142. Australian Aboriginal Personal and Place Names

Abstract

While name, person, thing, land, and history might all seem discrete concepts to the modern mind, they are not so separated in the dynamic imaginative consciousness of the Aborigines of Australia - or Kooris, as in more recent times the native people have come to prefer themselves to be called. Thus notions of onomastics embracing the separate realms of anthroponyms and toponyms are not valid for a people who have totally integrated in micro-sociology their vital beliefs about the universe and their relationships with places, animals, plants and other peoples. For the 'Dreaming' an underlying power-filled ground of reality and its manifestation in land and nature constitute the foundations of all traditional Aboriginal thought and of the unexpected yet irresistible cultural renaissance which since the 1970s has revitalised the indigenous peoples of the continent. The 'traditional' (past-present) is also the true History of people and place because it was in that always-to-be-remembered time out of time that the Ancestral Beings moved about, shaping what was nothing into something, forming the landscape and creating the plants, animals and people of the known world. All were related to each other through interactions that had taken place in the dreaming. Laws made then were passed on to man and have moved through the generations. All the universe was in a harmony between the physical and the spiritual.