Aboriginal Australian Dreaming and Māori Traditions

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived in Australia for at least 50,000 to 65,000 years, giving them some of the oldest continuing cultures on Earth. Their spiritual worldview is often called the Dreaming (or Dreamtime in older usage), an English term for concepts expressed differently in hundreds of languages. It refers to the creative era when ancestral beings shaped the land, laws and life, and to the ongoing presence of those beings in country today.

Songlines, sung routes that map ancestral journeys across the land, serve as both sacred stories and navigation knowledge, and ceremonies maintain the bond between people and country. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori tradition centers on genealogy (whakapapa) linking people to ancestors, gods such as Tāne and Tangaroa, and the land; key concepts include mana (spiritual authority), tapu (sacredness) and the marae as a community meeting place. Both traditions endured colonization and are now strengthened by legal recognition and cultural revival.