Tell 'em they're dreamin'!

Tell 'em they're dreamin'!

By Markus Zuercher

The famous line by Darryl Kerrigan in the movie The Castle obviously does not refer to the same kind of dreaming as Stanner (1979) discusses in ‘White Man Got No Dreaming’. 

Movie Poster (Miramax, 1997)

The notion of ‘dreaming’ clearly means many things. To an Indigenous Australian, The Dreaming is most important in understanding and connecting to where life comes from, where life ends, everything before and everything after…the whole being.

The Indigenous Australian concept of ‘The Dreaming’ to accept and understand the ‘meaning of life’ can perhaps only fully be appreciated by ‘thinking black’ (Stanner, 1979, pp. 24,25). The western way of thinking does not include this spiritual aspect, but I am arguing that we have a very similar way of understanding our heritage.


Partly with help of the Geneal-Forum network, I was able to trace my 9^th paternal great-grandfather who was born in 1555. I feel a very strong bond of belonging to my ancestors…this is what I mean by the notion of having similar ways of understanding our heritage in the western way of thinking.



Scrolling through hundreds of Church records of Births, Marriages and Deaths, following the lines of ancestors is like Arkady’s explanation in The Songlines (Chatwin, 1987): ‘A song is both map and direction finder. Providing you know the song, you could always find your way across country’. The names of my ancestors in the church books are the song and reading the song (names) correctly is guiding me in the direction of another ancestor. If I stray from my Songline, I’m trespassing and get lost (speared).



I do support Dr Van Luyn’s (2013) concept of self-narratives being for a particular purpose. In my case, constructing an authentic, nonfiction map or picture of my ancestors. But then again, is it true and authentic? The information in the church books was entered by the local priest. Who stopped him to omit, enter the churches interpretation of events or simply falsify the facts? 


Not only in the modern Facebook age is there no ‘I’ in network as argued by McNeill (2012), even 1555 existed the possibility of a certain amount of mash-up and (re)-edit. Who was able to read and check?



Reference List: 

Chatwin, B. (1987). Chapter 3. In The songlines. London: Cape.

McNeill, L. (2012). There Is No "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography. Biography, 35(1), 65-82.

Stanner, W. E. H. (1979). The Dreaming (1953). In White man got no dreaming (pp. 23-40). Norwalk, Conn: Australian National University Press.

Van Luyn, A. (2013). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, week 4 notes. [PowerPoint slides]   Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

 

Image Credit: 

Miramax. (1997). The Castle.   Retrieved Aug 22, 2013, from http://www.miramax.com/movie/the-castle