As a Westerner my values hail from a different cultural context to that of many of the Aboriginal people I work with. One major difference is our attitude towards time. We have a phrase for it around here, we call it “Noongar time”. It is a joke even my Aboriginal colleagues share because working as they do in mainstream culture they also get frustrated with their own people. It is something I have become used to, though I am still obliged to try and convince my students that although our system isn’t necessarily the one by which we should all be living our lives, it is the one in which we must operate.I have to say I have always had a flexible view of time and have found it extremely difficult to shackle myself to deadlines and outcomes. In fact, the Aboriginal sense of time fits in very well with my own non-linear understanding of it. So I have mixed feelings about imposing this system on them.
It is no surprise to find that the Aboriginal concept of time is bound up with the Dreaming, also known as the Dreamtime, a term that has fallen from favour and use. I think this is because the word “time” is inappropriate because as Stanner says, he has never been able to “discover any Aboriginal word for 'time' as an abstract concept”. (23) Neither “time” nor “history” relate to the Dreaming. That’s because the Dreaming has never passed out of existence. To the Western psyche, the Dreaming ‘conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past’ but in reality it is ‘still part of the present’. (24)
‘One cannot ‘fix’ the Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen’. (24) This sounds to me like the contradictory (to the West anyway) Eastern view of consciousness as being a non-moving centre on a moving field. Which in turn suggests that there is something about this notion of time and reality that is intrinsic to all of humanity, if we dig deep enough.
And which explains why the Western neurosis for clocks and the marking of time would have made absolutely no sense, and still doesn’t, to many Aboriginal people and even to many non-Aboriginals as well. When I am waiting impatiently for my late students to get on the college bus to go on an arranged cultural site visit, I have to remember to step back a little, retain my sense of humour and call in my own wholistic view of reality. I love working with these people - they constantly bring me back to ground. It is humbling because they always force me to re-focus on what is really important in life.
Stanner, W.E.H. (1979) The Dreaming (1953). In White man got no dreaming, Canberra: National University Press.
image: Australian Creational Myths
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/mitos_creacion/esp_mitoscreacion_2.htm
