David Tacey, La Trobe University, Melbourne
The Australian context
In 1953 the Sydney anthropologist Bill Stanner wrote an essay called “The Dreaming”. In this essay he quoted an Aboriginal elder whom he had met on an excursion into central Australia. The elder said:
White man got no dreaming,
Him go ‘nother way.
White man, him go different.
Him got road belong himself.[i]
[i] Aboriginal elder, quoted by W. E. H. Stanner, ‘The Dreaming’ (1953), in Robert Manne, ed., The Dreaming and Other Essays (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), p. 57.