and from the viewpoint of the present it is as much a feature of the future as it is of the past. And the Dreamtime is as concerned with space as with time: it refers to origins and powers that are located in places and things. 

Aboriginal Belief & Religion:
Aboriginal belief system or religion has a lot to do with the relationship between humans, animals and Dreamtime beings (we can call this ancestral thing) and this belief system differs from one part of Australia to another.
However, in most if not all Aboriginal religion there was a time of world creation before humans existed on earth. Ancestral beings (or Dreamtime beings) emerged from within the earth and began to give shape to the world.
The ancestral beings were complex forms capable of transforming their own bodies. Many of them were based on the shapes of creatures such as the kangaroo, emu, possum, caterpillar or inanimate objects such as rocks, trees. Some still on whole complexes of existence such as bushfires or beehives and honey.
Transformation and acceptance were the key points in these Dreamtime things.
If they were boulders they could run, if they were trees they could walk, of they were fish they could move on land or dive beneath the surface of the earth. Frequently, these dreamtime things could transform from animal, to human, to inanimate form, and into a rock.
They lived as humans do today but on a grander scale, and their actions had grander consequences. For instance, there was a great battle between groups of ancestral beings, and where their dead bodies laid down, it became hills, and lake formed from pools of their blood.
Over time the features of the earth began to take shape, and as long as the ancestral beings lived on the surface of the earth they modified its form little by little.  

Aboriginal religion is concerned with the continuities that lie behind dynamic processes and produce new lives, with stability in a world of acknowledged change. It is this accommodation of change and process that enabled Aboriginal religion to maintain its relevance in a rapidly changing world.

-Art, Religion, and the Dreaming-