‘Might be something’

We use the term ‘The Dreaming’ to refer to an Aboriginal way of thinking about their place in the universe; it is ‘a cosmology, an ancestral order, and a mytho-ritual structure’, in the words of Canadian anthropologist Sylvie Poirier. The Western Desert people with whom she lived for many months in the 1980s and 1990s (the Kukatja – though she acknowledges the difficulties of such labels) call it tjukurrpa, a term whose meanings include ‘story’. The stories are about the world- and knowledge-creating ancestral creatures. In the Kukatja world, as manifested in the Western Australian communities of Wirramanu, Mulan and Yagga Yagga, the more prominent stories are about Luurn (kingfisher), Wati Kutjarra (two initiated men), Kanaputa (digging stick women), Marlu (kangaroo), Karnti (yam) and Warnayarra (rainbow snake). When Kukatja narrate the travels of these creatures, they select segments in the itinerary that account for the narrator him or herself as a person who belongs to the places named in the story.